by Mark Nesbitt
Lincoln in the White House
Of all the United States presidents, none has presided over a more tumultuous time in our history than Abraham Lincoln. And, arguably, none wrestled more with his own demons.
Melancholy was steeped into Lincoln’s personality, from the time of his birth-mother’s death when he was four years old, to the loss of Ann Rutledge, his first love, to witnessing the deaths of two of his four children, his life was crisscrossed with personal tragedy. Then came the schism in the nation, which many Southerners argue was precipitated by Lincoln’s election and subsequent actions.
While living in the Executive Mansion, the Lincolns sponsored and participated in several séances. In 1863, medium Charles Shockle held a séance there. Medium J. B. Conklin passed a cryptic message he said had come from Lincoln’s close friend Edward Baker, killed leading Union troops at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff: “Gone elsewhere,” Baker allegedly said, and added, “Elsewhere is everywhere.”
Nettie Colburn Maynard, a medium who had conducted séances with the Lincolns in and outside the Executive Mansion, wrote a book about it called Was Lincoln a Spiritualist? In it she recounted the Lincolns witnessing the spirits levitating a piano with a man sitting on it.
Like so many mothers and fathers in mid-nineteenth-century America, when 620,000 of their boys had died, the Lincolns may have been drawn to spiritualism in an attempt to reconnect with their two sons, Eddie and Willie, who had died. The great bloodletting of the Civil War may be the reason for the renewed and increased popularity of spiritualism during the period.
Mary Todd Lincoln certainly seemed fascinated by the subject; whether her husband bought into it, as Maynard’s book title suggests, is arguable. One thing that is beyond argument, however, is Lincoln’s continued presence in the Executive Mansion, as well as the presence of the spirit of one son.
Some of President Grant’s family believed that they could contact the dead, and one was reported to have spoken with little Willie Lincoln’s ghost. Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, felt sure that it was in her room in the White House that Willie had died. Her mother, Lady Bird Johnson, while watching a television special on Lincoln, suddenly got a chill when the program talked of the importance to Lincoln of the very room she was sitting in. She immediately got an uncomfortable feeling, as if Lincoln were there, behind her.
Theodore Roosevelt, survivor of an assassination attempt himself, was perhaps speaking metaphorically when he claimed he was very much aware of Lincoln’s presence in the White House some four decades after his death: “I see him in the different rooms and in the halls.”
President Calvin Coolidge’s wife, Grace, claimed she saw Lincoln dressed in black wearing a shawl across his shoulders, something Lincoln was known to do. He apparently was standing at a window with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing thoughtfully out across the Potomac. It wasn’t the last time she would see him.
Harry Truman, as no-nonsense a president as we’ve ever had, was awakened one morning by two solid knocks on his bedroom door. He rose and opened the door to find no one. But he felt a freezing cold spot before him that began to accompany footsteps as they moved down the hall.
Perhaps it was the straits the country found itself in during the Great Depression and World War II, but the Franklin D. Roosevelt era was one of the most active for Lincoln re-visits to the White House. One of the most famous personages that Lincoln’s wraith visited was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who was staying in the Rose Room. This episode possibly occurred during her visit to the U.S. between June 24 and August 11, 1942. It was late when she heard the knock on her door. Thinking it may be some urgent state business, she answered it, only to be confronted by the six-foot, four-inch form of Abraham Lincoln. The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor after blacking out from the shock of seeing the American president killed during the last century.
Winston Churchill, during his visits in the 1940s, never liked sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom and would be found, in the morning, in the room across the hall. During one visit, after taking a hot bath (accompanied by a glass of scotch and omnipresent cigar) he emerged from the tub and strolled naked into an adjoining room where he ran right into Lincoln, who was leaning on the mantle above the fireplace. They looked each other in the face. Churchill was embarrassed. Lincoln simply vanished.
Various employees in the White House saw the sixteenth president during the Roosevelt administration. Mary Eben, Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, passed Lincoln’s bedroom once and saw a tall, thin, dark man sitting on the bed pulling on his boots. At seeing the former occupant of the White House, dead at that point for more than seventy-five years, she screamed and ran from the second floor. FDR’s personal valet, Cesar Carrera, once ran completely out of the White House screaming that he had just seen Lincoln’s ghost. Perhaps more interestingly, the Roosevelts’ little dog Fala would react to unseen entities in the White House.
Mary Surratt
The most pathetic spirit said to haunt the White House is that of Annie Surratt, daughter of executed Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt.
There is much controversy surrounding the Mary Surratt execution. In the frantic search for the assassins after Lincoln’s murder, a roundup unprecedented in American history occurred. No one really knew how far-ranging the conspiracy was and a vast dragnet was thrown out. Everyone from Confederate president Jefferson Davis to every lowly private in the Confederate Army was suspected by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who personally took over the case. Eventually the suspects were narrowed down. Eight men and one woman were suspected in the conspiracy.
Mary Surratt was in her teens when she married John Surratt. He was an alcoholic and they had trouble keeping land for farming, which he constantly had to sell off to pay his debts. They had three children and tried to educate them at the several Catholic schools in the area. John and Mary finally settled at a crossroads tavern and post office, and the town soon became known as Surrattsville. Although Mary was a devout Catholic, she and John held slaves, and her political sympathies lay with the Confederacy. By the time John died in 1862, Surratt Tavern had gained a reputation as the hub of a rebel spy network, with John Jr. allegedly one of the spies.
Though she kept ownership of the tavern, she and her daughter Annie moved into Washington, buying a townhouse on the 600 block of H Street. It, too, became somewhat of a safe house for Confederate sympathizers.
