So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: Lincoln’s Ghost

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Throughout his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was reportedly plagued by strange premonitions and recurring nightmares. Some say they were omens of his assassination. And in the aftermath of his death, Lincoln has been seen haunting the White House and elsewhere. 

In the summer of 1860, the United States is hanging on by a thread. A civil war seems imminent. There is a contentious election on the horizon, and then, as if things weren't doomsday enough, a procession of fireballs blaze through the sky. Meteor processions are extremely rare, so to the people of 1860, this appears as an omen. The meteors come from the west, sort of in the direction of Illinois,

which happens to be the home of the most controversial candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln. The Chicago Times had this to say about it. Who can fail to comprehend that these fiery messengers portend the approach of war, revolution, and change? Prophetic? Maybe. But this isn't a one-off. Tons of people, including Lincoln himself, had dark premonitions about his presidency. And if he'd listened to his gut, maybe he wouldn't have been assassinated. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. Today, I'm talking about the most high-profile ghost story in American history, Abraham Lincoln. Supposedly, his spirit's been seen around the White House and plenty of other places for the past 150 years. But even before he died, Lincoln was haunted by some ghosts and bad omens of his own.

I have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. In 1800s Kentucky, where Abe Lincoln was born, everyone around him was superstitious. They believed in witches, ghosts, omens, magic, and premonitions. As a kid, Abe was always kind of skeptical, but he was at least paranormal curious. One story says that when he's around six, he asks whether dreams can really tell the future. In particular, he had one dream he can't stop thinking about. He's in a big town giving a speech to a huge crowd. Now, for a kid who lives in a one-room log cabin in the middle of nowhere, this is a complete fantasy. I mean, if he had dreamed he could fly, it would probably be more realistic. But whether it's fate or just hard work, Abe exceeds expectations.

Even though he has no formal education, he teaches himself grammar, rhetoric, and public speaking. And by the time he's 23, that childhood prophecy comes true. He gives his first campaign speech as a candidate for the Illinois state legislature. It's not quite how he dreamed it. Frontier towns are pretty rough, and as soon as Lincoln takes the platform, a brawl breaks out in the crowd. Lincoln sees one of these guys try to lay a punch on his friend, so he climbs down from the platform, grabs the man, and throws him a good 12 feet across the room. Then he gets back up on stage and declares his candidacy. Sadly, Abe loses that election, but this is an important lesson for him.

In this day and age, politics can get violent. Which may be why, over the next few decades, Lincoln's visions of his future get pretty dark. He doesn't know how or when, but he has this unshakable feeling that he's going to die in some terribly tragic way. And that feeling intensifies on the day of the 1860 presidential election.

The results come in fast and Lincoln wins the presidency. When he gets home, he's so exhausted that he just plops down for a nap. But when he looks up, he sees something weird in the mirror. There are two separate images of his face reflecting back at him. When he gets up, one of those faces vanishes, so he's like, okay, it must have been a trick of the light or something. But when he lies down again, the illusion comes back, and it's even clearer than before. Only one of the two faces looks deathly pale, like a ghost. He tries to forget it, but he has this dreadful feeling for the rest of the day. He tells his wife Mary, who thinks it's an omen. The two faces mean he'll be elected for two terms as president, but the ghostliness of the second face is a sign that he won't survive his second

term. Which must have been a comforting thing to hear from his wife, right? But Mary's not the only one with this opinion. About a week before Lincoln leaves for his inauguration, he hears the same thing from his stepmother. He stops by for a visit and when he's about to go, she tells him point blank, this is goodbye forever. I just know that you're going to be assassinated and I'm never going to see you again. And listen, for the record, in these days, the idea of a president being assassinated is completely unheard of. There'd only been one attempt in presidential history, which ended with Andrew Jackson beating his would-be murderer with a cane. So let's just say it wasn't very

successful. Then again, no other president had to deal with the level of chaos that Lincoln's facing. By the time he gets to the Capitol, seven states have already seceded from the Union. The White House is in crisis mode, trying to stop a war from breaking out. Barely a month after he's sworn in, Lincoln goes to bed after another stressful day. And he has this very strange dream. He's on a ship in a vast expanse of rolling waves. He doesn't know where he's going, but he's drifting rapidly towards some dark and mysterious shore. At 4.30 that morning, possibly while he's having that dream, the Confederacy attacks Fort

