Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  But far be it from me to suggest that the two Presidents might be personally linked, perhaps through reincarnation, if such could be proved. Their similar fates must be the result of a higher order of which we know as yet very little except that it exists and operates as clearly and deliberately as any other law of nature.

  But there is ample reason to reject any notion of Lincoln’s rebirth in another body, if anyone were to make such a claim. Mr. Lincoln’s ghost has been observed in the White House by competent witnesses.

  According to Arthur Krock of the New York Times, the earliest specter at the White House was not Lincoln but Dolley Madison. During President Wilson’s administration, she appeared to a group of workers who were about to move her precious rose garden. Evidently they changed their minds about the removal, for the garden was not touched.

  It is natural to assume that in so emotion-laden a building as the White House there might be remnants of people whose lives were very closely tied to the structure. I have defined ghosts as the surviving emotional memories of people who are not aware of the transition called death and continue to function in a thought world as they did at the time of their passing, or before it. In a way, then, they are psychotics unable or unwilling to accept the realities of the nonphysical world into which they properly belong, but which is denied them by their unnatural state of “hanging on” in the denser, physical world of flesh and blood. I am sure we don’t know all the unhappy or disturbed individuals who are bound up with the White House, and some of them may not necessarily be from the distant past, either. But Abigail Adams was seen and identified during the administration of President Taft. Her shade was seen to pass through the doors of the East Room, which was later to play a prominent role in the White House’s most famous ghost story.

  That Abraham Lincoln would have excellent cause to hang around his former center of activity, even though he died across town, is obvious: he had so much unfinished business of great importance.

  Furthermore, Lincoln himself, during his lifetime, had on the record shown an unusual interest in the psychic. The Lincoln family later vehemently denied that séances took place in the White House during his administration. Robert Lincoln may have burned some important papers of his father’s bearing on these sittings, along with those concerning the political plot to assassinate his father. According to the record, he most certainly destroyed many documents before being halted in this foolish enterprise by a Mr. Young. This happened shortly before Robert Lincoln’s death and is attested to by Lincoln authority Emanuel Hertz in The Hidden Lincoln.

  The spiritualists even go so far as to claim the President as one of their own. This may be extending the facts, but Abraham Lincoln was certainly psychic, and even during his term in the White House his interest in the occult was well known. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, about to write of Lincoln’s interest in this subject, asked the President’s permission to do so, or, if he preferred, that he deny the statements made in the article linking him to these activities. Far from denying it, Lincoln replied, “The only falsehood in the statement is that half of it has not been told. The article does not begin to tell the things I have witnessed.”

  The séances held in the White House may well have started when Lincoln’s little boy Willie followed another son, Eddie, into premature death, and Mrs. Lincoln’s mind gave way to a state of temporary insanity. Perhaps to soothe her feelings, Lincoln decided to hold séances in the White House. It is not known whether the results were positive or not, but Willie’s ghost has also been seen in the White House. During Grant’s administration, according to Arthur Krock, a boy whom they recognized as the apparition of little Willie “materialized” before the eyes of some of his household.

  The medium Lincoln most frequently used was one Nettie Colburn Maynard, and allegedly the spirit of Daniel Webster communicated with him through her. On that occasion, it is said, he was urged to proclaim the emancipation of the slaves. That proclamation, as everybody knows, became Lincoln’s greatest political achievement. What is less known is the fact that it also laid the foundation for later dissension among his Cabinet members and that, as we shall see, it may indirectly have caused his premature death. Before going into this, however, let us make clear that on the whole Lincoln apparently did not need any mediums, for he himself had the gift of clairvoyance, and this talent stayed with him all his life. One of the more remarkable premonitory experiences is reported by Philip van Doren Stern in The Man Who Killed Lincoln, and also in most other sources dealing with Lincoln.

  It happened in Springfield in 1860, just after Lincoln had been elected. As he was looking at himself in a mirror, he suddenly saw a double image of himself. One, real and lifelike, and an etheric double, pale and shadowy. He was convinced that it meant he would get through his first term safely, but would die before the end of the second. Today, psychic researchers would explain Lincoln’s mirror experience in less fanciful terms. What the President saw was a brief “out-of-body experience,” or astral projection, which is not an uncommon psychic experience. It merely means that the bonds between conscious mind and the unconscious are temporarily loosened and that the inner or true self has quickly slipped out. Usually, these experiences take place in the dream state, but there are cases on record where the phenomenon occurs while awake.

  The President’s interpretation of the experience is of course another matter; here we have a second phenomenon come into play, that of divination; in his peculiar interpretation of his experience, he showed a degree of precognition, and future events, unfortunately, proved him to be correct.