After her husband’s death, Mary may have taken a more active role in supporting clandestine Confederate activities. In fact, at least one author, Donald E. Markle, in his book Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War, lists her as one of the “Confederate spies executed by the Union.”
Her association with John Wilkes Booth has been documented. Her own son brought Booth to the Surratt boardinghouse for meetings. Lewis Powell (aka Lewis Paine), who would be involved in the attempted assassination of Secretary of State William Henry Seward, blundered into the boardinghouse a few days after the assassination, and by his presence, indicted her while she spoke with the police. But at the time Booth was meeting at her house, the plan was to kidnap President Lincoln and haul him into Virginia to hold as ransom for a negotiated peace favorable to the Confederacy. Did Mary ever know that Booth’s plans changed to murder just before the assassination? Perhaps we’ll never know.
She was incarcerated along with the other coconspirators and tried through the spring and hot early days of summer 1865. Whenever they were moved about, the conspirators were forced to wear thick, sweltering hoods, and at least one report states that Mary Surratt was not allowed a change of clothing for the entire period of her imprisonment until her execution.
In spite of an attempt to gain her presidential clemency, and her daughter Annie’s pounding on the White House doors to speak with President Andrew Johnson, in July 1865 she became the first woman executed by the United States government, along with three other coconspirators.
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sp; Mary Surratt has been blamed, long after her death, for the pacing footsteps heard over the years on the second floor of the Surratt Boarding House, which still stands on H Street.
The Old Brick Capitol, once used as the seat of Congress during the War of 1812, formerly stood where the United State Supreme Court Building now stands in Washington. At the time of the Civil War, it was used to house Federal prisoners, including the famous Confederate spy Belle Boyd, Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp commander Henry Wirz, and accused Lincoln assassination coconspirator Mary Surratt. It was also used as the headquarters for the National Women’s Party, the Suffragettes, beginning in 1922. John Alexander interviewed a former resident who showed him old newspaper clippings documenting some of the supernatural events that went on in the building. Though the inmates and cells were long gone, the women would still be kept awake at night by disembodied weeping, moaning and sighing, and an occasional “maniacal scream” ripping through the darkened halls, or the cold-metal sound of a cell door being slammed. While Boyd’s ghost is blamed for the peals of bitter laughter once heard echoing through the building, the sounds of footsteps pacing incessantly coming from what was once a cell are thought to belong to the tortured spirit of Captain Wirz, who paced and paced the last few hours of his life away before climbing the gallows.
Also disturbing, according to Alexander’s interviewee, were the agonized cries from what could only have been a female spirit, a remnant of paranormal energy they attributed to Mary Surratt when she learned her fate would come at the end of a rope. Particularly unnerving is the report that on the anniversary of her death, July 7, a vague female form was seen at a window sobbing eternally. A closer look revealed deathly white fists clutching black iron bars where bars no longer existed.
The wraith of Mary Surratt has also been seen floating around the courtyard of Fort Leslie McNair where the gallows from which she swung were located. Eerily, shortly after the executions, a boxwood tree grew out of nothing but bare ground where the gallows once stood. Legend claims that Mary caused it to bloom, a living testament to her innocence.
A spirit seen moving aimlessly along Brandywine Road near Clinton, Maryland has been attributed to Mary. Clinton was once named Surrattsville, her home in better times.
Perhaps the saddest of all the specters associated with the murder of Lincoln is the lithe, young female ghost that is seen pounding periodically at the doors of the White House pleading for clemency from the president for her mother, doomed to drop those few fatal feet until stopped abruptly by the hangman’s noose. Those who have seen it and know their assassination history have identified it as the image of Annie Surratt, still heartbroken after all these years.
Ford’s Theatre
Ford’s Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth struck, is one of the museums in Washington administered by the National Park Service. After the assassination, it was closed as a theater and used for government offices. Rumors of it being cursed swirled after the brick façade collapsed in 1893, killing twenty-two and injuring another sixty-eight people. In 1968, it was reopened as a theater and still serves as one. It has also been the scene for some unexplainable events. Before its renovation between 2007 and 2009, reports emerged of phantom footsteps rushing to the box where Lincoln was shot. Some claim to have heard again the gunshot, the screams of horror, and Mary Todd Lincoln wailing, “He’s killed the President!”
Before the renovations, actors would avoid certain spots stage left, below the fatal box from which Booth leapt. If the actors hit the spot where Booth landed and broke his leg, they stumble over their lines and forget where they are in the play no matter how well-rehearsed they are. A chill welcomes them to the spot; some have become nauseous and begin to shake uncontrollably.
According to TheCabinet.com, some people claim to have seen the spirit of the assassin himself hurriedly limp across the stage, attempting to escape again, this time through the other world.
One of our guides at the Ghosts of Gettysburg Candlelight Walking Tours, Amanda Beck, works at Ford’s Theatre. I asked her about any otherworldly presences, and she only recalled one recurrent supernatural event. She and several of the staff, while walking through the lobby and gift shop, have heard whispering in their ears. She heard it so distinctly a number of times, she actually turned to see who it was. No one was in sight. While seemingly innocuous, it is still unnerving. Whoever whispers to her is unseen but apparently knows her intimately, because the word she hears whispered so close to her ears is her own name.
Bibliography
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Cohen, Daniel. Hauntings and Horrors. New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 2002.
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Daniel, Larry J. The Battle of Shiloh: National Park Civil War Series. Fort Washington, PA: Eastern National, 1998.
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Coleman, Dorcas. “Who’s Afraid of Ghosts.” Maryland Department of Natural Resources. http://dnr.maryland.gov/naturalresource/fall2001/ghosts.html.
