229 – Watertown 2: Eclectic Boo-Galoo

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow return to one of the show’s most personal cold cases: the alleged ghost photograph taken aboard the SS Watertown in 1925. Blake first investigated this case back in 2010 (Episode 16), published his findings in Fortean Times, and then spent the better part of a decade chasing down the one piece of evidence that had always eluded him — the uncropped original photograph. This episode is the follow-up nobody knew they needed, and it delivers.

The cropped version of the Watertown ghost photo — two giant arrows pointing at spectral faces in the churning water alongside the ship’s hull — has been a fixture of ghost-photo anthologies since at least the 1960s. It scared Blake as a first-grader, scared Karen as a first-grader, and has been reproduced in hundreds of books and thousands of websites ever since. Now, thanks to the ongoing digitization of historical newspaper archives, Blake has finally seen what the rest of the photo actually shows. Spoiler: it is dramatically more interesting than the crop.

⚓ The Story as Told (and Retold, and Retold)

The standard version of the legend goes roughly like this: in late 1924 or early 1925, two sailors aboard the oil tanker SS Watertown died in an accident and were buried at sea off the coast of Panama. Afterward, the crew began seeing the faces of the dead men floating in the water alongside the ship. A series of six photographs was taken; only one showed the apparitions. The captain locked the camera in the ship’s safe, handed it over to authorities at port, and the developed photos became proof of life after death.

As Blake notes, the story has accumulated embellishments with each retelling: the safe becomes a locked safe handed to a private detective agency; the photographer becomes the captain himself; the location of the deaths migrates across the globe. The Burns Detective Agency gets added to the chain of custody in later versions — a detail Blake traced to post-1930s retellings and almost certainly invented. The two sailors are occasionally described as cooks (they were not) and, in at least one account, as murder victims tied to the ship’s hull. None of this appears in the original record.

📰 What the Newspapers Actually Said

Blake tracked down two 1925 newspaper articles that establish what actually happened. The Pomona Progress Bulletin (January 12, 1925) reports tersely that seamen Michael Meehan and James Courtney were overcome by poisonous gas while working in a cofferdam and were buried at sea. The Los Angeles Times of the same date adds the dramatic details the ghost-story versions never mention: a crewman named Costi Taviola, the chief mate, crawled three times through a 40-foot tube only 20 inches in diameter to drag his unconscious shipmates out of the gas-filled compartment. He fell unconscious himself getting them to the deck and took half an hour to be revived. Meehan and Courtney could not be saved. The ship, her flag at half-mast, arrived in Los Angeles that day.

The newspaper also notes that five years prior, another man had died in the same manner, in the same tank — a fact that would seem tailor-made for the “cursed ship” narrative, yet somehow never made it into the ghost-story canon.

A dating inconsistency worth flagging: the 1963 Fate article by Michael G. Mann — the most detailed early account — gives the burial date as December 4, 1924, and the date of death as January 6, 1925. As Blake drily observes, he prefers to be buried after he is dead.

🔍 The Investigation: Photo Analysis and the Sister Ship

The photograph itself entered public consciousness via a 1935 newspaper Sunday supplement, apparently following an investigation of the case by paranormal researcher Hereward Carrington in 1934. The story then resurfaced in Fate magazine in the early 1950s (without the photo, which had become difficult to locate) and again in 1963 when Mann published his account with the cropped image. The Reader’s Digest book Mysteries of the Unexplained later reproduced a much sharper version of the crop — apparently from an original negative — and it is this version that makes the photo manipulation clearly visible.

Joe Nickell and Tom Flynn at what was then CSICOP (now CSI) examined the Reader’s Digest version and noted evidence of retouching — specifically, that one of the catwalk stanchion rails appears to have been repositioned or added. Blake confirmed this by obtaining a period photograph of the SS Bald Hill, a ship built to the same design as the Watertown, which allowed him to count stanchions and compare geometry. In the uncropped Watertown photo, the discrepancy is more apparent still.

Blake also ran a practical experiment: he set up rails on his deck at the correct spacing, had friends stand off to the side at the distances implied by the photo, and tried to photograph them. The resulting images barely showed recognizable human figures — which raises the obvious question of why the “ghostly” faces in the Watertown photo are so enormous. Scaled against the distance from the rails to the water, the faces would have to be several feet across. Nobody in the ghost-story tradition has ever described the apparitions as the size of a couch.

The verdict: the photo was almost certainly manipulated, most likely by someone enhancing indistinct shapes in the water into something face-like — not an outright paste-up, but deliberate retouching designed to be ambiguous enough to pass as pareidolia while still being convincingly eerie.

👻 Bonus Ghost Photo: The Goddard Squadron

Blake briefly discusses a related case he has been researching for a future episode: the so-called Freddy Jackson photograph, a 1919 group portrait of a Royal Air Force squadron in which a blurry, hatless face appears to peer out from behind one of the airmen. The story holds that Freddy Jackson, an air mechanic, had been killed by a propeller shortly before the photo was taken. The image was not published until 1975, which Blake notes is a suspicious gap. The squadron was associated with Sir Victor Goddard, an RAF officer with strong spiritualist interests who also claimed to have time-traveled in his aircraft through a vision of a future airfield. Blake published early findings on the Goddard photo in the Skeptic blog and promises a full episode when the research is further along.

📖 How Legends Grow (and What Gets Lost)

One of the episode’s recurring themes is how paranormal narratives gain detail — and respectability — over time, while the human reality behind them quietly disappears. The story of Costi Taviola, a man who risked his life three times crawling through a pipe barely wide enough to fit a human body, is absent from every ghost-story retelling Blake has seen. In its place: a locked safe, private detectives, chain-of-custody theater. The accretion of procedural detail lends an air of verifiability while the verifiable human drama goes unmentioned.

Blake draws a parallel to the Archimedes eureka story — vivid, widely repeated, and first written down roughly two centuries after the fact. Karen connects it to the upcoming episode on the Chase Vault moving coffins of Barbados, suggesting that the morphing of legend over time may be something of a 2021 theme for the show.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 Mysteries of the Unexplained 💵 by Reader’s Digest (the clearest pre-digital reproduction of the cropped photo)
– 📚 Ghost Caught on Film 💵 by Melvyn Willin

🔗 Related Links

– SS Watertown (Wikipedia)
– Hereward Carrington — paranormal investigator who examined the case in 1934
– Fate magazine
– Pareidolia
– Spirit photography
– Freddy Jackson ghost photograph
– Sir Victor Goddard
– Cofferdam — the type of shipboard void where Meehan and Courtney died
– Taphonomy (relevant to why buried-at-sea details differ from land burial legends)
– Blake’s write-up of the case, including the uncropped photo, is available on Medium (see show notes link)

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

It’s been nearly a century since the uncropped photo of the alleged Watertown Ghosts was seen by the public. In that time a tiny cropped version of the original has become an iconic member of the “greatest ghost photos of all time” club.  Blake’s research which was published in 2010 showed that the photo was manipulated, but he never forgot the missing uncropped photo and unanswered questions about the case.

But thanks to his research we can now see the original photo in its uncropped state and it’s a surprisingly dramatic image.

If you’d like to share the story of this photo with friends please consider checking out his write-up of the case on Medium. “Clapping” for the article and sharing it may help other paranormal enthusiasts see the full photo and new details. 

Below you can see the cropped and uncropped photos:

The uncropped full version of the famous ghost photo, rediscovered after more than fifty years:

These show notes will expand soon. Stay tuned. (5/20/2021)