We
don't believe in ghosts, Mrs. Phipps."
"Don't
matter if you believe in them or not. If they're there, they're there."
Joan Lowery Nixon,
The Haunting
A
skeptic is someone who hasn't had an experience yet. Jason Hawes
According
to the Gallup Poll News Service, about 32 percent of Americans believe in
ghosts, haunted houses, ghosts, communication with the dead and evil
witches. So it comes almost as no
surprise that the national house of the people, the White House, and our
capitol, would be seeped in ghost tales.
Indeed,
Washington DC and the surrounding area are the site of a vast number of
reportedly haunted locations ranging from battle fields to dueling ground and
assassinations.
Of
all these places, the White House is said to be the most haunted location of
them all. In fact, the White House is on
the list of Time Magazine’s Top Ten Haunted Places, and on the New York Daily
News List of the Most Haunted Places on Earth.
Yet
the White House has never been investigated by a paranormal group and it’s
highly unlikely that it ever will be.
(Originally, the White house was known as The Presidential Palace. President Theodore Roosevelt would officially
call it the White House in 1901, although the name had been informally used
before.) But still the lists of important and reliable people who have reported
unexplainable footsteps, knocks, slamming doors, barking dogs, and cold chills
in the White House is impressive.
President Harry Truman once wrote to his wife:
‘I sit here in this old house, all the while listening to the ghosts walk up
and down the hallway. At 4 o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on
my bedroom door. No one there. Damned place is haunted, sure as shootin’’
President
Eisenhower’s no-nonsense press secretary James Hagerty (Below) said that he
always sensed presence of Lincoln’s Ghost walking the White House halls and
Bill Clinton’s press secretary, Mike McCurry believed the house is haunted
overall.
Former
first lady Hilary Clinton said ‘There is something about the house at night
that you just feel like you are summoning up the spirits of all the people who
have lived there and worked there and walked through the halls there…..It’s
neat, it can be a little creepy. You
know, they think there’s a ghost there. It is a big old house and when the
lights are out it is dark and quiet and any movement at all catches your
attention.’
Most
recently, First Lady Michelle Obama said that her husband was awakened from a
sound sleep in the middle of the night after hearing what she called strange
sounds in the hall. She also said that
family members and friends had reported the unusual sensation of someone or
something gnawing or chewing on their feet.
I
first heard most of these stories when I moved here four decades ago. I came
here as a young man for the opportunities, but the magic of the city is what
has keep me here so very long. I love this town, this picturesque place drenched
in history, I truly do. I love the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, the buzz
of M street and the peaceful calm of the dignified upper northwest and all the
other various neighborhoods that each have their own distinct feel and charm
One
of the wonderful things about DC is that it’s all so walkable and I believe I
have hoofed it through most of this cities four quarters, each of which holds
its own special history inside the grander history of our nation’s capital. And
as a history buff, I’ve regaled in every detail and every now and then those
details include ghost stories, some are widely known others are local lore. As
an example, most of us have heard about the spirits that supposedly walk the
halls of the Capitol Building and the White House, but few known of the ghosts
that are said to haunt the old dueling grounds in Bladensburg Maryland, just
outside Washington DC.
But, soft; behold! Lo, where it comes again!
I'll cross it, though it blast me.—Stay,
illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me...
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Abigail
Adams (November 22, 1744 – October 28, 1818) was the wife of John Adams, (They
were third cousins and had known each other since childhood) the second
President of the United States and the first to live in the White House (George
Washington selected the site, oversaw construction of the executive mansion but
never lived in there.)
Mrs.
Adams, the second First Lady of America (Thomas Jefferson never married) was
also the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States.
Abigail Adams died on October 28, 1818, of typhoid fever at age 73. (Two weeks
shy of her 74th birthday.) Her last words were, "Do not grieve, my friend,
my dearest friend. I am ready to
go. And John, it will not be
long."
She
was buried beside her husband in a crypt in the United First Parish Church (AKA
“The Church of the Presidents”) in Quincy, Massachusetts, (below) a very long
way from the White House. However, her spirit is still seen there.
She was reported to have been seen by White
House staffers shortly after her death, as an aberration, her arms extended as
if she were still carrying laundry into the cavernous East Room. (There was no
furniture in the East Room at the time) where water was brought in by jugs (The
White House would not having running water until 1834) to be used for washing
and bathing.
The
ghost was said to be accompanied by the smell of soap or damp clothing. (Reportedly Abigail hung the family's laundry
up to dry in the East Room during inclement weather) In more recent times, the Household staff in
the Taft administration reported that they observed Abigail walking through
walls.
THE BLACK CAT
The legend of the Black Cat (AKA the Demon
Cat) is shared by the White House and Capitol Building, a few blocks away. At
the White House, the Black Cat is seen in the basement before various tragic
events. But up in the Capitol, it
apparently roams the halls at will. It should be noted that back in the 19th
century, both buildings employed cats to check the rat population, which is
numerous in Washington.
Supposedly
(No actual report exists) a Capital Building Policeman (The Capital has its own
police force, as does the US Supreme Court and the local DC federally managed
park system) said he saw the cat in the very early 19th century and another was
said to have shot at it in 1862. “It seemed to grow” he said “as I looked at
it. When I shot at the critter, it jumped right over my head”
The
cat sightings in both the White House and Capitol Building tend to follow a
national tragedy. A White House guard
claimed to have seen just before the Lincoln assassination, a week before the
stock market crash of 1929 and also reportedly seen days before the
assassination of JFK.
The last semi-official sighting of the Demon Cat was in
1940.
Interestingly
enough, a few block away from the White House sits the Octagon House, which is
said to be both cursed and haunted.
