When the Ghost Screams(6)

The Annie May Swift Hall at Northwestern University, depicted in this antique image, is home to the ghost of young Annie who succumbed to illness while attending college here. (author’s collection)

My sixth sense told me that while many spirits may inhabit the campus, a 1921 student was surely among them. Those familiar with my books know that I am only slightly shy about admitting that my intuition sometimes guides me as I track ghosts. And in this instance, that sixth sense felt as sharp as the one the victim himself felt when he made a gloomy prediction.



Northwestern University as it appeared when one student mysteriously vanished. (1922 yearbook)

Freshman Leighton Mount had a special affection for an older woman, twenty-four-year-old Doris Fuchs, who did not return his feelings. “You made me love you,” he wrote in a last note to her in September 1921.

“We were what you might call pals,” Doris said in 1923.

Was Leighton simply trying to get her attention when he spoke to her about ways he could end his life? He dismissed the idea of drowning, because his body would resurface, she remembered. She was so used to his ramblings that at first she did not take him that seriously when he told her that he would “disappear during rush.” Doris heard the statement as a half-hearted suicide threat. Was it a threat, or was it a premonition?

Leighton must have had reservations about the wild week of hazing, because his mother advised him that he had better participate, or he would “look like a sissy.”

The barbaric “fight week” pitted freshmen and sophomore males against each other in tortuous “pranks.” Did Leighton and his roommate, Roscoe Fitch, really have a choice? The rowdy, testosterone-driven event rushed over the campus like a tidal wave, picking up everything in its path and leaving the hapless wounded in its wake.

Some of the students were terrorized in the lake. Student Arthur Persinger, for instance, “was tied to a plank which was placed parallel with the water, and so low over it that the waves would splash over his face,” according to one witness.

Young men kidnapped and tied each other up, sometimes abandoning angry and embarrassed students naked and far from campus. Almost everyone seemed to get through the September 1921 rush OK—everyone except for Leighton Mount.

Just as he had told Doris he would, Leighton disappeared.

At first, none of the other students would admit to having any idea of what had happened to him. But then Northwestern student and star athlete Charles Palmer, who worked at a bakery, told a coworker that he knew where Leighton was. When she pressed Palmer for details, he clammed up.

As Leighton’s parents hired a private investigator, rumors circulated. Students told the university authorities that Leighton had been kidnapped by a newspaper reporter who was keeping him hidden. The reporter, they said, would eventually release him and get a great scoop for his newspaper.

Fifteen months went by with no word from Leighton, and then, at Christmastime, his parents received a telegram, signed “Leighton.”

Was he alive? Or was someone trying to throw them off the trail?

In April 1923 another fight week turned tragic when Louis Aubere was killed in a car wreck. The cars were loaded with students involved in the rush, and some witnesses said that the crash was deliberate.

As students were grieving, a grisly discovery was made. A twelve-year-old boy went down to the lakeshore to play by the Lake Street Pier, south of the college campus. Puzzled by the odd bones he found beneath the pier, he took one home to show his mother. She called the police.

Leighton Mount had been found.

The bone the kid retrieved was one of Leighton’s shin bones. Leighton’s mother identified bits of clothing and a belt buckle, stamped with the initials L.M. Leighton’s dentist made a positive identification.

While students said the death was a suicide, there was no discounting the rotted bits of rope found with the skeleton. It was the same type of rope that the boys used when they bound each other during rush.

Prosecutor Robert Crowe argued that Leighton had been kidnapped at midnight on Wednesday, September 21, 1921. The hazers had tied him beneath the pier and, when they returned the next day, found him dead. They had then made a pact to keep the death a secret. Now, twenty months later, dozens of people were subpoenaed as authorities demanded the truth in court.

The truth, however, was difficult to pinpoint. Some of the students changed their stories—including Leighton’s roommate, Roscoe Fitch. Newspapers reported that after four trying hours and eight versions of his account, Roscoe burst into tears and cried, “I’ll lose my credits! I’ll be kicked out of school if I tell! I dare not talk for I have been warned by men at the top to keep quiet, and I must do so!”