Sumter, meaning the Civil War has officially begun. So was that dream an omen? Maybe. I mean, Lincoln sure seems to think so. And now that sense of dread that he was carrying around earlier is back in full force. During the next few months, he keeps making weird and ominous comments like, this war is eating my life out. I have the strong impression that I shall not live to see the end. Then, about a year into his term, family tragedy strikes. Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie comes down with typhoid fever, and after a few days, he dies in his bedroom in the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln

is inconsolable, to the point where she can't even go downstairs for the funeral in the East Room. She just stays in her bedroom, grieving by herself. It gets to the point where even the White House staff is worried about Mary. But her seamstress gives her some advice. She says that she should try spiritualism. And yeah, I know I've talked about spiritualism before more than a few times, but it's a big deal in the late 1800s and there are even a few famous mediums in DC, including a mother-daughter duo named Margaret Laurie and Belle Laurie Miller. They run seances out of their townhouse in Georgetown. Oh, and it just so happens that Belle's husband James is a friend of the Lincolns. So not long after Willie's death, Mary starts attending seances at the Laurie's house, where she's

apparently speaking with her son's spirit. Whether these mediums are legit or not I can't say but either way it helps Mary cope with her grief and Willie isn't the only spirit Mary hears from. According to the Illinois Senator Orville Browning, Mary invites him to hang out on New Year's Day, 1863, the very day the Emancipation Proclamation goes into effect. She tells him that she went to Laurie's house the night before, and apparently the spirit realm is watching the White House like a ghostly C-SPAN because they have some advice that the Lincolns need to hear. During the seance, Margaret Lurie goes into a trance. A spirit comes over her and it says that, quote, the cabinet are all enemies of the president working for themselves. Coming up, Lincoln brings some spiritual advisors into the White House. Now back to the story. I don't know about you, but if spirits from the great beyond are saying my closest allies are working against me, I might listen. And apparently

so does Abraham Lincoln. Because after he hears this news, he starts attending those seances with his wife. And on occasion, he even hosts them at the White House. I'm not making this up. The Lorries and another psychic named Nettie Colburn all apparently summoned spirits in the Red Room, a parlor on the first floor. Supposedly, there were extensive notes kept about these seances, but they were lost a couple of decades later. So the only detailed account I have is a slightly dubious story from the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. It says that sometime in April of 1863 there's another seance in the Red Room hosted by both Mary and Abraham Lincoln. Also in attendance are the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of War, a reporter for the Gazette, and this medium named Charles Shockley.

During the proceedings, Shockley hides a paper and pencil under a handkerchief and waits for a few seconds. Then he removes the handkerchief to reveal there's a message written on the paper. It's full of vague advice like proclamations are useless, make a bold front and fight the enemy. But it's signed Henry Knox, the nation's first and now deceased Secretary of War. So Lincoln's like, okay, we've got Henry Knox on the line, ask him when this rebellion is going to be over. Shockley hides the paper again and when he lifts it, there's another much longer message. It basically says, I talked with Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, Napoleon, and we're all kind of split. Like Napoleon says to focus all your forces on one point, but Franklin says the South's weapons are no match for the North's and they'll be giving

up soon. Like I said, this account is a little dubious and the newspaper actually ends up printing a retraction later on. But the story still spreads all over the country. Suddenly, everyone's convinced that Lincoln is basically running the war with a Ouija board, which, of course, wins him the support of the spiritualists, but it gets him a fair amount of criticism from everyone else. One guy even publishes a book titled Interior Causes of the War, The Nation Demonized and Its President, a Spirit Rapper. Funny enough, the book doesn't condemn Lincoln for believing in spirits. The author agrees, of course, we can communicate with the dead. Everyone knows that.

