She came from hearty pioneer stock. Being the seventh daughter, she was imbued with the psychic attunements that can accrue to that place in the birth sequence. Rosa Brant grew to womanhood strong and vigorous. She married Oregon railroad man Jim Sutton and bore him five children. Rosa Brant Sutton’s maternal instinct was amplified by her innate extrasensory powers. Many took note of the inexplicable telepathy that existed between the mother and her children. Over the years, in matters both weighty and trivial, Rosa exhibited a remarkable telepathic bond with her daughters. But of all her brood, Rosa always had the most profound mystic connection with Jimmie. He was her firstborn.
When Jimmie was a toddler, for example, she saved him from drowning in a barrel of rainwater—after hearing the warning voice of her own dead father and racing to the barrel mere moments before little Jimmie was beyond rescue. As in so many other instances in which Rosa Sutton displayed an uncanny sensitivity to the sudden, sharp utterances of the dead, there was a witness on hand to verify the mind-boggling and eerie sequence that occurred that day.
One night, out of nowhere, Rosa cried that her brother was dead, cried it repeatedly to her disbelieving husband—disbelieving, that is, until a few hours later when the telegram arrived announcing the brother’s death. Rosa likewise predicted, just before it occurred, her mother’s demise many miles away—again with witnesses to her disturbing clairvoyance.
But it was her first, her Jimmie, whose pleas from the netherworld she heard loudly and relentlessly until the Sutton mystery became a consuming national fervor. It bound for all time the U.S. Naval Academy with one of the most celebrated and rigorously investigated cases in the annals of psychic phenomena. For Jimmie came to a tragic end as Lt. James N. Sutton Jr., USMC, a young man with a badly beaten face and a bullet in his brain. He lay dying on Naval Academy soil in the predawn blackness of October 13, 1907, in a dark dale between Halligan Hall and Hospital Point. Life seeped from his battered frame there, but his spirit remained (and remains), restless and indignant. It shook the foundations of power; it moaned from the shadows to a mother’s ears, and from there to the corridors of justice. It commanded the attention of the public and the press. Even the august New York Times agreed that “some of the details of so-called supernatural, or supernormal, occurrences in this case, have been corroborated with such complete evidence that even to the wholly skeptical they remain puzzling to the last degree, entirely inexplicable, indeed.”
And thus did the Naval Academy, founded in the wake of the paranormal-infused Somers horror, itself become host to the paranormal.
Originally called simply the Naval School, the sea service’s equivalent to West Point opened on the grounds of old Fort Severn alongside Annapolis in 1845; in 1850 it became known as the Naval Academy. Except for a four-year evacuation as the Civil War tramped its muddy boots through (during which time the operation temporarily relocated to Rhode Island), the Academy has fulfilled its mission of molding the Navy’s future leaders along the banks of the Severn River and College Creek. In those heady early decades of the school’s existence, young men from across a young nation dreamed Annapolis dreams. But not all who were accepted made it through. Academy life was rigorous, demanding; intensive studies, training, and hazing all took a toll. The first brutal year “on the Yard” was a weeding-out process. To have been accepted into the Academy was an honor; not to make it through was cause for disappointment, but not necessarily cause for shame. It was damnably tough.
Jimmie Sutton entered the Academy in 1904, a scrappy westerner described as both high-spirited and sensitive, with equal penchants for pugnacity and poetry—in short, brimming with potential. Hazed, hospitalized after a boxing match, falling behind in certain classes, he made it through to 1905 before resigning from the Academy. But he kept his hand in by applying for the Marine Corps officer-training program. Entering the Corps brought him back to the Academy; acceptance into the Marine Corps Application School billeted him back on the Yard.
But this time he would never leave it.
Halligan Hall, that picturesque Annapolis landmark, was home to the Marine Corps barracks and officer-training school in 1907, the antecedent to today’s Quantico for Marine officers-to-be. The field between Halligan Hall and College Creek where fans now fill bleachers to cheer Navy baseball was in 1907 the Marines’ parade ground, and home to thirteen tents housing the young officers in training. The thirteen tents faced the graves of the naval dead, holding eternal sentinel above the waves, on the hill leading up to the hospital. The cemetery was a popular destination to take a lady friend for an amorous tryst.
