Ghosts

by Hans Holzer

  Nell Gwyn’s spirit, as we shall see in a later chapter appeared in the romantic apartment of her younger years rather than in the staid home where she actually died.

  Even though there might be imprints of the great tragedy at both Ford’s Theatre and the Parker House, Lincoln himself would not, in my estimation, “hang around” there!

  My request for a quiet investigation in the White House went back to 1963 when Pierre Salinger was still in charge and John F. Kennedy was President. I never got an answer, and in March 1965 I tried again. This time, Bess Abell, social secretary to Mrs. Johnson, turned me down “for security reasons.” Patiently, I wrote back explaining I merely wanted to spend a half hour or so with a psychic, probably Mrs. Leek, in two rarely used areas: Lincoln’s bedroom and the East Room. Bess Abell had referred to the White House policy of not allowing visitors into the President’s private living quarters.” I pointed out that the President, to my knowledge, did not spend his nights in Lincoln’s bedroom, nor was the East Room anything but part of the ceremonial or official government rooms and hardly “private living quarters,” especially as tourists are taken through it every hour or so. As for security, why, I would gladly submit anything I wrote about my studies for their approval.

  Back came another pensive missive from Bess Abell. The President and Mrs. Johnson’s “restrictive schedules” would not permit my visit.

  I offered, in return, to come at any time, day or night, when the Johnsons were out of town.

  The answer was still no, and I began to wonder if it was merely a question of not wanting anything to do with ESP?

  But a good researcher never gives up hope. I subsequently asked Senator Jacob Javits to help me get into the White House, but even he couldn’t get me in. Through a local friend I met James Kerchum, the curator of the State rooms. Would he give me a privately conducted tour exactly like the regular tourist tour, except minus tourists to distract us?

  The answer remained negative.

  On March 6, 1967, Bess Abell again informed me that the only individuals eligible for admission to the two rooms I wanted to see were people invited for State visits and close personal friends. On either count, that left us out.

  I asked Elizabeth Carpenter, whom I knew to be favorably inclined toward ESP, to intervene. As press secretary to Mrs. Johnson, I thought she might be able to give me a less contrived excuse, at the very least. “An impossible precedent,” she explained, if I were to be allowed in. I refused to take the tourist tour, of course, as it would be a waste of my time, and dropped the matter for the time being.

  But I never lost interest in the case. To me, finding the missing link between what is officially known about Lincoln’s murderer and the true extent of the plot would be an important contribution to American history.

  The events themselves immediately preceding and following that dark day in American history are known to most readers, but there are, perhaps, some details which only the specialist would be familiar with and which will be found to have significance later in my investigation. I think it therefore useful to mention these events here, although they were not known to me at the time I undertook my psychic investigation. I try to keep my unconscious mind free of all knowledge so that no one may accuse my psychics of “reading my mind,” or suggest similar explanations for what transpires. Only at the end of this amazing case did I go through the contemporary record of the assassination.

  * * *

  The War between the States had been going on for four years, and the South was finally losing. This was obvious even to diehard Confederates, and everybody wanted only one thing to get it over with as quickly as possible and resume a normal life once again.

  While the South was, by and large, displaying apathy, there were still some fanatics who thought they could change the course of events by some miracle. In the North, it was a question of freeing the slaves and restoring the Union. In the South, it was not only a question of maintaining the economic system they had come to consider the only feasible one, but also one of maintaining the feudal, largely rural system their ancestors had known in Europe and which was being endangered by the industrialized North with its intellectuals, labor forces, and new values. To save the South from such a fate seemed a noble cause to a handful of fanatics, among them John Wilkes Booth, the man who was to play so fateful a role. Ironically, he was not even a true Southerner, but a man born on the fringe of the South, in Maryland, and his family, without exception, considered itself to be of the North.

  John Wilkes Booth was, of course, the lesser known of the Booth brothers, scions of a family celebrated in the theater of their age, and when Edwin Booth, “the Prince of Players,” learned of the terrible crime his younger brother had committed, he was genuinely shocked, and immediately made clear his position as a longtime supporter of Abraham Lincoln.

  But John Wilkes Booth did not care whether his people were with him or not. Still in his early twenties, he was not only politically immature but also romantically inspired. He could not understand the economic changes that were sure to take place and which no bullet could stop.

  And so, while the War between the States was drawing to a close, Booth decided to become the savior of his adopted Dixie, and surrounded himself with a small and motley band of helpers who had their secret meetings at Mrs. Mary Surratt’s boarding house in Washington.

  At first, they were discussing a plot to abduct President Lincoln and to deliver him to his foes at the Confederate capitol in Richmond, but the plot never came into being. Richmond fell to the Yankees, and time ran out for the cause of the Confederacy. As the days crept by and Booth’s fervor to “do something drastic” for his cause increased, the young actor started thinking in terms of killing the man whom he blamed for his country’s defeat. To Booth, Lincoln was the center of all he hated, and he believed that once the man was removed all would be well.