The problem is that he's trusting their war advice. Although this isn't really fair because there's no evidence that Lincoln made any decisions based on what he heard during those seances. But whether he's listening or not, the Great Beyond keeps talking. You remember that dream that Lincoln had before the attack on Fort Sumter, that he was on a ship floating toward a dark shore? Well, he has that same dream again a few months later, before the Battle of Bull Run, which at the time is the bloodiest battle in U.S. history. This is the point where both sides realize this war isn't going to be quick or easy. The same dream happens again before the Battle of Antietam. There are no winners in this battle.

But in one single day, the Union Army loses a fifth of its entire force and the Confederates lose almost a third. The next year, the dream makes another appearance before the Battle of Gettysburg, which once again sets a new record for the most casualties in U.S. history. But it ends with a Union victory. It's the turning point of the entire war. So clearly, Lincoln's dream is an omen of something huge. Not necessarily good or bad, but significant and probably pretty freaking bloody. Lincoln pays attention to this, especially since it's not the first prophetic vision he's had and it's not the

last either. In 1864, Lincoln wins re-election and yeah, he hasn't forgotten that weird ghost image he saw in the mirror four years earlier. You know, the one that made Mary think that her husband would die before he left office? Well, by this point, Lincoln's certain she was right. Even though the Civil War is finally coming to a close, he senses that the danger isn't over yet. And he's not the only one who thinks so, not by a long shot. Around the start of Lincoln's second term, there are some strange happenings around the Capitol. One morning, the Senate chaplain is about to open sessions with a prayer when he sees a man enter the chamber. Something about this guy startles him.

He's really handsome, but his whole energy is just off. Like, whatever he's doing there, he's up to no good. In fact, the chaplain is so disturbed that he has to pause and, like, collect himself before he can even keep going on with the prayer. And later, he sees the same guy lurking around the White House. The chaplain asks around and eventually finds out that's John Wilkes Booth. Now, John Wilkes Booth is a fairly well-known actor at the time. He's like this up-and-coming 26-year-old heartthrob. Imagine you're the president and a Senate chaplain comes to you and says, hey, I think I've seen Timothy Chalamet prowling around

the Capitol, and I think he's plotting to assassinate you. You'd probably laugh, right? Well, that's exactly how Lincoln reacts when the chaplain tries to warn him. But even if he doesn't take this particular threat seriously, he still has the feeling that something bad is on the horizon. Although that same day, the Confederate army surrenders. The Civil War is officially over. By the next day, April 10th, there's a huge crowd gathered outside the White House waiting for Lincoln to give a victory speech. But he's probably the only person in DC who's not in a mood to celebrate. When Mary asks why he's so down, Lincoln says out of the blue that it's strange how many references there are to his dream in the Bible. It seems like every time he opens the book,

it falls on a page about a prophetic vision. Then he tells her about this strange dream he had a few nights ago. He's in bed and he hears what sounds like a whole crowd of people weeping. He goes downstairs and all the lights are on, but there's no one there. Yet he keeps hearing this sobbing as

he walks through the White House like there are invisible mourners everywhere. Finally he gets to the east room and there's a flock of people gathered around a body wrapped in funeral vestments. Soldiers are standing guard. The body's face is covered so lincoln asks one of the soldiers who died and the soldier says the president he was killed by an assassin lincoln insists that he doesn't put too much stock in the dream but his expression says otherwise like he is grave and once again whether he believes them or not the warnings keep coming. Three days later, Lincoln is holding a cabinet meeting when he mentions something ominous. That reoccurring dream he's been having about the ship drifting to some unknown shore? Well, he had it again just last night. Which means something big

is coming, but he doesn't know what. In all likelihood, it's just going to be news from General Sherman who's negotiating the surrender of the Confederates. And maybe because he's expecting good news, Lincoln is in this weirdly cheerful mood, like he's uncharacteristically happy. There's just one thing that's bringing him down. He's supposed to see a play that night and he doesn't really feel like going, which is unusual because he loves the theater, but not tonight. He just wants to stay home and chill. And he's not the only one who's trying to get out of it. Ulysses S. Grant and his wife are supposed to go with the Lincolns, but they cancel at the last minute. Lincoln invites