Legend says that Betty Taylor, the married niece of the first owner of
the house, tripped and fell to her death by a black cat as she raced down the
houses circular stairs. She was running in the dark to greet her lover who
entered the property by a secret passage that opened on the bank of the Potomac
(The River has since been pushed back, but at one time it did run close to the
house)
THE BRITISH SOLDIER
It seems that the White House is haunted. This
was a most interesting piece of news to me, for it seemed to me to be the only
thing wanting to make the White House the most interesting spot in the United
States. . . . The ghost, it seems, is a young boy¾ from its description, I
should think about fourteen or fifteen years old. The housekeeper, a spooky
little person herself, informs me that he has been felt more often than he has
been seen, but when I remonstrated with her that ghosts have not the sense of
touch, at least those self-respecting ghosts of which I have heard, she
insisted that it was this manifestation of the Thing which caused such fright
among the servants. Archibald Butt to Clara Butt, July 26, 1911, Taft and
Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide, Vol. 2
On
August 19, 1814, during the War of 1812, over 4,500 British soldiers landed at
Benedict, Maryland, on the shores of the Patuxent River and marched towards
Washington. Their mission was to capture our capitol city and take revenge for
the burning of the English run capitol in Canada a year earlier by American
forces.
It
what remains one of the worst pieces of advice ever given to a President,
Secretary of War John Armstrong said that Washington was safe and didn’t need
military protection because the British were focused on Baltimore. In fact, as
British ships sailed up Chesapeake Bay toward Washington, Armstrong scoffed at
his generals concerns "What the devil will they do here?" Armstrong
said. "No! No! Baltimore is the place, sir. That is of so much more
consequence."
Assured
the city was safe, Madison wrote to his wife: "My dearest, I have passed
among the troops who are in high spirits ... the last and probably best
information is that [the enemy] are not very strong ... they are not in a
condition to strike at Washington."
After
the destruction of Washington, Madison forced Armstrong to resign in September
1814. The administration had had enough of him. He had already locked horns
with George Washington when Washington was the commander in chief and he had
angered his generals when he insisted that it was the duty of the Secretary of
War to direct soldiers in the field, a belief that pushed Maj. Gen. William
Henry Harrison to resign due to Armstrong's disregard for chain-of-command
procedure. Oddly enough, Armstrong replaced Harrison (below) with militia general
Andrew Jackson which was a stroke of genius, but he did so without asking for
presidential approval, angering Madison and earning himself a formal reprimand.
Arriving
in the city, the British sent a party of men under a white flag of truce to
Capitol Hill to come to terms, but they were attacked by snipers hiding in a
house at the corners of Maryland,
Constitution, and Second Street NE. It
was the only resistance the soldiers met within the city. The English responded
by setting the house afire, tossing the white flag and marching into the city
proper under the British flag.
Arriving to the top of Capitol Hill, the
troops set fire to the partially completed the Senate and House of
Representatives building there and set fire to what was the miniscule Library
of Congress inside the Senate building. However the library
was replaced through Thomas Jefferson who, in 1815, sold his personal library
of more than 6,487 volumes to the government to restock the Library of Congress
for $23,950, a staggering amount of money for the time. (Prior to the fire the
library held about 3,000 volumes). But the collection was incredible. It had
taken Jefferson 50 years to accumulate the wide variety of books that included
volumes in foreign languages, philosophy, science, literature and cookbooks.
"I
do not know” Said Jefferson “that it contains any branch of science which
Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no
subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to
refer." Oddly enough, a second fire
on Christmas Eve of 1851 destroyed nearly two thirds of the 6,487 volumes Congress
had purchased from Jefferson.
The
English intended to capture the supplies of hundreds of magazines of cannon and
gun powder stored at the vast Washington Navy Yard (Pictured below) but the
Americans had already set it afire rather than have the English capture
it.
The English sent two hundred men to secure a
fort on Greenleaf's Point. (Now Fort McNair, a military post in Southwest
Washington, which is said to be haunted by the ghosts of the Lincoln
conspirators who were hung there) but the fort had already been destroyed by
the Americans, however, for some reason, they had left behind 150 barrels of
gunpowder.
The
British arrived, found the powder and tried to destroy it by dropping the
barrels into a well, the powder ignited killing about thirty men and maiming
many others in the explosion that followed.
The
US Patent Office was saved from destruction by the Superintendent of Patents,
Dr. William Thornton who convinced the
British of the importance of its preservation. (Dr. William Thornton was an interesting guy.
For starters, he was a trained architect. Rather he was a trained medical
doctor who was an amateur architect who designed the U.S. Capitol after winning
a contest sponsored by President George Washington in 1793. Thornton was born
in the British West Indies and became an American citizen in 1787 and moved to
Washington in 1794. In 1802 President Jefferson appointed him head of the
Patent Office, an office he held until his death in 1828.)
Then the troops marched down Pennsylvania
Avenue toward the White House where a gallant First Lady, Dolley Madison
remained behind, alone. President James
Madison had left the White House on August 22 to meet with his generals on the
battlefield and his cabinet had already fled the city and saved the nation’s
valuables from the British. (Silverware, books, clocks, curtains) However it is not true that she removed
Gilbert Stuart's full-length portrait of George Washington. (The portrait was
actually a copy of Gilbert Stuart's original)
James Madison's personal servant, the slave
Paul Jennings (Below), was an eyewitness (He was 15 years old at the time) to
the event and wrote later “It has often
been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she
cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington and carried it
off. She had no time for doing it. It
would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver
in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off and
were expected any moment.”
Jennings, a child was a companion to Dolley's
son Payne Todd, was born into slavery at Montpelier in 1799; his mother was
owned by the Madison’s. She reportedly told Jennings that his father was
Benjamin Jennings, an English trader. Jennings became James Madison body
servant in the White House. After the White House years Jennings continued to
serve as Madison’s is valet for the rest of the president's life. After the
President’s death, Dolly sold Jennings to an insurance agent for $200 in 1846.