  Such reasoning, of course, is the reasoning of a demented mind. Had Booth really been an astute politician, he would have realized that Lincoln was a moderate compared to some members of his Cabinet, that the President was indeed, as some Southern leaders put it when news of the murder reached them, “the best friend the South had ever had.”

  Had he appraised the situation in Washington correctly, he would have realized that any man taking the place of Abraham Lincoln was bound to be far worse for Southern aspirations than Lincoln, who had deeply regretted the war and its hardships and who was eager to receive the seceded states back into the Union fold with as little punishment as possible.

  Not so the war party, principally Stanton, the Secretary of War, and Seward, the Secretary of State. Theirs was a harsher outlook, and history later proved them to be the winners—but also the cause of long years of continuing conflict between North and South, conflict and resentment that could have been avoided had Lincoln’s conciliatory policies been allowed to prevail.

  The principal fellow conspirators against Lincoln were an ex-Confederate soldier named Lewis Paine; David Herold, a druggist’s clerk who could not hold a job; George Atzerodt, a German born carriagemaker; Samuel Arnold, a clerk; Michael O’Laughlin, another clerk; Mrs. Mary Surratt, the Washington boarding house keeper at whose house they met; and finally, and importantly, John Harrison Surratt, her son, by profession a Confederate spy and courier. At the time of the final conspiracy Booth was only twenty-six, Surratt twenty-one, and Herold twenty-three, which perhaps accounts for the utter folly of their actions.

  The only one, besides Booth, who had any qualities of leadership was young Surratt. His main job at the time was traveling between Washington and Montreal as a secret courier for the Washington agents of the Confederacy and the Montreal, Canada headquarters of the rebels. Originally a clerk with the Adams Express Company, young Surratt had excellent connections in communications and was well known in Washington government circles, although his undercover activities were not.

  When Booth had convinced Surratt that the only way to help the Confedera
cy was to murder the President, they joined forces. Surratt had reservations about this course, and Mrs. Surratt certainly wanted no part of violence or murder. But they were both swept up in the course of events that followed.

  Unfortunately, they had not paid enough attention to the presence in the Surratt boarding house on H Street of a young War Department clerk named Louis Weichmann. Originally intending to become a priest, young Weichmann was a witness to much of the coming and going of the conspirators, and despite his friendship for John Surratt, which had originally brought him to the Surratt boarding house, he eventually turned against the Surratts. It was his testimony at Mrs. Surratt’s trial that ultimately led to her hanging.

  Originally, Mrs. Surratt had owned a tavern in a small town thirteen miles south of Washington then called Surrattsville and later, for obvious reasons, renamed Clinton, Maryland. When business at the tavern fell off, she leased it to an innkeeper named John Lloyd, and moved to Washington, where she opened a boarding house on H Street, between Sixth and Seventh Streets, which house still stands.

  Certainly she was present when the plans for Lincoln’s abduction were made, but she never was part of the conspiracy to kill him. That was chiefly Booth’s brain child, and all of his confederates were reluctant, in varying degrees, to go along with him; nevertheless, such was his ability to impress men that they ultimately gave in to his urgings. Then, too, they had already gotten into this conspiracy so deeply that if one were caught they’d all hang. So it seemed just as well that they did it together and increased their chances of getting away alive.

  Booth himself was to shoot the President. And when he discovered that the Lincolns would be in the State box at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, on the evening of April 14, 1865, it was decided to do it there. Surratt was to try to “fix the wires” so that the telegraph would not work during the time following the assassination. He had the right connections, and he knew he could do it. In addition, he was to follow General Grant on a train that was to take the general and his wife to New Jersey. Lewis Paine was to kill Secretary Seward at the same time.

  Booth had carefully surveyed the theater beforehand, making excellent use of the fact that as an actor he was known and respected there. This also made it quite easy to get inside the strategic moment. The play on stage was “Our American Cousin” starring Laura Keene. Booth’s plans were furthermore helped by a stroke of luck—or fate, if you prefer, namely, one of the men who was supposed to guard the President’s box was momentarily absent from his post.

  The hour was shortly after 10 P.M. when Booth quickly entered the box, killed Lincoln with a small Derringer pistol, struggled with a second guard and then, according to plan, jumped over the box rail onto the stage below.

  Lincoln lived through the night but never regained consciousness. He expired in the Parker House across from Ford’s theatre, where he had been brought. Booth caught his heel on an American flag that adorned the stage box, and fell, breaking his leg in the process. Despite intense pain, he managed to escape in the confusion and jump on the horse he had prepared outside.

  When he got to the Navy Yard bridge crossing the Anacostia River, the sentry on this road leading to the South stopped him. What was he doing out on the road that late? In wartime Washington, all important exits from the city were controlled. But Booth merely told the man his name and that he lived in Charles County. He was let through, despite the fact that a nine o’clock curfew was being rigidly enforced at that moment. Many later historians have found this incident odd, and have darkly pointed to a conspiracy: It may well be that Surratt did arrange for the easy passage, as they had all along planned to use the road over the Anacostia River bridge to make good their escape.