his war secretary instead, but he turns him down. The Lincoln's son, Robert, doesn't want to go. The Speaker of the House says he's busy. The Marquis de Chambon says it's Good Friday and you want to spend a holy day at a theater? No, thank you. Practically everyone in the District of Columbia takes a pass. But the press has already announced that Lincoln's going to be there. So he's basically like, listen, I gotta go. I can't disappoint the people.

The Lincolns run through their whole Rolodex until they finally find two people willing to tag along. This 27-year-old soldier named Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris. They're a little late, but the Lincolns and their guests finally get to Ford's Theater. They're all laughing at the play's funniest line when John Wilkes Booth sneaks into the president's box and shoots Lincoln in the back of the head. Henry tries to grab Booth and subdue him but Booth pulls out a knife and slashes Henry in the arm. Then he jumps down onto stage, which is like a 10 or 15 foot drop, by the way, and runs out the back door. Lincoln is unconscious, but still alive, so they rush him to a boarding house across the street. There's little hope for

recovery, but the least they can do is make him comfortable. Understandably, Mary is in hysterics. She can't even stay in the room with her husband for more than a few minutes without collapsing. Claire's dress is covered in blood, mostly Henry's, not Lincoln's, but every time Mary sees her, she screams, my husband's blood, my dear husband's blood. Mary's grief is so uncontrollable that the men decide it's too distracting and they banish her from the room which means that she's not there for her husband's last moments at 7 22 a.m the next morning Abe Lincoln finally passes away the family minister says a prayer at the bedside and after a long silence the secretary of of War says, now he belongs to the ages. Or now he belongs to the angels. To this day, nobody can agree. Either way, he's wrong.

Because Lincoln's not going anywhere. His spirit is staying right there in D.C. Coming up, Lincoln's ghost refuses to leave the White House. Now, back to the story. It probably shouldn't surprise you that after her husband's death, Mary Todd Lincoln consulted with mediums. After all, this lady loves a good seance. In 1872, Mary goes to Boston to visit this spirit photographer, a guy named William Mumler. He takes people's portraits, and when the photo is developed, ghostly figures appear in the background, and they often bear a striking resemblance to the subject's dead loved ones. I know this sounds like a hoax, like it's probably just a double exposure or something, right? But apparently it wasn't possible to do a double exposure with the process Mumler used. There were multiple attempts to debunk him as a fraud, but nobody could find any explanation for how he could be faking it.

At first, even Mary's a little skeptical, so to make sure Mumler isn't messing with her, she goes to great lengths to conceal her identity. She travels to Boston under a fake name, Mrs. Lindahl. When she arrives at Mumler's studio, she's wearing a mourning veil which hides most of her face. She doesn't take off the veil until right before he snaps the photo, and he doesn't seem to recognize her. He marks the negative as Mrs. Lindahl and tells Mary to come back in a few days when it's developed. When Mary returns, Mumler's wife, who also happens to be a medium, is at the studio. She digs through and finds the picture of Mary, and honestly, you need to Google this. I did like for yourself because it is pretty uncanny. There's this faint figure of a man standing right behind Mary with his hands

on her shoulders. And I'm telling you, it looks a lot like Abraham Lincoln. It is truly chilling. Another woman in the shop asks Mary if she recognizes the ghost. Mary hesitates for a second before saying yes. And instantly, Mrs. Mumler falls into a trance. She says to Mary, Mother, if you cannot recognize father, show the picture to Robert, who is the family's only living son. Now, Mary's like, okay, hang on a minute. Who am I speaking to? And Mrs. Mumler says Thaddeus. Now this is interesting because Lincoln's youngest son, Tad, had died the year before, but Tad wasn't short for Thaddeus.