Six months later, Senator Daniel Webster bought Jennings from the new owner for
$120 and gave Jennings his freedom. In 1848, Jennings helped plan a mass escape
of 77 slaves from Washington, DC on the schooner Pearl, one of largest slave
escape attempt in US history.
The White House in
ruins. After the 1812 burning, the White
House was whitewashed to cover the smoke stains. Originally light gray in color, the
building’s exterior was painted white during the restoration to cover the smoke
stain.
The heroes of the White House burning were
John Susé, Frenchman and doorkeeper, and a man named Magraw [McGraw], the
President's gardener. They saved
Washington’s portrait (The portrait was screwed to the wall) along with large
silver urns, packed it aboard a wagon and sent if off to Virginia. Senior clerk
Stephen Pleasonton saved the Declaration of Independence by hiding it in a
gristmill near Georgetown.
Before the English arrived in DC, Secretary of
State James Monroe ordered Pleasonton to save the books and papers of the State
Department which were held at the White House. Pleasonton filled several coarse
linen bags with the Department's records including the still-unpublished secret
journals of Congress, the commission and correspondence of George Washington,
the Articles of Confederation, the United States Constitution, and all the
treaties, laws, and correspondence of the Department made since 1789. He was
about to leave to hid the papers at the old a grist mill two miles beyond
Georgetown when he noticed the Declaration of Independence had been forgotten
and was still hanging in its frame on the wall, and took that as well.
After
the White House occupants had gone, Admiral Cockburn (below) made his way to the White
House after his officers arrived and began taking souvenirs including the first
couple’s personal belongings and the admiral was able to take one of President
Madison's hats, and a cushion from Dolley Madison's chair. He then issued an order for his troops to
drink Madison's wine and helped themselves to food.
British soldier George Gleig wrote “[H]aving
satisfied their appetites … and partaken pretty freely of the wines, they
finished by setting fire to the house which had so liberally entertained them.
… Of the Senate house, the President's palace, the barracks, the dockyard,
etc., nothing could be seen except heaps of smoking ruins.”
They
set fire to the White House (Then called the Presidents House) by tossing
torches through the windows and adding fuel to the fire to ensure that it would
keep burning and reports had it that the thick black smoke could be seen as far
away as Baltimore (Which is very doubtful) and the Patuxent River (Which is
likely). They also set fire to the adjacent Treasury Department building.
Washington
lay in ruins. American soldiers,
government officials, and residents fled the city. The White House, the Capitol, and many other
public buildings and residences were burning and the next day, August 25,
Washington was still burning.
Suddenly,
in the early afternoon, the sky darkened, lightening flashed, loud thunder
could be heard and the winds swept up into what one resident called “a frightening roar.”
It
was a tornado. On the one hand, the city, which was made mostly of wood, was
saved from a rapidly expanding fire by the storm but on the other hand, the
tornado probably did more damage to the city than it stopped. Buildings were
lifted into the air and tossed a block away. Flying debris killed several
English soldiers and one gust made off with several cannons. Hundreds of
English soldiers laid face down in the streets as the storm passed over them
and one account describes how a British officer on horseback did not dismount
and the winds slammed both horse and rider violently to the ground.
It
ended after two hours and the heavy rain that followed put out most of the
flames and prevented Washington from burning to the ground. The British
regrouped on Capitol Hill and marched out of the city that night.
As the English left the city, Admiral Cockburn
asked a local woman, “Great God, Madam! Is this the kind of storm to which you
are accustomed in this infernal country?”
The
lady answered, “No, Sir, this is a special interposition of Providence to drive
our enemies from our city.”
“Not
so Madam.” The Admiral answered, “It is rather to aid your enemies in the
destruction of your city.”
Hours
later, the British forces left Washington and returned to their ships on the
Patuxent River but the journey back to their ships was a difficult one. Downed
trees on the roadway slowed their return and the war ships they arrived on had
been badly damaged in the storm. Still, the English stopped their ships in Old
Town Alexandria long enough to loot it.
(A separate British force had already captured Alexandria, The mayor of
Alexandria made a deal and the British refrained from burning the town.)
President
Madison and Dolly returned to Washington three days later, but the White House
was made unlivable by the fire.
President Madison served the rest of his term residing at the Octagon
House. It was not until 1817 that newly elected president James Monroe moved
back into the reconstructed building.
After the attack, Congress was determined to
relocate the nation's capital north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Fearful that the capitol would be moved to
Philadelphia, local Washington businessmen financed the construction of the Old
Brick Capitol, (Mayor Thomas Corcoran offered Georgetown College as a temporary
home for Congress.) where Congress met while the Capitol was reconstructed from
1815 to 1819.
For
many decades the White House has had reports that the ghost of a British soldier
dressed in a uniform from the War of 1812 and carrying a torch haunts the
executive mansion. (He has also been seen on the front lawn) Some think the
soldier is one of those who burned the White House, or accidently killed while
burning down the White House or who lost his life the following tornado. He is
the only malicious spirit who haunts the White House. In 1953, one couple staying in a second-floor
bedroom said the ghost tried to set fire to their bed with a flaming torch.
DAVID BURNS
The White House is also said to be visited by
the spirit of Mr. David Burns who owned the ground on which the White House and
all of the federal park surrounding it, stand son today. Burns sold the land to
the government in May 1791, but not without a struggle.
The
Burns (Actually spelled as Burnes) family owned all of what is today west
Washington all the way from Georgetown to Capitol Hill, about 700 acres in all,
a small farm holding by standards of his day.
(By comparison, the George Washington estate stretched from Arlington to
where the old Naval Observatory was in Georgetown) The other major landowners in the city were
Daniel Carroll, of the fabulous Carroll family, Samuel Davidson and Notley
Young. (Who was married to a Carroll).
Young owned what is today the neighborhood of
Near Northwest, the area bounded by North Capitol Street to the west, Florida
Avenue to the north, F Street to the south, and 15th Street to the east. The
area was dubbed Youngsborough.
