Manifestations of Captain Jones

You may speak of gallant Conyngham, of the prizes he took and the havoc he wreaked. You may sing the praises of bold John Barry, of his audacious victories from Newfoundland to Florida. You may pen fanciful wardroom ballads extolling intrepid Lambert Wickes, terror of the English Channel and the Irish coast. But of all the heroic figures who set sail to fight for American independence, one name alone still echoes like thunder across the rolling waves: John Paul Jones.

Jones, the first to raise the American flag on a ship-of-war. Jones, the raider of St. Mary’s Isle, the champion of Carrickfergus, the sea god of Flamborough. Jones, whose thirst for action was captured in unequivocating declarations: “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.” And, “I have not yet begun to fight!” John Paul Jones—words inscribed in marble offer apt summation at his hallowed sarcophagus: “He gave our Navy its earliest traditions of heroism and victory.”

His was an adventurous, restless, wandering soul—and there is evidence that it remains so to this day.

John Paul Jones’ apparition is of a category not bound to one location (the spirit of a murder victim, by contrast, tends to remain rooted to the scene of the grisly crime). Like the specters of other historical figures—Anne Boleyn and Abraham Lincoln likewise fall into this classification—the spectral manifestations of Captain Jones have been witnessed in more than one spot.

Geographically dispersed hauntings are not so surprising in the light of the widely wandering life Jones led. But the mystery becomes: Why these haunted sites and not others? If his ghost is adrift, why does he not revisit his birthplace, the small cottage on the windy Scottish coast that still stands in monument to him today? Why has he not deemed to appear in the colonial Fredericksburg, Virginia, house where he lived with his brother on first coming to America, which likewise is still extant? Why does he not haunt the cold shores of the Black Sea, where he laid low the Turks in the single fleet-command victory of his storied naval career? Why are there no records of him haunting the rooms on the Rue de Tournon in Paris where he met his illness-wracked demise at the age of forty-five? Or the Paris cemetery that was his home for more than a century? Modern buildings now stand above it, but no ponytailed, buckle-shoed gentleman wraith has been reported from this quarter.

No, for reasons we can only conjecture, the ghost of John Paul Jones has chosen to haunt only two places. One is where he rests for eternity, finally and with due honors after having his corpse suffer, first, ignominious anonymity, and then the disturbance of being shuffled about from place to place (surely such jostling could re-stir the deadest of the dead). And as for the other spot, might his haunting presence be (Jones was, after all, a rather legendary ladies’ man) for the love of a woman?

The colorful details of his life, his rise from modest beginnings to grand influencer of events in his earth-altering era, are well known: how he was born a gardener’s son on the banks of Solway Firth in 1747. How he went to sea at the age of thirteen. How, on a trading voyage during which the captain and chief mate perished of fever, young John took charge with coolness and success, and thus rose to his first command while only twenty-one. How on a later voyage he killed a mutineer in self-defense. How he was convinced to flee to the American colonies, where he abandoned his birth name, John Paul, for the alias Paul Jones, and later, finally, became John Paul Jones.

His adventurous life course swept him into the swirling political maelstroms of his century, and he relished the tumult. He later would voice a sentiment, popular among the Enlightenment thinkers of the time, that he liked to fancy himself a citizen of the world. The mystic cabalism of Freemasonry appealed to him early on; he petitioned for, and received, admission into St. Bernard’s Lodge, Kilwinning Number 122, of the Ancient Society of Free and Accepted Masons in 1770. His entry into this mysterious brotherhood would have profound impacts throughout his life. It was Masonic associations that paved the way for Jones’ entry as an officer into the fledgling Continental Navy in 1775. A few years hence, once he had become the swashbuckling hero of the seas and the toast of France, he was admitted into the exclusive, powerful Lodge of the Nine Sisters—Europe’s most influential and important Masonic order—whose members included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. Jones was now party to weird, clandestine ritualism in the Jesuit grounds on the Rue de Pot de Fer Sainte-Sulpice, where he was hailed by his confreres as the very scion of the ancient gods of war and wisdom.

But all that was still in the future when he set forth on a path for glory in the opening year of the American Revolution. He received his lieutenant’s commission in December 1775; by 1777 he had his own command, the Ranger. Jones took up lodgings in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, while the Ranger was being built there and was quite taken with the town. He later would write that the happiest days of his life were in Paris and Portsmouth. Jones not only loved Portsmouth, he loved certain of its ladies as well, and they loved him in return.

Jones sailed in command of the Ranger until 1779, when he became the proud recipient of a gift from the king of France—an old East Indiaman named the Duc de Duras. Jones overhauled the ship and redubbed her the Bon Homme Richard in homage to his patron Benjamin Franklin (a reference to Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack). With the deck of the Bon Homme Richard rolling beneath his feet, Jones sailed into the history books.

In a bloody, tenacious, close-in fight, the Bon Homme Richard battled HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head in the North Sea on September 23, 1779. The engagement began poorly for Jones; the opening British broadside crippled the Bon Homme Richard, taking many of her guns and gunners out of the equation. Capt. Richard Pearson of the Serapis quite reasonably asked Jones if he was ready to surrender, eliciting Jones’ immortal retort, “I have not yet begun to fight!” The American naval spirit was born that day in Jones’ defiance and in the dogged, unyielding grit with which the Bon Homme Richard’s crew kept fiercely in the fray even while their ship was sinking beneath them and Royal Marine sharpshooters in the spars were decimating them from above. Jones lost his ship but won the battle—and undying fame.

