Happy Halloween!
The SS Watertown was a standard American oil tanker built in 1919 for the Cities Service Company and spent its early years transporting petroleum along the United States coastline and through the Gulf of Mexico. The ship lived a largely uneventful life until December 1924, when it departed New York bound for the Panama Canal.
During the voyage, crewmen James Courtney and Michael Meehan were assigned to clean a cargo tank but were tragically overcome by toxic gas fumes and suffocated. Because the ship was days away from port, the captain ordered a traditional burial at sea, and both men were committed to the ocean off the Mexican coast on December 4, 1924.
The ship became famous almost immediately after the burial when the crew began reporting a chilling phenomenon in the water. For days, multiple sailors claimed they could see the distinct, oversized faces of Courtney and Meehan staring back at them from the foam and waves in the ship’s wake, always appearing around dusk and following the vessel for miles. Skeptical but intrigued, Captain Keith Tracy purchased a camera when the ship docked in New Orleans to document the claims on their return trip.
When the faces reportedly appeared again, Captain Keith Tracy took six photographs of the water. According to the story, five showed nothing unusual. The sixth appeared to contain two humanlike faces floating among the waves. Later accounts claimed the William J. Burns Detective Agency examined the negative and found no evidence of tampering. However, the original negative disappeared, the agency’s report has not been located, and surviving copies may have been enhanced over the years.
The photograph may show nothing more than foam, shadows, and the human mind searching for familiar faces. But once you know the story of Courtney and Meehan, it becomes remarkably difficult to see only water.
