Abraham Lincoln always had a melancholy nature. The loss of his mother as a child, the ceaseless hard physical labor he endured as a youth, and the struggle to acquire even a rudimentary education all combined to make him somber, even when cracking a joke.
The Civil War shadowed his countenance with constant sorrow. The heavy losses on both sides and the divided loyalties the war called up pained him deeply. His wife’s brothers fought for the Confederacy; Lincoln’s own family ancestry was Southern.
Lincoln paid fanatical attention to even the minutest details of the war. By the time of his reelection the physical strain was self-evident; deep lines etched his face and heavy black circles underscored his eyes. He slept little. During his five years in the White House, he took less than a month’s vacation. His only escape was an occasional theater outing or a late-night buggy ride. Reading Shakespeare or the Bible gave him solace late into the night.
But there may have been more to his sadness than even he would admit. The disturbing mirror image in his Springfield home was but the first incident that seemed to foreshadow his tragic fate. Lincoln is widely reported to have dreamed of his own death.
One account comes from his close friend and self-appointed bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. He said the president told him the following on an evening early in 1865:
About ten days ago I retired very late. . . . 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.
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 alone. . . . I was puzzled and alarmed.
Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room. 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.”
Abraham Lincoln became even more depressed as April 1865 approached. Although Northern forces now firmly controlled the war, Lincoln did not rejoice.
A few days after his horrifying dream, on Friday, April 14, 1865, President Lincoln called a meeting of his cabinet. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton arrived twenty minutes late with apologies. The meeting then proceeded as scheduled.
At the meeting’s conclusion, Secretary Stanton and Attorney General James Speed left together. The secretary noted that they had completed a good deal of work.
“But you were not here at the beginnings,” the attorney general said. “You do not know what passed. [We] found the President seated at the [head] of the table with his face buried between his hands. Presently he raised it and we saw that he looked grave and worn.”
“Gentlemen,” the president began, “before long you will have important news.”
The cabinet members were anxious to hear what news Lincoln might have. They pressed him, but he demurred.
“I have heard nothing,” he said. “I have had no news, but you will hear tomorrow.”
He hesitated, Speed said, but then continued.
“I have had a dream; I have dreamed that dream three times before, once before the battle of Bull Run, once on another occasion, and again last night. I am in a boat, alone on a boundless ocean. I have no oars—no rudder—I am helpless. I drift!”
Shortly after ten o’clock that evening, while the president and Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed a rare night at the theater watching a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater, an unemployed actor and Southern sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head. The president died the next morning, April 15, 1865. It was the anniversary of the Southern assault on Fort Sumter, the opening salvo of the Civil War.
The eerie incidents connected with Abraham Lincoln did not end with his death. Little Willie Lincoln, the president’s favorite son, died while his father occupied the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln never again set foot in his bedroom. But others say they have seen the ghost of a little boy in there.
The life of Lincoln’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was also touched with a perplexing psychic cast. Robert Todd was at his father’s bedside when he died of the bullet wound inflicted by Booth.
Sixteen years later, in 1881, James A. Garfield, less than four months after taking office as the twentieth president of the United States, strode through a railroad station in Washington, DC. Robert Lincoln, his secretary of war, was at his side when a crazed man named Charles Julius Guiteau leaped forward and killed the president.
In 1901 President William McKinley invited Robert Lincoln, by then the president of the Pullman Company, to tour the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. There, the anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz fired a fatal bullet at President McKinley.
Robert Todd Lincoln had now personally witnessed three deaths of American presidents.
As a result, this son of a revered president, a prominent statesman and lawyer in his own right and a graduate of Harvard University, refused ever again to meet or associate with a U.S. president. Although he had many invitations, Robert Todd turned them all away. His presence was a curse, he insisted. He died in 1926.
In the years since then, several presidents and visiting dignitaries have encountered Lincoln’s ghost in the White House.
During the thirteen years Franklin D. Roosevelt lived there, his wife, Eleanor, often sensed the presence of the Great Emancipator. She used his former bedroom as her study. She wrote that sometimes she felt someone watching her. Even when she turned to look and found no one else in the room, she believed it was Lincoln standing alongside her.
A young clerk who worked in the White House during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in office said she saw Lincoln’s ghost sitting on his very own bed, pulling on his boots.
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands spent a night in the White House during Roosevelt’s presidency. She reported that a knock brought her out of bed to answer the door. The ghost of Lincoln stood staring at her from the hallway.
Lincoln seems to prefer knocking on doors. Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman all said they heard tap-tap-tapping, often at their bedroom doors in the middle of the night when no one was about in the family quarters.