Young gave parts of the land to the Federal
government in exchange for a promise that Congress would divide the land into
lots and return half of those lots to the original landowners. Young, it should
be noted, was a Roman Catholic at a time when it was difficult to be a Roman
Catholic in America and his estate, which sat on a high river bank on what is
now G Street SE between Ninth and Tenth streets was a refugee for the city’s
small Catholic population.
In
an odd twist of fate, Young was buried on the grounds of his estate. As the city grew, his land was taken over by
the city and a well-meaning Mayor Robert Brent (Below) had Young’s remains
reinterred in the Carroll burial ground at St. John's on Rock Creek. However no
one bothered to mark the exact location of the grave and its whereabouts are
now lost forever.
Burns (above) was described by those who knew him as
“Very bigoted” and “choleric”, a man who willfully disagreed with everyone and
who sought out an argument. He was also
opposed to selling his lands for the new executive mansion and once
during one of several meeting that were held between him, General Washington
and Washington’s staff, Burns is said to have remarked to the general “I
suppose Mr. Washington that you assume people here are going to take every
grist from you as poor grain. But what would you have been if you had not
married the widow Custis?” referring to the fact that George Washington came
from proud but modest stock and had married the enormously wealthy Mrs. Custis.
Washington, known for his ability not to become riled, lost his temper and
stormed out of the house, never to return and refusing to meet with Burns
again, calling him “That obstinate Mr. Burns”
Actually,
all that Burns wanted was a fair price for his land, which was now in demand by
powerful and wealthy people. Those same people who had threatened him with
eminent domain if he didn’t sell at a price they wanted for all of his land, not just parts of it as the story
is so often told.
Burns
lived in a small wood framed, whitewashed cottage on what is today 7th Street
NW (Where the Pan American Union Building stands today) the only sign of his
wealth being that it was equipped with two chimneys. The rudely-fashioned
structure had two rooms on the ground floor and was said to be only slightly
better than a slave’s cabin.
Burns
only son, John had died as a teenager (1772-1795) and several years later and
his wife (Anne Wight Burnes) died shortly afterwards. His only family was his
daughter, Maria, (Some record the name as having been Marcia, 1782-1832) who
was described by many as “lovely”. Burns
placed his daughter with a cultivated Baltimore family so she could receive
social breeding and literary training.
She returned to live with her father in 1801 when she was 19-years-old
in 1801.
Maria Burns
Maria
stood to inherit a fortune from her father’s estate. In 1802 she married a
dashing young Congressman named from New York named John Peter Van Ness (for
whom Van Ness Street NW, between Wisconsin Avenue and River Road). Van Ness, a
lawyer with his own Knickerbocker-Dutch fortune, was a disciple of the popular
Arron Burr. He would go on to be a Major in the District Militia, bank owner
and Mayor of Washington.
When
David Burns died he left his daughter his entire and very substantial estate
telling her from his death bed “Marcia, you have been a good daughter; you'll
now be the richest girl in America." She was said to be the richest woman
in America at the time of the inheritance. (She signed all of her wealth over
to Van Ness as was the custom of the day)
Since
his death, Burns ghost has been seen in the Oval Office when a reporter told a
security guard during the Truman administration that, while standing in the
Yellow Oval Room, he heard a whisper which said, "I'm Mr. Burns."
Around
that same time, a White House guard reported that he heard a voice call out
from the attic above the Oval Office “I’m Mr. Burns” several times. The guard
assumed that he was hearing the voice of Truman’s Secretary of State, James
Byrnes (Below) but learned that Byrnes was out of the country at the time.
Prior
to that, FDR’s valet, Cesar Carrera, heard a voice as he stood in the Yellow
Oval Room. When he turned to see who it was, the voice said, “I’m Mr. Burns.”
Although Mr. Burns has not been heard of since the 1940s, the old man would
take some pride in the fact that his is the oldest ghost to haunt of the White
House. After Burns death, Maria and John
Van Ness House constructed their own estate between 1813 and 1816.
A
behemoth Greek revival home bounded by C Street, Constitution Avenue, 17th
Street, and 18th Street and designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who was then
the superintendent of government buildings.
Latrobe one of the architects of the Capitol,
spent a small fortune trying to make it the finest private residence in North
America. A brick wall enclosed the
ground that were an array of trees, flowers, fountains and statuary. The couple
had David Burns cottage (Below) moved to the property, Marcia would never allow
it to be torn down.
Their daughter Ann
held her wedding to South Carolinian Arthur Middleton was held there. Middleton was the son of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence. Ann died a
year later giving birth to a stillborn baby and Marcia, who was close friends
with Dolly Madison, soon became something of a recluse and retreated into
religion. She commissioned the city
orphanage in her daughter’s memory. She spent her years as a philanthropist and
was a beloved and influential figure in the city until her death, at age 50 in
a cholera epidemic. She was given a
massive public funeral, the only woman, up to that time, to be given such an
honor.
The sculptor Horatio Greenough wrote this
tribute to her;
Mid rank and wealth and worldly pride.
From every snare she turned aside.
She sought the low, the humble shed.
Where gaunt disease and famine tread;
And from that time, in youthful pride.
She stood Van Ness's blooming bride.
No day her blameless head o'er past
But saw her dearer than the last.
The Van Ness Mausoleum was fashioned after the
Temple of Vesta as a tribute to Marcia Burnes Van Ness, by her husband, John
Peter. George Hadfield designed the
mausoleum and the cost to build it was $30,000 in 1824. It was originally set at the old Burnes
graveyard, on Square 375, 9th & 10th, G & H Streets, Northwest. It was said that after Marcia died that Van
Ness became obsessed with building the mausoleum and spent most of his free
time there. It can be found today on a
knoll in Oak Hill Cemetery.