His full name was Thomas, but it's pretty close. And I should mention that this story comes from Mr. Mumler's memoir, so maybe he just misremembered the name when he was writing it, or maybe he and his wife were getting one over on the grieving widow, which is exactly what Robert Lincoln thinks. Robert knows that his mother has always been superstitious and maybe a bit paranoid, which honestly seems fair considering she's lost three sons and a husband. No wonder she's a little high strung. But Robert feels it's reaching the point of actual delusions. Like in 1875, Mary shows up at Robert's home in Chicago unannounced. She took a train all the way from Florida because she was convinced that Robert was seriously ill. Of course, when she arrives, Robert's totally fine, but Mary obviously isn't. She's rambling

about someone who tried to poison her on the train and that someone stole her pocketbook. Her behavior is so erratic, Robert is actually concerned for her safety. So he files a petition to have her declared insane. And the trial is ugly. Mary is basically snatched up from her hotel room and taken to the courtroom with zero notice. She has no time to prepare her defense. The jury consists of a bunch of Roberts' friends and Mary's defense lawyer was hired and paid for by Robert. The defense doesn't call a single witness, but Robert's got 17 people lined up to testify against Mary. All of their testimony focuses on the fact that she believes she's being followed by spirits, particularly her husband's ghost. The employees at Mary's hotel

say that she's been complaining about strange voices speaking to her through the walls. And Mary's doctor says she's been having terrifying hallucinations. At one point, she apparently told him that Abe's spirit said that she was going to die soon. The trial only lasts a few hours before Mary is sentenced to a psychiatric hospital. And okay, some of this stuff is troubling. The trial itself is obviously a farce, but if these witnesses are telling the truth, it's hard to deny that something is going on with Mary. But I do want to give her the benefit of the doubt for a minute, because no one else ever did. And because she isn't the only witness who seems to be haunted by Lincoln's assassination.

Remember the other couple at the theater, Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone? Henry made a full recovery from his stabbing, at least physically, but they're both traumatized by the whole experience. Clara can't bring herself to get rid of the bloody dress she wore that night. It just seems wrong to throw it away, I guess. So when she gets home, she just puts it in a closet and leaves it there. But a year later, on the first anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, Clara wakes up to the sound of laughter. She looks over and sees Lincoln sitting in a chair facing the closet and laughing as if he's watching a play. When Clara tells her family the next morning, they assure her it was just a dream.

At this point, Clara is so freaked out that she has the closet bricked up with the dress still inside. Out of sight, out of mind. But apparently that doesn't work either because a few years later, a guest is sleeping over in the room and he sees the same thing. Now, if you think that's bad, things are much worse for Henry. After the assassination, he starts having serious physical and mental health

problems. Allegedly, he's tormented by guilt about not being able to save Lincoln, even though there's no way he could have stopped the shooting. For 18 years, Henry suffers from depression, delusions, and erratic behavior that seems to be getting worse. Until finally, on December 23rd, 1883, something snaps. Just before dawn, Henry grabs a knife and a revolver and heads to the bedroom where his children are sleeping. Clara is able to lure him back to their bedroom, but as soon as the door is closed, Henry shoots her and then slashes himself with a knife, the way Booth had stabbed him all those years ago. It's as if he was reenacting Lincoln's assassination. Clara dies, but once again Henry survives his wounds. He spends the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital until he dies 28 years later.

So of the three people who witnessed the assassination, all three had their lives permanently destroyed by the trauma. We could chalk it up to PTSD if they were the only ones being haunted, but they're not, not by a long shot. For the past 150 years, Lincoln's ghost has been seen by tons of people all over the Capitol. After the assassination, the U.S. government bought out Ford's Theater and turned it into an office building. It just seemed wrong to keep showing plays there. And for about a hundred years, there are no ghostly sightings of Lincoln there. I guess his spirit appreciated the respect. But in the 1960s, Congress decides that enough time

