It was a normal night at the old Buffalo Naval Park for young Eddie Kirkwood. He was told to do lock-up and also given the task of painting the yellow guide lines aboard the USS The Sullivans, when something unusual happened. He had set the can of paint on a nearby tabletop when suddenly it flew across the room, splattering its contents on the wall. A moment later, another unexplainable phenomenon happened—a welding shield visor took on a life of its own, whipped around a fire extinguisher and started spinning. The door was shut tight, and there were no vacuums or fans in the old ammunition bunker where they kept the paint.
Kirkwood, then a recently hired night watch-man aboard the retired ship, bolted.
USS The Sullivans was the only ship in the history of the U. S. Navy to be named after more than one person, and the only one to include the word “The” in its name. It was named after a family of five brothers who all perished in the watery depths of the Pacific in the same battle in World War II—the biggest loss for a single family.
After the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa were inspired to take action and fight for their country. The Sullivan brothers, George, Joseph, Madison, Francis, and Albert, aged 19 to 27, enlisted in the United States Navy in January of 1942, insisting that they serve together on the same ship under the motto “We stick together.”
This band of brothers were sent to the Juneau, a light cruiser that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sunk on November 13, 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal. Francis, Joseph and Madison died instantly and Albert drowned the next day. George, the eldest, however, was left afloat in a raft, clinging to life. The legend goes that he drifted through the water for days, slowly going mad, wiping the black stains off the faces of floating corpses while looking for his brothers. His skin was becoming completely torched by the sun, so he tried to swim for a shore nearly fifty miles away, and was either drowned, or devoured by a shark.
Many believe the spirit of George Sullivan haunts the vessel that holds his family name, and he wanders the ship, forever searching for his lost brothers.
After the Sullivan family lost all of its sons and had no one to carry on its name, a new policy was instituted to protect families from such serious travesties. It was called the Sole Survivor Policy, and may be familiar from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, where a unit was sent to retrieve the last remaining son of the Ryan family.
Kirkwood has been working at the Buffalo Naval Park for nearly twenty years, and has witnessed numerous incidents, most of which can only be explained by a supernatural force. Explaining the mysterious episode with the flying paint can, Kirkwood recalls, “I’m looking around, trying to think ‘What happened here?’ so when I couldn’t come up with nothing, that’s when I took off, and I ran home.” Initially, Kirkwood had no intention of returning to work after being so bone-chillingly shaken up, but his mother convinced him to go back and explain what happened—a story that came as no surprise to his boss.
The original tale of haunting on The Sullivans was only a few years after its retirement. In 1969, a wrench was spotted flying across the room. The ship later moved from its home in Pennsylvania to Buffalo, where much of its haunting occurred around the late ‘80s.
In the winter of 1988, when the park was closed from its normal season, a couple had come to walk around, and Kirkwood recalls, “They got a tour from an admiral, and he was showing them the engine room, telling them about somebody who got burnt in the fire room.” But there was no admiral—in fact, there was no one in uniform aboard, and the stories they were told were unknown to anybody who then worked on the ship.
In 1989 a worker on the ship, Danny Santiago, had gone below the deck to check the fire extinguishers, when out of the dark, a burnt, bloody face atop half of a body appeared and began to float towards him. He was so terrified he quickly quit his job.
Tom Dwyer, Kirkwood’s predecessor as the night watchman, had been alone and had heard somebody call out of the silence, “Hey, you!” Perhaps not the most alarming of experiences, but another incident soon occurred that ultimately lead to Kirkwood’s promotion—Dwyer was inexplicably knocked unconscious. He woke up not knowing what had happened, and for him that was enough. Nobody has had the courage to do lock-up since, except Kirkwood.
Kirkwood soon had another experience that forever solidified his suspicions. “I was working a party one evening,” on the Little Rock, a bigger ship that shares the same harbor as The Sullivans. “I come walking back and I see everybody on the fantail looking in my direction!” he says. What caught their attention was not just Kirkwood, but that The Sullivans’ radar was spinning. They thanked him for putting on a show for their party, and, to keep them from panicking, Kirkwood played along. What he didn’t tell them was that he had already turned off the circuit breaker—the only switch that sends power to the radar.
Working on The Sullivans for nearly twenty years, Kirkwood has gotten much more than he bargained for when he took the job in his late teens, having essentially engendered a life-long belief in the haunted vessel. He has been interviewed on MSNBC and The History Channel, retelling mainly the paint and radar stories. He keeps a junky old television in a small room on the Little Rock with all the videos taken on the ship from the investigations done by various television networks.
“I do believe that your body has a life force,” Kirkwood says. “When you die, and that shell is done, the energy’s gotta go somewhere.” He says he didn’t always believe in afterlife—whether it’s the ghosts of the departed, or something they’ve left behind—but his experiences on The Sullivans have greatly nurtured those beliefs. “It could be a number of things,” referring to the incidents on the ship. “I don’t necessarily think it’s the Sullivan brothers,” he adds.
Many people agree with Kirkwood. John Branning, Chief Engineer at the Naval Park and member of the Depew Paranormal Society, calls himself the “resident skeptic.” He doesn’t believe in ghosts. “I believe in personalities,” he says. Though he is a recent add-on to the Naval Park staff, he is a retired United States Navy engineer, and knows full well after those twenty years, “You can, especially on a ship, leave something behind…you live like sardines. The emotion drains out of you,” he said.
Branning has been around for visits from people who call themselves “sensitives,” a variation on psychics, who can sense supernatural presence. They come in groups and take pictures and EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) recordings. According to Branning, almost every time a person comes on board The Sullivans with a digital camera, their batteries have died.
This June, Branning says, they performed an experiment in attempts to correspond with any spirits aboard. They simply asked aloud, “Is there anyone who would like to communicate with us?” after which they heard a knocking on the wall. They posed the same question again, and received the same response.
Whether it’s the spirits of the Sullivan brothers, or some other tortured soul doomed to traverse the inside of the ship, there is a general consensus amongst employees, sensitives, psychics, and EVP enthusiasts that some sort of paranormal force exists on The Sullivans.
Jon Sham is a senior English major and a Features writer for Generation.