The
great Van Ness mansion started to crumble as John Van Ness withdrew from the
world after his wives and daughter’s deaths and he, like his wife before him,
become a recluse. Rumors spread that the
house staff quick after run in with ghosts and that many of the servants who
stayed refused to enter certain rooms in the mansion because they were so
haunted. There were reports of footsteps coming from empty rooms and laughter
that turned to screams of agony, said to be from the spirit of young Ann as she
died. Several people claimed that the apparition of Marcia Van Ness
materialized in the upstairs hallway and roamed the house at will.
Van Ness
John Van Ness outlived her by 16 years and
died on March 7, 1846, at the age of 76. The couple is buried in a private mausoleum
at Oak Hill Cemetery. Hundreds of Washingtonians lined the route to see their
Mayor off and to watch bier drawn by six white horses that had been so
cherished by Van Ness, carry his coffin to the family mausoleum.
Those
horses were later sold during the settlement of Van Ness’s estate and there was
constant talk of demolishing the now dilapidated Van Ness Mansion and the
reports of its haunting increased.
The
house became the residence of a man named Thomas Green. Years later Green and
his wife were arrested after the Lincoln assassination because it was rumored
that they had been involved in Booth’s original plot to kidnap Lincoln and hold
him captive for a few days in the mansion’s wine cellar before spiriting him into
Confederate territory. The Greens were
found innocent, released, and then fled the city forever. Over the next fifty
years the property was used as a German beer garden, florist's nursery,
headquarters of the city street cleaners, and Columbia Athletic Club.
Columbian College, (Now George Washington
University) purchased the property in 1903 for $161,000 and planned to build a
new campus on the site but were voted down by alumni who said the property was
unhealthy because it was near marsh on what was then B Street and is now
Constitution Avenue. The university sold
the property in 1907 for $200,000 to the State Department which tore down the
estate building in 1908 to build the Pan American Union Building.
Over the years there were reports by several
about people who claimed to have seen, six headless white horses galloping
around the house. In the 1980s, a man
ran his car off the road on Rock Creek Park claiming that as his car passed by
Oak Hill Cemetery, he was distracted by the sight of six headless white horses
up on the hill by the Van Ness Mausoleum. The legend is that on the anniversary
John Van Ness’s death, that his favorite troop of six white horses make a
midnight run around the old mansion.
CLOSING DOORS
Gary J.
Walters was appointed White House Chief Usher in 1986. According to Walters, “I
was standing at the state floor of the White House adjacent to the staircase
that comes up from the ground floor. The police officers and I felt a cool rush
of air pass between us and then two doors that stand open closed by themselves.
I have never seen these doors move before without somebody specifically closing
them by hand. It was quite remarkable.” Other staff member report that White
House doors throughout the building close by themselves.
FRANCIS FOLSOM CLEVELAND
First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland,
(1864-1947) married to President Grover Cleveland, a life-long bachelor, in the
White House's Blue Room in 1886. She was 21 years old student at Wells College
at the time, the youngest First Lady in American history. He was 49 and executor of her father’s
estate. (Who died in a carriage accident on July 23, 1875, without having
written a Will. The court appointed Cleveland administrator of his estate.)
Cleveland had more or less supervised Frances upbringing since she was 11 years
old.
Cleveland remains the only President to be
married in the White House and the second President to be married while serving
in office. The couple were wildly popular with the American people and by all
reports, Francis was aid to be a warm and interesting person of great beauty.
The couple eventually had five children.
After
her husband's death in 1908, Frances Cleveland remarried in 1913 to Thomas J.
Preston, Jr., a professor of archeology at Wells College. She was the first presidential widow to
remarry. Francis died in Baltimore on
October 29, 1947, and was buried in Princeton with her first husband, President
Grover Cleveland.
That
same year, 1947, her ghost was reported to have appeared in the Blue Room
(Above, in about 1910) where she married sixty-one years before. She is still
reported to haunt the room and visitors tell of sensing “an overpowering
presence” when in the room alone.
FOOTSTEPS
The night bodyguard to President Benjamin
Harrison reported hearing near constant footsteps in the hall where he was
posted and assumed it was spirit of Abe Lincoln pacing the floor, back and
forth. He was said to have grown so
weary of the sound that he attended a séance to ask President Lincoln to stop.
The noises were heard by many others over the year but they are said to have
stopped after the extensive repairs were done to the second floor of the White
House in 1952.
Harrison
died only three weeks after his inauguration when he caught a common cold which
developed into Pneumonia and then pleurisy. His last words, spoken to his Vice
President, John Tyler were, “Sir, I wish you to understand the true principles
of the government. I wish them carried out. I ask nothing more.”
Harrison’s
death started the legend of the “curse of the Shawnee Prophet”. The curse
(Which is also called The Curse of Tippecanoe) derives from the battle of
Tippecanoe in 1811 while Harrison was governor of the Indiana Territory. Apparently during the negotiation of the 1809
Treaty of Fort Wayne with Native Americans, Harrison used some underhanded
tactics to cede enormous tracks of land from the Indian nations to the U.S.
government.
The terms brought about the battle of
Tippecanoe (Above) in which the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother rose up
against the westward expansion of the United States. It was Harrison’s
leadership of the US troops during the battle that brought him national fame as
a war hero. However, Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, known as the Prophet, set
a curse against Harrison and all others who were elected president during years
with the same end number as Harrison. (He was elected in 1840)
For
the next 120 years, presidents elected during years ending in a zero (occurring
every 20 years) died while serving in office, from Harrison to John F. Kennedy
and including Ronald Reagan, (elected in 1980) who was shot but survived and
George W. Bush (2000) who survived an attempt on his life unharmed. However,
the only president who died in office without being elected in a
"cursed" year was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 and died in
1850.
