Real-Life X-Files

by Joe Nickell

  Figure 15.1. Double image of author (and photographer Rob McElroy) reproduces a curious effect experienced by Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and thought by Mrs. Lincoln to be an omen

  Although Lincoln thought the effect essentially an optical illusion, nevertheless, said Noah Brooks (1865, 225), “the flavor of superstition which hangs about every mans composition made him wish that he had never seen it. But,” Brooks added, “there are people who will now believe that this odd coincidence was ca warning.’”

  Dreams of Death

  The mirror incident sets the stage for claims of even more emphatically premonitory experiences. These were dreams Lincoln reportedly had that foretold dramatic events—one of which he related to his cabinet on April 14, 1865. The previous night, he had dreamed he was in some mysterious boat, he said, “sailing toward a dark and indefinite shore.” In another version, it was of “a ship sailing rapidly” (Lewis 1973, 290). When Lincoln was assassinated only hours later, the dream was seen as weirdly prophetic. The story grew in the retellings that spread, says Lloyd Lewis in Myths After Lincoln (1973, 291) “around the world.”

  In fact, Lincoln had not thought the dream presaged his death. He had actually mentioned it in reply to General Grant, his guest that Good Friday afternoon, who had expressed worries about General Sherman s fate in North Carolina. Lincoln felt that Sherman would be victorious because, he said, the dream had often come to him prior to significant events in the war. According to Lewis (1973,290), “For a President of the United States, in a time like the Civil War, to dream that he was sailing rapidly to an unseen shore was certainly not remarkable. Most of his waking hours, across four years, were spent in wondering where the Ship of State was going.”

  Not long before his assassination, Lincoln supposedly described an even more ominous dream to Mrs. Lincoln, then again to Ward Hill Lamon (1895, 115-16), who reconstructed Lincoln’s words as follows:

  About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President,” was his answer; ”he was killed by an assassin!“ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

  Lamon’s account may be true, although he has been criticized for having “fed the fire of superstition that people were kindling about the name of Lincoln” (Lewis 1973,294). In fact, however, Lamon had added a sequel to the story that is invariably ignored: “Once the President alluded to this terrible dream with some show of playful humor. ‘Hill,’ said he, ‘your apprehension of harm to me from some hidden enemy is down-right foolishness. For a long time you have been trying to keep somebody—the Lord knows who—from killing me. Don’t you see how it will turn out? In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on some one else’”(Lamon 1895,116-17).

  In any event, that Lincoln should have dreamed of assassination—even his own—can scarcely be termed remarkable. Prior to his first inauguration in 1861, Pinkerton detectives had smuggled Lincoln into Washington at night to avoid a change of trains in Baltimore, where an assassination plot had been uncovered (Neely 1982,16-17). Lincoln had subsequently “received [an] untold number of death threats” (St. George 1990, 66), and on one occasion had a hole shot through his top hat by a would-be assassin (Neely 1982,282).

  Among the Spirits

  Lamon (1895,120) insisted that Lincoln “was no dabbler in divination—astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, or witcheries of any sort.” Yet soon after his death, spiritualists sought to use Lincoln to give respectability to their practices by citing the occasions he had permitted séances in the White House, as well as to claim contact with his own departed spirit. The extent of Lincoln’s involvement with spiritualism has been much debated. Daniel Cohen (1989,7) says the president “seems to have had some genuine interest in ghosts and spirits while he was still alive,” and spiritualists later tried to claim him “as one of their own” (Holzer 1995,63).

  Actually, it was Mrs. Lincoln who was involved with spiritualists. She turned to them in her bereavement over the death of Willie, the Lincolns’ beloved eleven-year-old son who died of “bilious fever” in 1862. One such spiritualist medium was Henrietta “Nettie” Colburn (1841-1892). Mary Todd Lincoln met her at a “circle” or séance at the Georgetown home of Cranstoun Laurie, chief clerk of the Post Office in Washington. On one occasion, a séance with Nettie was being held in the White House’s Red Parlor when the president stumbled upon them and watched with curiosity. Another time, he accompanied Mary to a séance at the Lauries’ home. At least one biographer has suggested that Lincoln’s marginal involvement may have stemmed from a desire “to protect his gullible wife” (Temple 1995,199).

  That was exactly what Lincoln did with regard to a trickster named Charles J. Colchester. Styling himself “Lord Colchester,” he conducted séances wherein “spirit rappings” were produced. A concerned Lincoln asked Dr. Joseph Henry (1797-1878), the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for his advice about Colchester, whereupon Dr. Henry invited the medium to give a demonstration at his office. The scientist determined that the sounds came from Colchester, and he suspected trickery. Later, Noah Brooks caught the medium cheating and warned Colchester not to return to the executive mansion (Temple 1995,200). Lincoln himself was not interested in séances, but according to Lloyd Lewis’s Myths After Lincoln (1973, 301), “In these dark hocus-pocuses Mrs. Lincoln found comfort, and Lincoln let them go on for a time, careless of whether the intellectuals of the capital thought him addle-pated or no.”