has passed. They shell out the money to restore the building and reopen it as a fully functioning theater. And almost immediately, strange things start happening. Throughout the 70s and 80s tons of people report a bright light shining from Lincoln's booth even though it's closed to the public. On at least one occasion an actress actually walks off stage complaining about it. At one point a lecturer comes to the theater to give a talk about the assassination. He looks into the audience and claims to see Lincoln sitting in his box totally lifelike. But maybe the most interesting event happens on April 14th, 1975, the 110th anniversary of the assassination. They're performing a play about Martin Luther King Jr. called I Have a Dream. In the first act, there's this scene where the MLK character is talking

about how much he admires Lincoln. And in the middle, there's this unexpected noise, like someone running across the stage and out the back door. It's loud enough that everyone in the theater hears it, but nobody sees anything, and there's no one backstage who could have made the noise. The crew later finds that a live microphone was somehow dragged across the stage and out the back door into the alley, the same exact route John Wilkes Booth took when he ran out of the theater. Maybe a practical joke, but if so, nobody on the crew confesses. Either way, it's probably not surprising that after Ford's theater reopens, presidents avoid the place like the plague. Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon both declined several invitations to visit the venue. But they can't avoid the site where Lincoln's ghost is most often seen,

the White House. By the 1920s, there's a rumor that every night when the light over the front door is dimmed, Lincoln's ghost will appear and pace across the porch. First Lady Grace Coolidge allegedly sees the ghost herself, standing in the Oval Office gazing out the window. According to Eleanor Roosevelt, who moves in a few years later, several White House employees have seen Lincoln staring out that very window. Eleanor also says that not long after they

moved in, a staff member came sprinting down from the second floor in terror. She was gasping that she'd seen Lincoln sitting on his bed, putting on his boots. And the White House doorman claims that one time, President Roosevelt's valet came out of the building screaming. He ran right into the arms of a guard, insisting he'd just seen Lincoln. There's another ghost story from the Roosevelt era that's kind of poorly sourced, but it's too funny not to mention. During World War II, Winston Churchill is visiting from Britain. He gets out of the bath and steps into the bedroom totally naked and apparently sees Abe Lincoln just standing by the fireplace.

Now, Churchill isn't a guy who startles easily, so he just calmly says, Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage. And the ghost sightings continue over the decades. President Harry Truman says that he often heard tapping on his door at around 3 a.m., but he'd open it to find nothing. Ronald Reagan's daughter, Maureen, who slept in Lincoln's old bedroom when she visited, claims that she saw a red glowing aura hovering over her in the middle of the night. Even in the 90s, Clinton's social secretary says that a lot of White House employees refused to go into the Lincoln bedroom because that's where most of the sightings occur. So whatever is going on there, it's real enough to scare the crap out

of them. And look, I know this sounds overwhelming, like can the same ghost be haunting the White House, Ford's Theater, and Clara Harris's closet all at the same time? The answer is apparently yes. But you'd have to expand your definition of ghost. There's a type of haunting that's called a residual haunting. This isn't exactly an intelligent spirit. It's more like an echo of a past event replaying on a loop. Supposedly, if something traumatic happens at a location, the negative energy will kind of record itself there. And the moment will replay over and over like a movie on an invisible projector screen.

Now as far as national traumas go, the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination are definitely up there, which may explain why Lincoln's ghost is seen so often. The shooting at the theater, the late night cabinet meetings, the ominous dreams Lincoln had in that bed. I can only imagine how much negative energy these events gave off. And whether it's an honest to God haunting or a case of overactive imaginations, does it really make a difference? The point is the same either way. We can't forget. The scars of the past are still so real we can see them. Wherever we go, we're always moving under the weight of the history that came before us,

and that can be scary. But underneath the fear, I think it's actually kind of comforting. Those mysterious taps you hear on the wall, the dark shapes you see hovering in the night, they're a reminder that you're not alone. Centuries worth of people have lived and died in the very spot you're sitting right now. Whatever they went through, it didn't destroy them. Their memory is still here, even after their bodies are gone. And if you listen close, you can hear their footsteps walking with you. Thanks for listening. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.