Also, there is that certain window in the Oval Office. First Lady Grace Coolidge said she saw his ghost gazing through that portal on several occasions, his hands clasped tightly behind his back, his attention focused on the bloody Civil War battlefields that lay beyond the Potomac.
Indiana
Diana of the Dunes
Indiana Dunes State Park
The naked young woman walks nimbly across the Indiana sand dunes, sheltered by a grove of black oak trees that nearly shut out the sun. Emerging on the wide beach, she stops to watch the shore birds tottering along on spindly legs as they search for breakfast at water’s edge. They pay little attention to this odd, two-legged creature.
The woman plunges into the frigid water. She swims gracefully, her strong, swift strokes carrying her body effortlessly along.
Back on shore, she races back and forth over the sand to dry off. She stops, arches her back, and raises her arms. She tilts her face skyward as if giving thanks for the glory of the day. With a determined stride, she vanishes across the dunes in the direction she had come.
Who is this mysterious young woman and why is her life at the heart of a century-old northern Indiana ghost story? Her reputed appearances—virtually none of them verified—have been told and retold as if they were hard fact.
The first part is easy enough to answer, though much of her life remains veiled in mys
tery and ambiguity.
Alice Mabel Gray was her given name, but she came to be known to the world as Diana of the Dunes. From 1915 until her untimely death on February 9, 1925, this mysterious, free-spirited Chicago native, University of Chicago Phi Beta Kappa graduate, and early dunes conservationist chose to eschew civilization and live in primitive conditions in the wild and rugged Indiana dunes country along the southern Lake Michigan shoreline.
Alice/Diana might have lived and died in obscurity had not someone seen her frequent nude swims, which was in reality simply the way she bathed, often twice a day, as she had no running water or steady water supply. Most likely it was a fisherman casting a line who first caught sight of her, though it is the man’s wife who probably spread the salacious rumor of her nudity in an era when women’s bathing suits were heavy, baggy woolen affairs that covered the wearer from neck to midcalf. But however the news spread among the scattered dunes residents, by the summer of 1916 the life of this skinny-dipping “bronzed goddess” would be forever changed.
Alice was in her midthirties when local newspaper reporters heard the rumors and combed the dunes to find this woman “costumed as Eve,” as the New York Times described her in its obituary years later, flouncing around the region. It was a story they could not ignore in an era when facts often did not get in the way of a juicy tale. And that it certainly was.
She was not hard to find.
Alice Mabel Gray/Diana of the Dunes (sometimes nymph of the dunes) was living alone in a sand-floored, abandoned fisherman’s shack that was “ten-foot square and without windows,” as she later wrote. She had named it “Driftwood.” She had been there since October 31, 1915. Now, some nine months later, Diana tried to tell the peering reporters that all she wanted was her privacy, to be left alone. She had fled Chicago and the severe limitations placed on women for the solitude of a more natural life among the sand dunes and as an advocate for its preservation.
Sadly that was not to be.
A century later, her story has been printed and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. It is among the best-known legends of northern Indiana. Even today, visitors to what is now Indiana Dunes State Park look for the ghost of the mysterious Diana hurrying over the sands at dawn, or her sobs coming from the location of the old fishing shack that was once her home. Her tears shed because her dying wishes were not carried out.
The legend has arisen partly as a ghost story because so few firm facts are known about Alice’s Gray’s life. She was wont to exaggerate, obfuscate, or downright lie about her own background and intentions when reporters were hounding her. A biography published in 2010 gathered what information was known and could be verified.
Diana of the Dunes was not the child of a prominent Chicago physician, as was thought at one time (and may have been promoted by Alice herself), but the daughter of a hardscrabble working-class family, one of six children of Ambrose and Sallie Gray, born on March 25, 1881, when the family was living on South Hermitage Avenue in the McKinley Park neighborhood of the city. Her father was listed in city directories variously as an ironworker, spectacles maker, and lamplighter. He spent a year recovering from a gas lamp fire that burned his arms. Ambrose died in 1898 at the age of fifty-seven. Four years later, in 1902, Sallie Gray died of pulmonary tuberculosis.
Alice graduated from South Division High School at age sixteen in 1897 and immediately enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she primarily pursued math studies but also took foreign languages, theology, and astronomy classes.
She spent six years there, earning Phi Beta Kappa distinction and graduating in 1903. She had moved out of her family home by then and seemed to be headed for graduate school in Europe when she instead took a civil service job at age twenty-two with the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington, DC. She left Chicago alone for the nation’s capital. She had been hired as one of the USNO’s earliest women “computers,” employees working for hours at a time with columns of logarithmic equations. The women, Diana included, made $1,200 annually, an amount not changed since 1892.