  Spectral Visits

  It is ironic that Lincoln did not believe in spiritualism, when his ghost is now reportedly so active. Although his Springfield home is decidedly unhaunted, according to curator Linda Suits (1998), who says neither she nor anyone she knows has had a ghostly encounter there, other places compete for attention. There have been numerous reported sightings of Lincoln’s ghost at his tomb in Springfield as well as at Fort Monroe in Virginia and, in Washington, at both the White House and Ford’s Theater (where Lincoln was assassinated) (Cohen 1989,11; Winer and Osborn 1979,125; Jones 1996,15). Understandably, perhaps, it is the White House that seems to receive the most attention—especially the “Lincoln Bedroom” (which, in Lincoln’s time, was actually his office). The notion that his ghost frequents the stately rooms and corridors doubtless began with Mrs. Lincoln’s post-assassination séances, and it was probably given im-petus by a figurative remark made by President Theodore Roosevelt (who served from 1901-1909): “I think of Lincoln, shambling, homely, with his strong, sad, deeply-furrowed face, all the time. I see him in the different rooms and in the halls” (St. George 1990, 84). Such feelings are still common and may trigger sightings among imaginative people and those predisposed to see ghosts. The first person to r
eport actually seeing Lincoln s ghost was Grace Coolidge (First Lady from 1923 to 1929), who saw his tall figure looking out an Oval Office window (Scott and Norman, 1991, 74; Cohen 1989,10). During her tenure, guests were lodged in the “Lincoln bedroom” and “Every newcomer was informed of the legend that when the great light over the front door was dimmed for the night the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was supposed to pace silently to and fro on the North Porch” (Ross 1962,109).

  Since that time, there have been many alleged sightings of Lincoln’s ghost by “White House staff, official visitors and members of presidential families,” even, it is said, by “hard-boiled Secret Service men” who “have acknowledged observing the shadowy form of the martyred president gliding at night through the quiet hallways of the White House” (Jones 1996, 9). Among the Lincoln sightings was one by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (who had a prior interest in spiritualism). She was a guest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt when she heard a knock during the night at her bedroom door. Opening it, the drowsy queen saw the figure of Abraham Lincoln looking down at her, causing her to swoon (Ronan 1974,40; Cohen 1989,10). Religious leader Norman Vincent Peale claimed that a prominent actor (whom he would not name) had been a White House guest when he awoke to Lincoln’s voice pleading for help. The actor sat up to see “the lanky form of Lincoln prostrate on the floor in prayer, arms outstretched with fingers digging into the carpet” (Winer and Osborn 1979,135). And President Reagan’s daughter Maureen said she had occasionally seen Lincoln’s ghost—“an aura, sometimes red, sometimes orange”—during the night. So had her husband Dennis Revell (Caroli 1992, 39).

  These examples are typical of many ghost sightings that are due to common “waking dreams,” an experience that occurs when someone is just going to sleep or waking up and perceives ghosts, lights, or other strange imagery (Nickell 1995,41,46). Other apparitions are most likely to be seen when one is tired, daydreaming, performing routine chores, or is otherwise in a reverie or dissociative state (see e.g., Mackenzie 1982). This may help explain such sightings as one by Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, who passed by the Lincoln Bedroom one day and was frightened to see the ghostly president sitting on the bed and pulling on his boots (Alexander 1998,43; Jones 1996, 8).

  Once the notion of a ghost is affixed to a place, almost anything—an unexplained noise, mechanical malfunction, misplaced object, or the like—can be added to the lore. For example, “When FDR’s little Scottish terrier, Falla, would begin barking for no particular reason, some would say that the dog could see the ghost but no one else could” (Cohen 1989, 10). A similar situation was reported by the Reagans. On one of my appearances on The Michael Reagan Show, Mike told me an anecdote about his father and their dog Rex. According to President Reagan, when passing the Lincoln bedroom, Rex would often bark but would refuse to enter the room (Reagan 1998; see also Caroli 1992,39, and Alexander 1998, 45). Mike related the story as more of a novelty than as proof of a supernatural occurrence. (President Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, once asked her father if he had ever seen Lincoln’s ghost. “No,” my father answered—a bit sadly, I thought. “I haven’t seen him yet. But I do believe he’s here” [Davis 1995].) Neither the Bushes nor, as far as they could tell, their dog Millie ever saw the ghost of Lincoln, or indeed any of the other historical specters who are occasionally reported (Alexander 1998,45).

  Not all of the reports of Lincoln’s ghost, however, have featured apparitions. In earlier times, there were frequent reports of sounds that were variously interpreted, by some as heavy footfalls (Cohen 1989, 10; Jones 1996, 8), by others as knockings at the door, with Lincoln’s ghost typically being thought responsible. Not only Queen Wilhelmina but also “Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman all said they heard mysterious rappings, often at their bedroom doors” (Scott and Norman 1991,74). However, ghost hunter Hans Holzer (1995,70) concedes: ”President Truman, a skeptic, decided that the noises had to be due to ’natural’ causes, such as the dangerous settling of the floors. He ordered the White House completely rebuilt, and perhaps this was a good thing: It would surely have collapsed soon after, according to the architect, General Edgerton.”