Harrison
is said to haunt the White House attic where his ghost has been seen tossing
about papers and boxes as if he was looking for something very specific. Harrison’s guard brush with the afterworld was
not the only a séance was related to the White House. President Lincoln, no
doubt in a move to appease his somewhat erratic wife, attended several séance
in the White House and in his book The Choice, Bob Woodward describes a 1995, a
séance was held by psychic Jean Houston (Below) in the White House solarium for the
benefit of Hillary Clinton. According to
the book, Hillary, while in a deep trance, channeled the spirits of Eleanor
Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi. Before that, First Lady Nancy Reagan asked her
astrologer, Joan Quigley, to arrange an attempt to communicate with the
otherworld through the so-called White House portal.
Nancy
Reagan called Quigley in 1981 after John Hinckley's attempted assassination of
the president and asked Quigley if she could have foreseen the assassination
attempt. Quigley said she could have, and Nancy then had her stay on as the
White House astrologer in secret until that secret was released in 1988 by
former chief of staff Donald Regan.
Explaining
why she kept Quigley on, the First Lady wrote “Very few people can understand
what it's like to have your husband shot at and almost die, and then have him
exposed all the time to enormous crowds, tens of thousands of people, any one
of whom might be a lunatic with a gun... I was doing everything I could think
of to protect my husband and keep him alive."
Quigley
later wrote, "Not since the days of the Roman emperors—and never in the
history of the United States Presidency—has an astrologer played such a
significant role in the nation's affairs of State."
ANDREW JACKSON
" … all the while listening to the ghosts
walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors
pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson]
and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt]." President Harry Truman in a 1945 letter to his wife,
Lillian
Rogers Parks was a one-time society hairdresser who had used her client
connections to get the White House job as a seamstress and Executive maid from
the beginning of the Hoover Administration in 1929 to the end of the Eisenhower
years. She had been a familiar figure at the White House since she was a little
girl. Her mother, Maggie Rogers, was part of the White House staff at the start
of the Taft Administration and often took her daughter to work with her.
Parks,
who lived to age 100, wrote ''My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House.''
created an immediate sensation when it was published in 1961 and was on The New
York Times best-seller list for 26 weeks. The book also became the basis of a
nine-part NBC miniseries in 1979. But its success so alarmed the incoming First
Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, that she ordered all White House domestic employees
to sign a pledge not to write about their White House experiences. (Mrs. Kennedy's secretary, Mary Gallagher, in photo below was assigned to the task of collecting the signatures but neglected to sign
one, herself, and eventually wrote her own tell-all, ''My Boss,'' in 1969.)
In
her book, Park told of working in the Rose Bedroom (the modern Queen's Suite)
to prepare it for a visit from Queen Elizabeth, when she gradually became aware
of a cold presence standing behind her. Frightened, she rushed out of the room
not looking once behind her. It was three years before she could bring herself
to enter the room again.
In that same room, President Andrew Jackson is
said to be seen lying on the Queens' Bedroom and his would rough laugh has been
heard in the White House since the beginning of the 1860s.
First
Lady press secretary Liz Carpenter heard the laugh and swore it was Jackson's,
and Mary Todd Lincoln (Who had some mental health issues) claimed to have heard
the stomping and swearing of an invisible presence which she claimed was the
uncouth Jackson.
Mary
Todd Lincoln (Below) was certain that President Jackson was caring for her
young son Willie in the afterlife. In the 1940s, Katurah Brooks, a maid, said
that she often heard laughter coming from the Queen's Suite.
Mary also once remarked that she heard
President Thomas Jefferson playing his violin in the Yellow Oval Room (below) and remarked “My, my, how that Mr. Jefferson does play that violin.” However, she was the only person who heard
the sounds.
LINCOLNS PREMONITION OF HIS OWN DEATH
Prodded by Mrs. Lincoln to continue, Lincoln
said “about ten days ago" he had gone to bed late after he had stayed up
"waiting for important dispatches from the front." As he began to
dream, he experienced "a death-like stillness about me."
Hearing the sounds of subdued sobs, Lincoln
walked downstairs in search of the "mournful sounds of distress," but
encountered no living person until he entered the East Room, (Below) where he found
"a sickening surprise": a covered corpse resting on a catafalque,
surrounded by soldiers, with mourners gazing at the body and weeping.
"'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!'" Lincoln then
stated that he awoke soon after in response to a "loud burst of grief from
the crowd," did not sleep again that night due to the dream, and
"have been strangely annoyed by it since."
William
H. Crook was Lincoln's primary bodyguards in 1865. Crook, and the other
security detail in the White House, were members of the Washington DC police
force and were brought into the Executive mansion to curb the astounding lack
of protection around the president.
"The entrance doors and all the doors on the Pennsylvania side of
the mansion were open at all hours of the day and, often, very late into the
evening." Crook wrote. In 1864, the White House was given four
around-the-clock bodyguards including Crook.
On
April 14, 1865, the night Lincoln was killed, Crook began his shift at 8 AM and
was supposed to have been relieved by John Frederick Parker at 4 PM, but Parker
was several hours late. Crook was a joke as a policeman. During his short tine
as an officer, (The DC police department came into being in 1861) Parker was
charged with dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer several
times for being drunk on duty, sleeping on streetcars while at work, and
visiting a brothel. Yet remarkably, he was never fired and actually assigned to
the White House. It was Parker (In a badly blurred police photo on right above)
who attended Fords Theater (Below) with Lincoln and was assigned to guard the
entrance to the President's box.
Police
sketch of the door where Parker was supposed to be sitting at.
Parker stayed at
his post for only a short time and then went to a nearby tavern with Lincoln's
footman and coachman and Lincoln was shot moments later.
