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The photograph is a famous one. It’s included in just about any list of top ghost photos. It has appeared in countless books, magazines and newspaper articles. It crops up all over the Internet. It shows – according to the story – the ghostly faces of two dead sailors looking up from the waters of the Pacific from the side of an oil tanker.

The ship was the SS Watertown; the sailors were a pair of ex-shipmates named Court­enay and Meehan who had been buried at sea and continued to haunt their old vessel whenever it ventured into the Pacific Ocean.