Carvel Hall, a new and fashionable Annapolis hotel that threw elegant soirées, was a magnet for young swains of both the Navy and Marine persuasions—and the eligible local ladies for whom they vied. There was a Naval Academy dance, a “middie hop” in the parlance of the day, at Carvel Hall on Saturday night, October 12, 1907. Here, something transpired that within hours would result in violent death. The stories told later would vary, but the conflicting accounts shared some details in common: much liquor, rivalry over a woman, inflamed tempers.
It was well past midnight when the sentry heard shouts and gunshots on the parade ground. Officers were roused, and the news was bad: two Marines had been wounded by another Marine who then shot himself.
Officers and the doctor on duty converged at the body of the shooter lying face down in blood. They rolled him over and lit matches to see better: bruises on the lip, the cheek, the forehead; gravel ground into the lacerated nose; a gunshot wound up behind the right ear, residue gunpowder and viscous brain effluvium in the blood.
There was still a slight pulse. But before the stretcher made it up the hill to the hospital, Jimmie Sutton was dead.
As Jimmie’s life leaked away in the early morning hours on the East Coast, Rosa Sutton was spending Saturday evening with her daughters in the parlor of the house on Hoyt Street in Portland, Oregon, when she felt a sudden explosion of pain.
“Something has happened to Jimmie!” she screamed.
She felt a blow to the head, then a stab in the heart. “Oh God! Save him!”
Her distraught daughters tried helplessly to comfort her. Then Mr. Sutton arrived home. And Rosa sensed that he had not come through the door alone.
She whispered, “Jimmie is here.”
Mr. Sutton said, “Can you stand some bad news?”
Rosa asked what she already knew: “Is Jimmie hurt?”
“He is dead.”
The family collapsed in collective despair. But Jimmie was there with them in the parlor. The others couldn’t tell, but Rosa saw him plain as day. “You must clear my name,” the ghost begged her. “God will give you the means to bring these men to justice.”
“Do any of you see Jimmie or hear what he is saying?” Rosa cried. The ghost kept pleading with her: “Mama, they beat me almost to death. I did not know I was shot until my soul went into eternity. They either knocked or struck me in the jaw . . . there is a big lump on the left side. I never had a chance to defend myself.”
She repeated his words as the rest of the family listened in horror. A terse telegram from the U.S. Navy soon disputed the ghost’s version of the events: “It is reported from Annapolis Lieutenant James M. Sutton committed suicide at 1:20 this morning, Oct. 13, 1907.”
Suicide: to the Catholic Suttons that was a cardinal sin, enough to prevent Jimmie from burial in holy ground, enough to keep his soul from eternal rest in Heaven. No wonder, then, that he cried out for vindication. No wonder that his spirit remained restless beyond the corporeal threshold. A reporter arrived at the household of bereavement and, seeking quotes, tactlessly conveyed lurid details of the prevailing account of the occurrence, telling the Suttons that at the dance Jimmie “drank a little too much, on the way home got crazy mad, and blew the whole top of his head off.”
Newspapers across America carried banner headlines about the shocking suicide at the Naval Academy. And throughout those awful first four days, the dead son haunted his attuned mother. His ghost was plaintive, articulate, repeatedly pleading, “If you could only see my forehead, you would know how they beat me.”
He also told her the gun he had been shot with was not his—that his killers had planted it on him.
The other young men involved were together on their story: Sutton had started trouble with them, they unanimously recited. It was all Sutton’s fault, and it all culminated with Sutton suddenly turning his rage inward—shooting himself in the head.
As suicide scenarios go, it certainly was baroque. To the Navy, it was a matter of case closed. To Rosa Sutton, it was thoroughly unbelievable.
Maternal intuition and spectral visitations were telling her a different version. And for months on end, as the Navy and Marine Corps brass wished she would just go away, Mrs. Sutton pursued her son’s case with unflagging doggedness, incorporating family, friends, the press, and any influential allies she could recruit. Bit by bit, she chipped away at the veneer of the military’s facile account of the tragedy of October 13, 1907: a supportive witness here, a factual discrepancy there, a growing body of snippets adding up to a compelling case for reexamination of what really had happened that terrible night.