The woman who became Diana of the Dunes seemed to begin the mysteries connected to her life while in college and the two years she spent at the USNO.
University of Chicago yearbooks contain virtually no information about her, no list of activities, no photographs.
The same holds true for the USNO. A biographer found in their archives nothing but the most perfunctory information about her two years there. She was one of the few with not a single photograph in the files. Her life in Washington is a blank canvas.
How did she pay for it all? Her parents certainly did not have the money to send her to the University of Chicago (their own home had been bought for them by a relative). Evidence suggests she may have earned some of her way through college working part time as a stenographer or editing journals; she may have had relatives who helped her out as well. One story—which was recounted in her New York Times obituary—is that a high school friend did not need her scholarship to the University of Chicago and so she gave it to Alice.
Alice was showing her independence at a time when women could not vote, were barred from all but the most menial workplace jobs, and were certainly not supposed to travel alone halfway across the country to take a job with the government. But the Civil Service System was one of the few that openly encouraged female applicants for many levels of employment.
After about two years, Alice left the USNO to study mathematics as a “guest listener” at the University of Göttingen in Germany. The question that lingers here is why would she leave a relatively well-paying job for the era—and certainly for women—to take up the life of a graduate student? One possibility was that her former professors, who knew that university, encouraged her. The university was also one of the few European ones at the time to accept female students on an equal footing with their male counterparts.
Perhaps the thought of spending time living in and traveling through Europe was another step on her path of adventurous independence. Hour upon hour of hand-calculating mathematical figures must have become excruciatingly dreary to an intelligent twentysomething woman who wanted to push against the boundaries of what society considered “acceptable” female behavior. She may have also discovered the glass ceiling was already in place at the turn of the twentieth century—even in the Civil Service—and she was not going to advance very far in either the public or private sector despite her brilliant academics.
Records of her time in Germany were sent home with her so the only real details known are that she returned to the United States in 1908 and enrolled in graduate school back at the University of Chicago.
For about the next four years she studied, among other subjects, advanced math, “physical culture,” beginning Sanskrit, and elementary Italian. She also signed up for philosophy but seems to have dropped the course. It is speculated that she may have helped edit a book and a university academic journal to help ends meet.
She dropped out of grad school in 1913. No records exist of the next two years of her life . . . nothing until the few residents and, eventually, the press discover this single woman taking up residence in the harsh, inhospitable Indiana dunes country.
Why would an undoubtedly brilliant woman like Alice Mabel Gray again make such a radical departure from the life she was leading? One theory is that she got fed up with society and its treatment and limitations of women and wanted to adopt a simple, back to nature existence like the dunes offered.
“I was tired of working under the conditions and the lighting in offices, so I came out here,” she told one interviewer. “Then I wished never to go back to Chicago—to the learned and the officious. Out in the dunes I wished to regain my poise once more and trust.”
On another occasion, she said, “The life of a wage earner is slavery.”
But in another interview, she told a reporter that she left Chicago because her eyesight had begun to fail and a physician gave her the wrong medicine, which
made it impossible for her to continue the close work her magazine job required.
Perhaps it was something more personal. Several writers have suggested it was a broken love affair with someone named “L,” whom she references in a few of her surviving diary excerpts. Others put forward that her inability to compete with men in access to the workplace or rise at all above menial (to her) labor had led her to contemplate suicide.
One clear reason for choosing the dunes as her unlikely front yard is that she had visited the region as a child because her older sister and family lived in Michigan City, Indiana.
She also claimed to have written a naturalist’s dissertation about the dunes when she was at the University of Chicago.
Whatever the truth, she adapted to her new natural world with enthusiasm if not adequate knowledge of how to set up housekeeping in little more than an unheated hovel amid miles and miles of the “trackless wilderness” of towering sand dunes, dense woods, and only scattered settlements that was the region a century ago. It was commonly termed a “wasteland” by those not enamored of its wildness.
According to most accounts, Alice Mabel Gray arrived in the Indiana dunes country with few possessions on Halloween day, October 31, 1915. One version is that she had the clothes on her back, a glass, a knife, a spoon, a blanket, and two guns. After sleeping on the moist sand for some time, she found a deserted fisherman’s shack built years before by one George Blagge, a Civil War veteran and well-known character of the region. Hermits, recluses, and even criminals on the lam had ended up living among the dunes over the years. They would simply move into one of the many abandoned cabins. But they had all been men, of course. And that was probably the first thing that set tongues wagging.
Fortunately no one objected to her occupancy. She called the shack “Driftwood” because that was what served as her rough furniture . . . and because she felt like a piece of driftwood herself washing up on various shores.
Haunted Heartland Page 7