  This was not, by far, the only recorded dream experienced in Lincoln’s life. He put serious stock in dreams and often liked to interpret them. William Herndon, Lincoln’s onetime law partner and biographer, said of him that he always contended he was doomed to a sad fate, and quotes the President as saying many times, “I am sure I shall meet with some terrible end.”

  It is interesting to note also that Lincoln’s fatalism made him often refer to Brutus and Caesar, explaining the events of Caesar’s assassination as caused by laws over which neither had any control; years later, Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, also thought of himself as the new Brutus slaying the American Caesar because destiny had singled him out for the deed!

  Certainly the most widely quoted psychic experience of Abraham Lincoln was a strange dream he had a few days before his death. When his strangely thoughtful mien gave Mrs. Lincoln cause to worry, he finally admitted that he had been disturbed by an unusually detailed dream. Urged, over dinner, to confide his dream, he did so in the presence of Ward Hill Lamon, close friend and social secretary as well as a kind of bodyguard. Lamon wrote it down immediately afterward, and it is contained in his biography of Lincoln:

  “About ten days ago,” the President began, “I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. 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.

  “There I met with a sickening surprise. 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 there came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night….”

  Lincoln always knew he was a marked man, not only because of his own psychic hunches, but objectively, for he kept a sizable envelope in his desk containing all the threatening letters he had received. That envelope was simply marked “Assassination,” and the matter did not frighten him. A man in his position is always in danger, he would argue, although the Civil War and the larger question of what to do with the South after victory had split the country into two factions, made the President’s position even more vulnerable. Lincoln therefore did not take his elaborate dream warning seriously, or at any rate, he pretended not to. When his friends remonstrated with him, asking him to take extra precautions, he shrugged off their warnings with the lighthearted remark, “Why, it wasn’t me on that catafalque. It was some other fellow!”

  But the face of the corpse had been covered in his dream and he really was whistling in the dark.

  Had fate wanted to prevent the tragedy and give him warning to avoid it?

  Had an even higher order of things decided that he was to ignore that warning?

  Lincoln had often had a certain dream in which he saw himself on a strange ship, moving with great speed toward an indefinite shore. The dream had always preceded some unusual event. In effect, he had dreamed it precisely in the same way preceding the events at Fort Sumter, the Battles of Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, and Wilmington. Now he had just dreamed it again on the eve of his death. This was April 13, 1865, and Lincoln spoke of his recurrent dream in unusually optimistic tones. To him it was an indication of impending good news. That news, he felt, would be word from General Sherman that hostilities had ceased. There was a Cabinet meeting scheduled for April 14 and Lincoln hoped the news would come in time for it. It never occurred to him that the important news hinted at by this dream was his own demise that very evening, and that the strange vessel carrying him to a distant shore was Charon’s boat ferrying him across the Styx into the nonphysical world.

  But had he really crossed over?

  Rumors of a ghostly President in the White House kept circulating. They were promptly denied by the government, as would be expected. President Theodore Roosevelt, according to Bess Furman in White House Profile, often fancied that he felt Lincoln’s spirit, and during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s, a female secretary saw the figure of Abraham Lincoln in his onetime bedroom. The ghost was seated on the bed, pulling on his boots, as if he were in a hurry to go somewhere. This happened in mid-afternoon. Eleanor Roosevelt had often felt Lincoln’s presence and freely admitted it.

  Now it had been the habit of the administration to put important visitors into what was formerly Lincoln’s bedroom. This was not done out of mischief, but merely because the Lincoln room was among the most impressive rooms of the White House. We have no record of all those who slept there and had eerie experiences, for people, especially politically highly placed people, don’t talk about such things as ghosts.

  Yet, the late Queen Wilhelmina did mention the constant knockings at her door followed by footsteps—only to find the corridor outside deserted. And Margaret Truman, who also slept in that area of the White House, often heard knocking at her bedroom door at 3 A.M. Whenever she checked, there was nobody there. Her father, President Truman, a skeptic, decided that the noises had to be due to “natural” causes, such as the dangerous settling of the floors. He ordered the White House completely rebuilt, and perhaps this was a good thing: It would surely have collapsed soon after, according to the architect, General Edgerton. Thus, if nothing else, the ghostly knockings had led to a survey of the structure and subsequent rebuilding. Or was that the reason for the knocks? Had Lincoln tried to warn the later occupants that the house was about to fall down around their ears?