Parker
was charged with neglect of duty, but the complaint was dismissed and was still
assigned to work security at the White House. While waiting for Parker to
arrive Lincoln had told Crook that he had been having dreams of himself being
assassinated for three straight nights. Crook tried to persuade Lincoln not to
attend the theater. As Lincoln left for the theater, he turned to Crook and
said "Goodbye, Crook." Before, Lincoln had always said, "Good
night, Crook." Crook later recalled: "It was the first time that he
neglected to say, ‘Good Night’ to me and it was the only time that he ever said
‘Good-bye’. I thought of it at that moment and, a few hours later, when the
news flashed over Washington that he had been shot, his last words were so
burned into my being that they can never be forgotten."
Crook
stayed on at the White House as a guard for Andrew Johnson and it was Crook who
brought the news to the President that he had been acquitted in his impeachment
trial in May 1868. Ulysses S. Grant later appointed Crook "Executive Clerk
of the President of the United States" in 1870, and dispersing agent in
1877.
Lincoln’s driver and Parkers drinking companion (above) and
the Star Saloon where they drank as Lincoln was killed.
ABE LINCOLN’S GHOST
President Abe Lincoln is by far the most seen
and heard ghost to haunt the White House. The president’s ghost is most often
seen, befittingly, in the Lincoln bedroom, but Lincoln never slept in that
room. Rather, he used it as a Cabinet room and signed the Emancipation
Proclamation there.
One
of the first reports of “Sensing” Lincoln’s ghost roaming the White House halls
came from the very practical Theodore Roosevelt, (Above) who lived in the White
House from 1901 to 1909.
First Lady Grace Coolidge, wife of President
Calvin Coolidge, was the first to claim to have seen Lincoln's ghost. She insisted that she saw Lincoln looking
towards the Potomac River from the Oval Office.
(During Lincoln’s administration the Potomac ran much closer to the
White House than it does today) The no-nonsense Queen Wilhelmina (Below) of the
Netherlands visited the United States for about two week in June of 1942 as
guest of the U.S. government.
While
in Washington, she addressed the U.S. Congress (The first queen to do so) and
spent a night at the White House, staying in the Lincoln bedroom. After she had retired for the evening and was
soundly asleep, the Queen awoke after hearing a persistent knocking on her
door. Thinking that there might be news
of her war torn homeland, she stepped from the bed, opened the door, saw before
her President Abe Lincoln, and promptly fainted.
Around
that same time, long time White House employee Lillian Rogers Parks said that
while working in a small room near the Lincoln bedroom when she heard footsteps
coming from the Lincoln room and that she kept turning expecting to see someone
come near her, but no one ever did.
Roosevelt’s
secretary, Mary Eben, said she was saw Lincoln laying on his bed (another
version says she saw the President pulling on
his boots in the bedroom) and
White House guest Carl Sandburg claimed to have "sensed" Lincoln do
the same as well.
Eleanor
Roosevelt said that she sensed Lincoln’s presence repeatedly throughout the
White House and remarked that she always had the feeling of being watched when
she worked in her very busy office.
FDR’s dog, Fala, would sometimes bark at an empty chair.
A
naked Winston Churchill was waddling about in the Lincoln bedroom when he saw
Lincoln’s ghost. There are two versions of the story. In the first version
there was knock on the. The Prime Minster opened the door and purportedly saw
the ghost of Abraham Lincoln standing there. Churchill slammed the door shut, demanded to
be moved to another room across the hall and vowed to never enter the Lincoln
bedroom again.
In
the second version of the same sighting, Churchill had just stepped out of a
bath and was enjoying a cigar and a glass of scotch when Lincoln appeared,
standing by the fireplace. The pair are said to have started at each other for
some time before the ghost faded away.
One
night at 3 AM, President Harry Truman was awaken by a series of loud raps on
his door. He stepped out of bed, opened
the door and found no one but publicly attributed the knock to Abe
Lincoln. The President’s daughter,
Margaret said she heard also heard a loud knocking on her door in the White
House and also believed it was Lincoln.
Gerald
Ford's daughter Susan Ford refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom and Ronald
Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, insisted that she saw Lincoln in the Lincoln
Bedroom while staying there during her father’s administration.
I'm
not kidding” she said “We've really seen it. When I told my parents what I saw
they looked at me a little weirdly."
Maureen
said that the spirit appeared to her in the early morning hours as a red and
sometimes orange aura. Years later,
First Lady Nancy Reagan said that the family dog, Rex, would often stand
outside the Lincoln Bedroom door and bark loudly but refused to go in.
The
last reported sighting of Lincoln’s ghost came in the early 1980s when the
White House operations foreman, Tony Savoy, came into the White House and saw
Lincoln sitting in a chair at the top of some stairs.
THE
GHOST OF WILLIE LINCOLN
William
Wallace "Willie" Lincoln was the third son of Abraham Lincoln and
Mary Todd Lincoln who died in the White House at the age of 11 on February 20,
1862. The cause of death was more than probably was typhoid fever developed
from drinking Washington’s contaminated water sometime in late January of 1862.
He fell ill and remained ill for almost two months, his condition fluctuating
from day to day. Finally, after much
suffering, the child died at 5:00 PM on February 20, with his parents by his
side.
"My poor boy.” His father
said “He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he
is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have
him die!"
His
death deeply affected the nation and the First Family. It was reported that Willie's younger
brother, Tad, cried for nearly for a week.
(Who was sick with the same illness at the same time, though he survived.)
Mary
Todd Lincoln was so distraught that Lincoln feared for her sanity and Abe
Lincoln fell into one of deep depressions, this one lasting for a week. He and Mary Todd held several séances in the
Green Room to contact Willie’s spirit in the afterlife.
Willie Lincoln's ghost was first seen in the
White House by staff members of the Grant administration in the 1870s and was
seen again in the 1960s by President Lyndon B. Johnson's college-age daughter,
Lynda Bird Johnson Robb, who said she not only saw the ghost but conversed with
it.
THE GHOST OF DOLLY MADISON
During the early years of the Wilson
administration, (1913-1921) First lady Ellen Wilson sent workmen to dig up the
rose garden to redesign it.