As 1907 turned into 1908, the national press continued to squeeze miles of ink out of the sensational story of the bereaved psychic mother who would not give up her quest to clear her son’s name. Eventually, the stories were not just about the ghostly advice she had followed (to the amusement or amazement of readers early on); they began to show an ever-increasing conviction that something was just not right about the official story regarding Sutton’s death.
As time passed and the case remained a gaudy part of the national conversation, it inevitably drew the attention of serious scholars of the supernatural. The American Society for Psychical Research, a highly respected organization known for its rigorous spirit of inquiry, healthy skepticism, and scientific methodologies, sent field investigator M. A. Thacher to Portland to dig into the Sutton phenomenon. Soon, his leg-work revealed that Rosa was not the only one who had been visited by Jimmie Sutton’s ghost.
Thacher described “friends and relatives of the Sutton family . . . who say that they have seen the ‘apparition’ of Jimmie since his death.” First, there was one of Sutton’s sisters, whom Jimmie visited on a train. The sister, Thacher said, “corroborates Mrs. Sutton’s statement by saying that Jimmie said he did not kill himself but was murdered, in the manner he is said to have detailed to his mother.”
Then Thacher found another witness. “Still another lady, unconnected with the family, and said to be of the highest standing, not a spiritist, reports an apparition of the young officer, in full uniform, not long after his death; the apparition made no statement.”
And, most eye-opening of all, there was “a near relative of Mr. Sutton’s [who] reported, a few days after Jimmie’s death and before she had heard anything about Mrs. Sutton’s experiences, that she had had a vision of Jimmie, and that he had told her that a man came up behind him and struck him on the head.” Interestingly, noted Thacher, these visions “all occurred within seventy-two hours of the boy’s death.”
Thacher spent months on the investigation, finding Rosa to be “a woman of unusual intelligence and apparently vigorous health.” After conducting a series of experiments and tests, he was able to state, “There really seems to be a telepathic rapport between Mrs. Sutton and her daughters.” Most significant, Thacher concluded that “Mrs. Sutton unquestionably has visions which correspond with actual happenings of which she could have no information gained in normal fashion.”
Premonitions, the ability to see and hear the dead—Rosa’s abilities have been known in folk culture for countless generations as “the gift.” One modern-day possessor of “the gift,” Mary Ann Winkowski, inherited them from her grandmother, who early on taught her to harness her powers. Winkowski has worked with law enforcement agencies and as a television consultant; her memoirs bespeak a body of experience remarkably reminiscent of Rosa Sutton’s. Winkowski has cultivated a theory about “the white Light” that appears to a person at the time of death and is “the opportunity to cross over.” But if the spirit fails to enter the Light, the spirit just might find itself stuck here.
“Your spirit is meant to go into the Light once it has left your body,” Winkowski wrote in When Ghosts Speak: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits. “All the earthbound spirits I’ve spoken to . . . know that the Light is there for them and that they can walk into it. . . . [W]hen I talk to spirits who have chosen not to go into the Light, they clearly believe that their reasons for remaining earthbound are both logical and compelling.”
Those who, like Jimmie Sutton, die a sudden and violent death are likely to linger, noted Winkowski. “It’s not surprising when you think about it: These are the ones who most frequently choose not to go into the Light. They stay to seek justice or revenge.”
And Rosa kept up the battle to clear her son’s name while evidence mounted and editorials clamored for action. The New York Times wrote, “The fight she has made to accomplish this has, undoubtedly, been one of the bravest and most persistent battles in the modern history of motherhood.”
Finally bowing to public pressure, the Navy Department resurrected the Sutton case. From July to August 1909, the Sutton Court of Inquiry held proceedings in the Naval Academy’s Academic Building, now known as Mahan Hall, to reexamine the details of Sutton’s death. Dr. Edward Schaeffer, former deputy coroner of Washington, D.C., and one of the most thoroughly seasoned experts alive on gunshot forensics, arrived at the court with a handgun, a human skull, and assorted other props. He painstakingly proved to all assembled that, based on the angle of the gunshot wound in Jimmie Sutton’s skull, it would have been impossible for anybody except a “professional contortionist” to shoot himself in the head thusly.
