A history of the spooky side of the White House
Based on ghost stories, Lincoln seems to be most common visitor to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
On a lonely night in 1946, President Harry S. Truman went to bed at 9 p.m. About six hours later, he heard it. Knock. Knock. Knock. The sound against his bedroom door awakened him, he wrote to his wife in a letter archived in his presidential library and museum.
“I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there,” he wrote. “Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked in your room and [daughter] Margie’s. Still no one. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped and looked and no one there! The damned place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret Service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.
“You and Margie had better come back and protect me before some of these ghosts carry me off.”
In addition to its political ghosts, the White House has long housed unsettling specters of a different, more bump-in-the-night kind, if numerous former leaders and their staff members are to be believed.
Whether one embraces or mocks the paranormal, the many accounts that have spilled out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over two centuries give an undeniable place in the country’s history to ghosts, making that address arguably the nation’s most famous haunted house.
The sightings, documented in eerie detail by scholars and newspapers, involve a former president who appears when the nation needs a leader most and a first lady who is, sadly, perpetually stuck doing laundry.
Jared Broach is the founder of the company Nightly Spirits, which offers tours of haunted areas in several cities nationwide. But when Broach started the tours in 2012, he offered only one: the White House.
Asked if he believes in ghosts, Broach said “for sure,” pointing to more prestigious authorities. “If I said no, I’d be calling about eight different presidents liars,” he said.
One of them would be Abraham Lincoln. He reportedly received regular visits from his son William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln, who died in the White House in 1862 at 11 of what was probably typhoid fever. Mary Todd Lincoln, who was so grief-stricken that she remained in her room for weeks, spoke of seeing her son’s ghost once at the foot of her bed.
After his 1865 assassination, Lincoln apparently joined his son in his phantasmal roaming. First lady Grace Coolidge spoke in magazine accounts of seeing him look out a window in what had been in his office.
Many more sightings would come in the decades and presidential administrations that followed. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom in 1942 when she reportedly heard a knock on her bedroom door, opened it to see the bearded president and fainted. Two years earlier, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, according to accounts, had just stepped out of a hot bath in that same room and was wearing nothing but a cigar when he encountered Lincoln by the fireplace.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Churchill reportedly said. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
In his research, Broach said, he found that Lincoln seems to be the most common visitor among the White House’s ghosts and also the one who carries the greatest burden.
“They say Lincoln always comes back whenever he feels the country is in need or in peril,” Broach said. “They say he just strides up and down the second-floor hallways and raps on doors and stands by windows.”
In a 1989 Washington Post article, White House curator Rex Scouten said that President Ronald Reagan had commented that his dog would go into any room except the Lincoln bedroom. There are also haunting accounts involving two presidents’ wives. Abigail Adams was the first first lady to live in the White House and used the East Room to dry sheets. Since her death, there have been reported sightings of her likeness in that area. She walks, according to the accounts, with her arms outstretched as if holding clean linens.
Newspapers once treated stories about ghosts with far less skepticism than they might today. A Washington Post article published Aug. 13, 1907, describes the police department’s effort to address paranormal activity in Georgetown with the headline “Spooks Baffle Police.”
The headline for a 1903 Post story, said: “White House Ghosts: Changes in the Mansion Have Driven Them Away.”
In the article, a longtime White House servant lamented how renovations had cleared the mansion of the spirits that kept him company on lonely nights.
But Lincoln, it seems, would not be scared away so easily. Mary Eban, who worked for first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, reported seeing him on his bed, pulling on his boots. Her screams apparently brought Secret Service agents running. Roosevelt, in a 1932 talk about life in the White House, told a group in San Antonio that she felt another presence when she worked in a room where many presidents had also worked. “I get a distinct feeling that there is somebody in the room,” she said.