  Not only Lincoln’s bedroom, but other old areas of the White House are evidently haunted. There is, first of all, the famous East Room, where the lying-in-state took place. By a strange quirk of fate, President Kennedy also was placed there after his assassination. Lynda Bird Johnson’s room happened to be the room in which Willie Lincoln died, and later on, Truman’s mother. It was also the room used by the doctors to perform the autopsy on Abraham Lincoln. It is therefore not too surprising that President Johnson’s daughter did not sleep too well in the room. She heard footsteps at night, and the phone would ring and no one would be on the other end. An exasperated White House telephone operator would come on again and again, explaining she did not ring her!

  But if Abraham Lincoln’s ghost roams the White House because of unfinished business, it is apparently a ghost free to do other things as well, something the average specter can’t do, since it is tied only to the place of its untimely demise.

  Mrs. Lincoln lived on for many more years, but ultimately turned senile and died not in her right mind at the home of her sister. Long before she became unbalanced, however, she journeyed to Boston in a continuing search for some proof of her late husband’s survival of bodily death. This was in the 1880s, and word had reached her that a certain photographer named William Mumler had been able to obtain the likenesses of dead people on his photographic plates under strict test conditions. She decided to try this man, fully aware that fraud might be attempted if she were recognized. Heavily veiled in mourning clothes, she sat down along with other visitors in Mumler’s experimental study. She gave the name of Mrs. Tyndall; all Mumler could see was a widow in heavy veils. Mumler then proceeded to take pictures of all those present in the room. When they were developed, there was one of “Mrs. Tyndall.” In back of her appears a semi-solid figure of Abraham Lincoln, with his hands resting upon the shoulders of his widow, and an expression of great compassion on his face. Next to Lincoln was the figure of their son Willie, who had died so young in the White House. Mumler showed his prints to the assembled group, and before Mrs. Lincoln could claim her print, another woman in the group exclaimed. “Why, that looks like President Lincoln!” Then Mrs. Lincoln identified herself for the first time.

  There is, by the way, no photograph in existence showing Lincoln with his son in the manner in which they appeared on the psychic photograph.

  Another photographic likeness of Lincoln was obtained in 1937 in an experiment commemorating the President’s one-hundredth birthday. This took place at Cassadaga, Florida, with Horace Hambling as the psychic intermediary, whose mere presence would make such a phenomenon possible.

  Ralph Pressing, editor of the Psychic Observer, was to supply and guard the roll of film to be used, and the exposures were made in dim light inside a séance room. The roll of film was then handed to a local photographer for developing, without telling him anything. Imagine the man’s surprise when he found a clearly defined portrait of Abraham Lincoln, along with four other, smaller faces, superimposed on the otherwise black negative.

  I myself was present at an experiment in San Francisco, when a reputable physician by the name of Andrew von Salza demonstrated his amazing gift of psychic photography, using a Polaroid camera. This was in the fall of 1966, and several other people witnessed the proceedings, which I reported in my book Psychic Photography—Threshold of a New Science?

  After I had examined the camera, lens, film, and premises carefully, Dr. von Salza took a number of pictures with the Polaroid camera. On many of them there appeared various “extras,” or faces of people superimposed in a manner excluding fraud or double exposure completely. The most interesting of these psychic impressions was a picture showing the face of President Lincoln, with President Kennedy next to him!

  Had the two men, who had suffered in so many similar ways, found a bond between them in the nonphysical world? The amazing picture followed one on which President Kennedy’s face appeared alone, accompanied by the word “War” written in white ectoplasm. Was this their way to warn us to �
��mend our ways”?

  Whatever the meaning, I am sure of one thing: The phenomenon itself, the experiment, was genuine and in no way the result of deceit, accident, self-delusion, or hallucination. I have published both pictures for all to see.

  There are dozens of good books dealing with the tragedy of Abraham Lincoln’s reign and untimely death. And yet I had always felt that the story had not been told fully. This conviction was not only due to the reported appearances of Lincoln’s ghost, indicating restlessness and unfinished business, but also to my objective historical training that somehow led me to reject the solutions given of the plot in very much the same way many serious people today refuse to accept the findings of the Warren Commission as final in the case of President Kennedy’s death. But where to begin?

  Surely, if Lincoln had been seen at the White House in recent years, that would be the place to start. True, he was shot at Ford’s Theatre and actually died in the Parker House across the street. But the White House was his home. Ghosts often occur where the “emotional center” of the person was, while in the body, even though actual death might have occurred elsewhere. A case in point is Alexander Hamilton, whose shade has been observed in what was once his personal physician’s house; it was there that he spent his final day on earth, and his unsuccessful struggle to cling to life made it his “emotional center” father than the spot in New Jersey where he received the fatal wound.