West Point's "Pusher" Ghost of Room 4714

West Point has never been short of ghost stories. Molly, Thayer's Irish cook, is said to linger in Quarters 100. But one story stands apart. It began in the autumn of 1972, in Room 4714 of the 47th Division, North Barracks. The building has since been renamed Scott Barracks.

21 October 1972. One of the two plebes in Room 4714 saw a life-sized 19th-century officer step out of a wall. He wore a shako and carried a musket. It receded back into the wall before the plebe could wake his roommate. The next night, both of them saw it.

Jim O'Connor was a plebe in Room 4714. For him it began on late-night trips to the latrine. Toilet paper unrolled itself. Water turned on and off.

His roommate, Victor, saw a man sitting on the toilet in a gray dress uniform, holding a musket with a bayonet. His eyes were bright, pure white. He stood up and faded as Victor ran. Later, as the room grew cold, O'Connor saw "a silhouette of a man's torso, floating five feet above the radiator." Victor saw it too.

Then the upperclassmen stepped in. A platoon leader slept in the room, saw the figure, and called in Assistant Brigade Adjutant John Feeley. At about 2:30 a.m. the room went cold. Feeley felt a crushing weight, as though someone was sitting on his chest.

A figure in a high-collared coat stared down with glowing white eyes. He could neither rise nor scream. Then it fled into the wall. Several upperclassmen later reported being pinned down. The cadets called him "The Pusher."

Cadet Captain Keith Bakken spent a night there with another upperclassman. The figure appeared to his companion and receded into the wall. Bakken remained a skeptic, but the spot where it vanished, normally warm, was icy to the touch. According to the New York Times, the ghost also walked out amidst a group of cadets in an area known as the Bureau. They screamed, clutched each other and said the rosary.

The witnesses identified the figure from a print found at the Point. Lt. Col. Patrick Dionne, the academy's information officer, called it "an unexplained phenomenon." A Protestant chaplain said: "I believe the cadets with all my heart. I believe they think they saw something… It just doesn't fit into my theology." Bakken declared the room off limits until Easter. Later, unverified retellings add that the psychic Jeane Dixon was thrown from the room during an exorcism.

Timothy R. O'Neill, a former West Point professor, later proposed collective sleep paralysis. "This event, called hypnagogic hallucination, can be frighteningly real," he wrote. Others pointed to suggestion after the Warrens' lecture. One column claimed a Navy midshipman lowered himself from the roof and shone a slide taped to a flashlight onto the barracks wall. An Associated Press follow-up found flaws in his story. A 1997 search of the academy's archives found no official records.

In 1987 O'Neill published a novel, Shades of Gray, and sightings resurfaced. The room was sealed, then turned into a study area. In 1998 an alumnus said his son, a cadet, had woken with pressure on his chest. Cadets now call the ghost "The Crusher." Jim O'Connor does not believe in ghosts. He still cannot explain what he saw.