A gardener
claimed that while digging up the garden the ghost Dolly Madison appeared and
reprimanded him for removing the rose bushes she had planted over a hundred
years ago. Ellen Wilson died from Bright’s disease, in the White House, on
August 6, 1914.
MUSIC FROM NOWHERE
Jenna
Bush Hager, the daughter of former President George W. Bush claimed that while
she lived in the White House ‘I heard a ghost.
I was asleep, there was a fireplace in my room, and all of a sudden, I
heard 1920s music coming out. I could
feel it; I freaked out and ran into my sister's room. She was like “Please go back to sleep this is
ridiculous”.
The
next week we were both asleep in my room, the phone had rang and woke us
up. ‘We were talking and going back to
bed when all of a sudden we heard this opera, coming out of the fireplace. We
couldn't believe it; we both jumped in bed and were asking the people that
worked there the next morning “Are we crazy?”
We tried to rationalize it, but they said they heard it there all the time.’
THE SAD GHOST ANNA SURRATT
Anna
Surratt was the loving, innocent, and dedicated daughter of convicted Lincoln
assassination co-conspirator Mary Surratt. After the assassination of Abe
Lincoln, Mary Surratt was arrested and convicted of being part of the conspiracy
to kill the President and was sentenced to be hung by the neck as a result of
her part in the plot. Essentially,
Surratt had allowed her boardinghouse in downtown Washington (Where it still
stands today) to be used as a meeting place for Booth and the others
conspirators. How much deeper her involvement went beyond that is still a
matter of debate.
After
the guilty verdict, Anna Surratt pleaded repeatedly for her mother's life with
Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, but he refused to consider clemency. She then tried to see President Andrew Johnson
at the White House to plead for her mother’s life but was pushed off the
grounds by Senator James Lane (Below) and Preston King.
On
July 1, 1866 the recently reelected Lane shot himself in the head as he jumped
from his carriage in Leavenworth, Kansas. He was said to be deranged,
depressed, had been accused of financial irregularities in office. He died ten
days later near Leavenworth, Kansas, a result of the self-inflicted gunshot. Preston
King (Below) committed suicide by tying a bag of bullets around his neck and leaping
from a ferryboat in New York Harbor on November 13, 1865
Later,
Mrs. Stephen Douglas, (Below) widow of the late senator, arrived by carriage to the
White to convince President Andrew Johnson not to execute Mary Surratt, but to
no avail. But there was hope until the
end. General Winfield Scott Hancock was
in command at the
Washington Penitentiary, where Mary Hancock was being held.
On the day of the execution, he stationed cavalry riders from the jail to the
White House in the event President Johnson changed his mind and granted a
last-minute reprieve.
After
her mother was executed, Anna’s younger brother John was on the run as an
accused member of the conspiracy and another brother, Isaac, was in the
Confederate army and would not return home for another several months.
Eventually,
in 1867, John was put on trial, but the government was unable to convict him,
and he was released. He became a teacher
at St. Joseph Catholic School in Emmetsburg, Maryland and later joined the
Baltimore Steam Packet Company. He rose to be treasurer of the Company and
married Mary Victorine Hunter a relative of Francis Scott Key. He died of pneumonia at the age of 72.
Mary
was ostracized from society in general and for a while lived in poverty. On March 10, 1869, Surratt tavern in
Surrattsville (now Clinton Md.) was sold to Robert W. Hunter who purchased the
building and 6 acres around it for $3,500.
After that, Annie married Professor William P. Tonry in a private
ceremony at St. Patrick’s Church, just a short walk from Fords Theater.
Tonry was a chemist working for the surgeon
general’s office. Strangely enough, he worked at Ford’s Theatre during the
civil war when the theater been converted into government offices shortly after
the assassination. Four days after her marriage was made public fired Tonry
from his job at the War Department.
Anna
Surratt and her brother Isaac. Like the
others Isaac also move to Baltimore. He never married and died at age 66.
The couple eventually moved to Baltimore and
Tonry went back to work as a chemist and the couple had four children and
overall, became somewhat well off if not rich.
But the strain of the Lincoln assassination and her mother execution
left mentally unbalanced and she often suffered from bouts of anxiety,
depression, and fear. Anna died of
kidney disease on Oct. 24, 1904. She was
buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, in an unmarked grave next to
Mary.
To
this day, some members of the White House staff claim that Anna's ghost returns
to the White House every July 6, silently banging on the front door to plea for
her mother's life. Residents of the H Street NW apartments where she lived for
a while report deep moaning and sobbing sounds in the hallways.
JOHN TYLER
President John Tyler allegedly haunts the Blue
Oval Room. The stories started when the unstable Mary Todd Lincoln reported
hearing his voice coming from the Oval Office.
Mary said that she heard Tyler make a proposal of marriage to Julia
Gardner, (above) Tyler’s second and much young wife.
Mary
Todd Lincoln, thought to be a hypochondriac, was long considered mentally
unstable although in recent years scholars have come to believe that she
suffered from pernicious anemia which may have
cause her difficulties. On May 20, 1875, she was involuntarily
institutionalized for psychiatric disease ten years after her husband's murder
by her son after she almost jumped out of a window to escape a non-existent
fire. She freed herself from the asylum within three months after she managed
to smuggle letters to her lawyer, James B. Bradwell, and his wife Myra
Bradwell, a feminist and fellow spiritualist. Mary was released into the
custody of her sister in Springfield Ill. After the court proceedings to
determine her competency, she was so enraged that she attempted suicide by
trying to drink laudanum but the hotel pharmacist, realized her intent and gave
her a placebo. Later she sat for spirit
photographer William H. Mumler. Mumler, who knew Mary Todd personally, later
claimed he did not know that his sitter was Mary Todd Lincoln. The photo of
course, is a hoax.