To much of the public following the proceedings in detail, the suicide theory was beginning to look more and more ridiculous. But the Navy and Marine Corps remained tenacious even in the face of Dr. Schaeffer’s testimony. They had held the court of inquiry the public demanded and now intended to put the matter behind them. The Suttons and those around the country who agreed with them found the court’s conclusion devastatingly unsatisfying: Sutton, the court declared in the end, “was killed by a revolver shot . . . fired by himself, without the intervention of any other hand.”
The expected outrage, the anticipated outcry in the press about the perceived whitewash, ensued, and still Rosa Sutton refused to give up. She may not have gotten the Navy Department to admit to anything, but enough testimony had entered the public arena to make a compelling argument that Jimmie had not committed suicide. Rosa launched a letter-writing campaign to Catholic Church officials to have her son’s grave consecrated; in light of all that had come out in the court of inquiry, the Church was receptive to such a request—pending an exhumation and autopsy. And finally, nearly two years after her son’s death, Rosa met with some success, for the War Department agreed to exhume Jimmie’s body in Arlington National Cemetery.
The autopsy took three hours, and its conclusions were explosive. Newspaper headlines were succinct and damning: “AUTOPSY ADDS STRENGTH TO MURDER THEORY—SHOT FIRED FROM DISTANCE . . . SKULL BRUISED AND CUT, SCARS OF BATTLE CLING TO CORPSE . . . FAMILY DOCTOR SAYS SUICIDE CONTENTION IS EXPLODED.”
The Navy never changed its official conclusion on the matter, but the new evidence was enough for the Roman Catholic Church. As Jimmie Sutton was laid back into the earth, a priest sprinkled holy water on the coffin and chanted in Latin. Jimmie was absolved of the sin of suicide. He now rested in holy ground. Rosa got through the prayers before she broke down.
But two things had kept Jimmie Sutton from entering the “white Light” and passing on to the eternal beyond. One was resolved with the negation of the suicide stigma and the proper burial. But the other was never resolved—for if he did not shoot himself, then someone else did, and that person or persons got away with it. Jimmie’s ghost sought redemption and got it. He also sought justice and was denied it. And he still lurks at the Naval Academy today, a restive phantom angered that no one was ever punished for his murder.
Sutton’s ghost has been sighted dozens of times over the years. He peeks into windows at night. He walks through walls. He wanders through buildings. Sometimes he manifests as a glowing, man-shaped mist patrolling the dark terrain where he was killed more than a century ago. In the most recently reported sighting, he was seen drifting atop the fence surrounding the Academy. Maybe he was trying to scale it, as a live young man might, to sneak out, to escape at last. But he was unable to cross to the outside. For he is bound forever to the locus of his foul and unresolved demise.
And he has company.
There is, of course, the most august company of all, the ghost of John Paul Jones heretofore chronicled. Jones’ corpse was being shuffled from site to site at the Academy awaiting his crypt’s completion at just the time that Sutton himself was living, and dying, there. But there are others as well; a mix of doomed hoverers from different eras imbue the grounds with a palpable aura of fearfulness on nights dark and still. A former security officer, glad to have left this particular assignment behind, remarked that “the Naval Academy at night is the scariest place I have ever been.”
Perhaps some of the spirits are those of poor wretches who arrived in boatloads during the Civil War, starving and diseased, hoping to find succor in the rows of hospital tents that then lined the Academy grounds. Many were beyond saving and perished in agony. Perhaps some are those of the suicides who hanged themselves in Bancroft Hall in the 1940s and 1950s. (Across the Severn, Naval Station Annapolis is haunted by a mysterious woman in red, also said to be the evanescence of a long-forgotten suicide.)
Where so much history has unfolded, spirits are likely to linger. And the Naval Academy proves, as do so many other land quarters, that the ocean waves are not the only province of the Navy’s prolific ghosts.