  For all his greatness, Abraham Lincoln was of course human. Among his foibles were a tendency to melancholy, a sense of fatalism, and a touch of superstition from his frontier upbringing. However, as this investigation demonstrates, neither his life nor his death offers proof of paranormal or supernatural occurrences—not his very human apprehensions of mortality, not his wife’s sad seduction into spiritualism, and not the evidence, even if expressed as anecdotes of ghostly apparitions, that his great legacy lives on.

  References

  Alexander, John. 1998. Ghosts: Washington Revisited. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer.

  Brooks, Noah. 1865. “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. July, 222-26.

  Caroli, Betty Boyd. 1992. Inside the White House. New York: Canopy.

  Cescinsky, Herbert. 1931. The Gentle Art of Faking Furniture. Reprinted NewYork: Dover, 1967,135.

  Cohen, Daniel. 1989. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts. New York: Dorset.

  Davis, Patti. 1995. Angels Don’t Die. New York: HarperCollins, 65.

  Holzer, Hans. 1995. Ghosts, Hauntings and Possessions: The Best of Hans Holzer, ed. by Raymond Buckland. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn.

  Jones, Merlin. 1996. Haunted Places. Boca Raton, Fla.: Globe Communications.

  Lamon, Ward Hill. 1895. Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865. Chicago: A.C. McClurg.

  Lewis, Lloyd. 1973. Myths After Lincoln. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.

  Mackenzie, Andrew. 1982. Hauntings and Apparitions. London: Heinemann.

  Neely, Mark E., Jr. 1982. The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo.

  Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus.

  Reagan, Michael. 1998. The Michael Reagan Show, Oct. 30. Ronan, Margaret. 1974. Strange Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Scholastic.

  Ross, Ishbel. 1962. Grace Coolidge and Her Era. New York: Dodd, Mead.

  Scott, Beth, and Michael Norman. 1991. Haunted Heartland. New York: Dorset.

  St. George, Judith. 1990. The White House: Cornerstone of a Nation. New York: G.P. Putnam’s.

  Suits, Linda Norbut (curator, Lincoln Home, Springfield). 1998. Interview by author.

  Temple, Wayne C. 1995. Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet. Mahomet, 111.: Mayhaven.

  Winer, Richard, and Nancy Osborn. 1979. Haunted Houses. New York: Bantam.

  Chapter 16

  The Rosvell Legend

  More than a half century ago, in the summer of 1947, the modern UFO craze began. Fed by fantasy, faddishness, and even outright fakery, the mythology has become so well nourished that it has begun to spawn bizarre religious cults like Heaven s Gate. In 1997, the Roswell controversy reached out to involve U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond and a former aide, Philip J. Corso, in a dispute over a memoir by Corso for which Thurmond wrote the foreword. The book claims that the U.S. government used alien technology to win the Cold War (“Thurmond” 1997). This controversy only intensified the planned fiftieth-anniversary hoopla July 1-6 at Roswell, New Mexico, the site of ufology’s Holy Grail. From near Roswell, according to a burgeoning legend, in late June or early July of 1947, a crashed alien spacecraft and its humanoid occupants were retrieved and hidden away at a secret government installation.

  The “Roswell Incident,” as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a “flying disc” had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed (Korff 1997, Berlitz and Moore 1980). This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sighting, the famous string of “flying saucers” witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24. Just such sightings had long been anticipated by pulp science-fiction magazines, li
ke Amazing Stories, and by the earlier writings of a crank named Charles Fort. Called “the world s first ufologist,” Fort reported on unidentified objects in the sky that he believed indicated visits from space aliens, reports taken from old newspaper and magazine accounts. Soon after the press release about the Roswell sighting made headlines around the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was announced: the unidentified flying object had really been a weather bal-loon, said officials, and photographs of the “wreckage”—some flexible, silvery-looking material—were distributed to the press.

  In 1949 came the first of the crashed- saucer hoaxes—a science- fiction movie, The Flying Saucer, produced by Mikel Conrad, which con-tained scenes of a purportedly captured spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad actually posed as an FBI agent and swore the claim was true. The following year, writer Frank Scully reported in his book Behind the Flying Saucers that the United States government had in its possession no fewer than three alien spaceships, together with the bodies of their humanoid occupants. Scully was fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum- locating device allegedly based on alien technology (Clark 1993).

  Other crash- retrieval stories followed, as did photographs of space aliens living and dead: one gruesome photo merely portrayed the charred body of the pilot of a small plane, his aviator’s glasses still visible in the picture. In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one of the crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. According to the late claimant’s son, Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story (Carr 1997). In 1977, a pseudonymous “Fritz Werner” claimed to have “assisted in the investiga-tion of a crashed unknown object” in Arizona. This included, he said, his actually seeing the body of one four- foot- tall humanoid occupant that had been placed in a tent. Unfortunately, there were suspicious parallels between the Werner and the Scully stories and other evidence of hoax-ing, including various inconsistencies in Werner’s tale.