Abraham Lincoln’s assassination is one of America’s defining historical events, and the trauma lasted long after his death. Our 16th — and, according to many rankings, best — President is the White House’s most famous ghost, having been sighted more than any other spirit. In a way, those sightings include a chilling prophecy Lincoln experienced himself. One evening early in 1865, Lincoln told his close friend Ward Hill Lamon of a troubling dream he’d had a week and a half earlier:
“I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike 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 … I arrived at the East Room. Before me was a catafalque [raised platform for a coffin], 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 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.’”
Lincoln was assassinated just a few months later, and sightings of the fallen leader in the room now known as the Lincoln Bedroom began not long after. According to Jared Broach, founder of the ghost tour company Nightly Spirits, “They say Lincoln always comes back whenever he feels the country is in need or in peril. They say he just strides up and down the second-floor hallways and raps on doors and stands by windows.”
It isn’t just humans who have felt this presence. Rex Scouten, then the White House curator, said in 1989 that Ronald Reagan’s dog felt comfortable roaming through every room in the White House except the Lincoln Bedroom, where “he’d just stand outside the door and bark.”
No less a credible source than Winston Churchill himself reported encountering Lincoln’s ghost in that very room, albeit under different circumstances. He had just stepped out of the bath and was “wearing” nothing but a cigar when he saw the former President by the fireplace. “Good evening, Mr. President,” Churchill reportedly said. “You seem to have me at a disadvantage.” Indeed he did, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else being so witty in that moment.
Media Release/InterestingFacts.com