Jones returned to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1781 to oversee the construction of the America, which was to be the new nation’s greatest ship, and his new command. While the ship was being built, Jones delved headlong again into the pleasures of the Portsmouth party circuit and romantic dalliances with the local ladies.

When Congress changed its mind, denied Jones his pending command, and instead offered the America as a gift to France, Jones swallowed his bile and roamed abroad. He was always a better captain than politician, and a role in the political and military affairs of the new United States of America was not in the cards. The circumstances under which the man who came to be regarded as the father of America’s Navy ended up adrift in Europe after the Revolution are both ironic and sad. He did not, could not, give up the sea. He served for a time as a rear admiral in the imperial navy of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Finally defeated by illness, he died in Paris in 1792.

His gravesite was lost within the shifting topographies of that sprawling European capital, and it was not until 1905, after a six-year search, that American officials succeeded in unearthing the corpse of the Republic’s first great naval hero. The cadaver’s gruesome visage—desiccated, leather-like skin drawn taut over the skull; eye sockets hollow; hair now wildly long—provided an uncannily accurate match when overlaid with images of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s anatomically precise bust of Jones. President Theodore Roosevelt had Jones’ body escorted home by a squadron of four cruisers, which were joined by seven battleships for the ceremonial approach up the Chesapeake to a resting place worthy of the father of the Navy. His remains arrived at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis on July 22, 1905. Congress had not yet appropriated funds for a proper tomb, so the corpse was stashed in a storage room in the basement of Bancroft Hall. After an official welcoming ceremony held on April 24, 1906, replete with a speech by President Roosevelt to a crowd of more than a thousand, Jones went back to the basement to await completion of his grand crypt beneath the Naval Academy chapel in 1913. Until he was laid to his final rest there, the body of John Paul Jones, still in limbo after having been recalled from more than a century’s slumber, lay in the basement of Bancroft Hall.

He had known cozier quarters in his time. During his New Hampshire sojourns Jones had boarded at the Widow Purcell’s house in Portsmouth, which today still stands as the John Paul Jones House Museum. The indications of Jones’ ghostly presence there are generally attributed to the love affairs the lusty captain carried out at the premises. Next door to the Jones House is another historic edifice, the Rockingham Hotel, formerly the home of town patriarch Woodbury Langdon. A feminine specter dubbed “the White Lady of Rockingham” by resident poet and ghost witness Esther Buffler haunts this building. The ghost is possibly the wife of Woodbury Langdon—and a secret paramour of the rakish captain who was lodging just next door, according to the hushed and knowing gossip-lore that has been passed down in the seaport since colonial days.

If the lady ghost is still active, might that explain why the ghost of Jones has chosen to return here as well? Perhaps the two of them, in the afterlife, are continuing the torrid affair they once savored in the flesh. Paranormalists equipped with ghost-detecting divining rods have verified the captain’s presence in Jones House. His chamber was one of the hotbeds of spectral signals. And indeed, a glowing white female ghost—none other than the White Lady of Rockingham herself, Mrs. Langdon—occasionally sneaks over from her usual haunts next door to tryst with Captain Jones. “Some say the vision of a lady with a pure ivory face has been seen peering from more than one window of the John Paul Jones house,” Portsmouth historian Pamela Keene noted.

No one would deny a hard-fighting naval hero his onshore pleasures; both he and the lady clearly seem to be enjoying themselves. But Jones, ever the rover, has not entirely changed his wandering ways. He divides his manifestations between Portsmouth and his final (at last) resting place in Annapolis, his southern headquarters for rampant ghostly activity.

Creepy noises emanate from his crypt at night. Over the years, honor guards have reported ghostly sightings both visual and auditory. Jones has been spotted standing among the marbled columns of the crypt, and a garbled, unsettling voice—a voice muffled and indistinct yet insistent—has been heard on numerous occasions. Indeed, one of the enduring legends ingrained in the lore of the Naval Academy tells of the honor guard who, driven insane by the manifestation of Captain Jones, was found leaning against the sarcophagus babbling in deranged conversation with the corpse entombed within.

Another guard engaged in a dialogue with the captain’s ghost only with great reluctance. The crypt was devoid of visitors one afternoon when the guard was assailed from behind by a commanding basso profundo voice: “What . . . is . . . your name, sailor?”

The guard stared straight ahead with all the sentinel sangfroid he could muster.

The silence was broken again: “What . . . is . . . your name, sailor?”

This time, he turned.

The ghost was close, iridescent, bedecked in the garb of a bygone century.

The guard fought the panic inundating his veins.

The ghost smiled now, staring him in the face, and once again asked, “What . . . is . . . your name, sailor?”

The guard did the only thing he could think to do: he answered.

John Paul Jones nodded slowly, then pivoted and loped out of the crypt.

The guard, now beyond panic and into the realm of stunned disorientation, quickly followed.

The sun was bright, and John Paul Jones was gone.

Odds are he had a lady friend up north who was just dying to see him.