Dead Presidents

“About ten days ago, I retired late.  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.  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.”

Abraham Lincoln’s spooky recollection of this dream to his friend and personal bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon took place somewhere in the two weeks prior to his death on April 15, 1865.  Lincoln, of course, was killed by an assassin and his body “wrapped in funeral vestments” rested on a catafalque in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by grief-stricken mourners and soldiers.

Since Lincoln’s assassination, many people have claimed to see Abraham Lincoln’s ghost in the White House.  Of course, any ghost stories should be accepted only with caution, but the people who claimed to have seen the apparition might surprise you:  Theodore Roosevelt, Grace Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, Harry Truman, Margaret Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, as well as many White House employees, valets, ushers, and a few Press Secretaries.

Those who have experienced Lincoln’s ghost have mentioned that Lincoln either walks back-and-forth in second-floor hallways, knocks on doors and windows, or stares out of a window pensively with his hands clasped behind his back.  One of Benjamin Harrison’s bodyguards searched the White House almost every night because he frequently heard footsteps.  Worried about protecting President Harrison but weary from his fruitless search, the bodyguard held a séance to attempt to contact Lincoln and ask him to stop haunting him.  Winston Churchill claimed to have seen Lincoln’s ghost as he was staying in the White House.  Churchill had just gotten out of the bath and was naked except for his cigar and glass of scotch when he encountered Lincoln’s apparition.  Churchill claimed he told the ghost, “Good evening, Mr. President.  You seem to have me at a disadvantage.”

Many of the Lincoln sightings occur in-or-near the Lincoln Bedroom.  Contrary to popular belief, Abraham Lincoln never slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.  During his Presidency, the Lincoln Bedroom was actually President Lincoln’s Cabinet Room.  It is where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Happy Halloween!