The Ghost Lieutenant of Annapolis
Photo taken from jbriankelly.org
On the night of October 12th, 1907, Lieutenant James Sutton of the U.S. Naval Academy went to a dance in Annapolis, Maryland and had way too much to drink. A fight broke out on the way back to the academy and Sutton lost his temper and all self-control. Once they got back, he grabbed two pistols in his room and started shooting every which way.
The shots did not hit anyone and apparently some Naval soldiers watched Sutton pull one of the pistols to his head and killed himself. The final report said that Sutton had killed himself in a drunken age. When Sutton’s mom back at home in Portland read the telegram of his death a vision of him kept coming to her. The vision would continuously say that he didn’t kill himself and that he was innocent.
The visions kept becoming more detailed to the point where he described how someone beat him over the head with a gun and killed him. The ghost even said that his watch had been broken and as the family went to gather his belongings they did indeed see his watch broken as he described it. For two more years the ghost kept appearing to his mother pleading her to start an investigation of his death. In 1909, there was finally a real autopsy given, and it showed that the bullet angle was not in conjunction with Sutton putting a bullet to his head. Following this, the ghost of Lieutenant Sutton never appeared again.
(Source: Cohen, Daniel. Hauntings and Horrors. 2002)