  A little later, Booth was joined on the road by David Herold. Together they rode out to the Surratt tavern, where they arrived around midnight. The purpose of their visit there at that moment became clear to me only much later. The tavern had of course been a meeting place for Booth and Surratt and the others before Mrs. Surratt moved her establishment to Washington. Shortly after, the two men rode onward and entered the last leg of their journey. After a harrowing escape interrupted by temporary stays at Dr. Mudd’s office at Bryantown—where Booth had his leg looked after—and various attempts to cross the Potomac, the two men holed up at Garrett’s farm near Port Royal, Virginia. It was there that they were hunted down like mad dogs by the Federal forces. Twelve days after Lincoln’s murder, on April 26, 1865, Booth was shot down. Even that latter fact is not certain: Had he committed suicide when he saw no way out of Garrett’s burning barn, with soldiers all around it? Or had the avenger’s bullet of Sergeant Boston Corbett found its mark, as the soldier had claimed?

  It is not my intent here to go into the details of the flight and capture, as these events are amply told elsewhere. The mystery is not so much Booth’s crime and punishment, about which there is no doubt, but the question of who really plotted Lincoln’s death. The State funeral was hardly over when all sorts of rumors and legends concerning the plot started to spring up.

  Mrs. Surratt was arrested immediately, and she, along with Paine, Atzerodt, and Herold were hanged after a trial marked by prejudice and the withholding of vital information, such as Booth’s own diary, which Secretary of War Stanton had ordered confiscated and which was never entered as an exhibit at the trial. This, along with the fact that Stanton was at odds politically with Lincoln, gave rise to various speculations concerning Stanton’s involvement in the plot. Then, too, there was the question of the role John Surratt had played, so much of it covered by secrecy, like an iceburg with only a small portion showing above the surface!

  After he had escaped from the United States and gone to Europe and then to Egypt, he was ultimately captured and extradited to stand trial in 1867. But a jury of four Northerners and eight Southerners allowed him to go free, when they could not agree on a verdict of guilty. Surratt moved to Baltimore, where he went into business and died in 1916. Very little is known of his activities beyond these bare facts. The lesser conspirators, those who merely helped the murderer escape, were convicted to heavy prison terms.

  There was some to do about Booth’s body also. After it had been identified by a number of people who knew him in life, it was buried under the stone floor of the Arsenal Prison in Washington, the same prison where the four other conspirators had been executed. But in 1867, the prison was torn down and the five bodies exhumed. One of them, presumed to be Booth’s, was interred in the family plot in Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore. Yet a rumor arose, and never ceased, that actually someone else lay in Booth’s grave and, though most historians refuse to take this seriously, according to Philip Van Doren Stern, “the question of whether or not the man who died at Garrett’s Farm was John Wilkes Booth is one that doubtless will never be settled.”

  No accounts of any psychic nature concerning Booth have been reported to date, and Booth’s ghost does not walk the corridors of Ford’s Theatre the way Lincoln’s does in the White House. The spot where Garrett’s farm used to stand is no longer as it was, and a new building has long replaced the old barn.

  If I were to shed new light or uncover fresh evidence concerning the plot to kill Lincoln, I would have to go to a place having emotional ties to the event itself. But the constant refusal of the White House to permit me a short visit made it impossible for me to do so properly.

  The questions that, to me, seem in need of clarification concerned, first of all, the strange role John H. Surratt had played in the plot; secondly, was Booth really the one who initiated the murder, and was he really the leader of the plot? One notices the close parallel between this case and the assassination of President Kennedy.

  As I began this investigation, my own feelings were that an involvement of War Secretary Stanton could be shown and that there probably was a northern plot to kill Lincoln as well as a southern desire to get rid of him. But that was pure speculation on my part, and I had as yet nothing to back up my contention. Then fa
te played a letter into my hands, out of left field, so to speak, that gave me new hope for a solution to this exciting case.

  A young girl by the name of Phyllis Amos, of Washington, Pennsylvania, had seen me on a television show in the fall of 1967. She contacted me by letter, and as a consequence I organized an expedition to the Surratt tavern, the same tavern that had served as home to Mrs. Mary Surratt and as a focal point of the Lincoln conspiracy prior to the move to H Street in Washington.

  Phyllis’ connection with the old tavern goes back to 1955. It was then occupied by a Mrs. Ella Curtain and by Phyllis’ family, who shared the house with this elderly lady. Mrs. Curtain’s brother B. K. Miler, a prosperous supermarket owner nearby, was the actual owner of the house, but the let his sister live there. Since it was a large house, they subleased to the Amos family, which then consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Amos and their two girls, about two years apart in age.

  Phyllis, who is now in her twenties, occupied a room on the upper floor; across the narrow hall from her room was Ella Curtain’s room—once the room where John Wilkes Booth had hidden his guns. To the right of Phyllis’ bedroom and a few steps down was a large room where the conspirators met regularly. It was shielded from the curious by a small anteroom through which one would have to go to reach the meeting room. Downstairs were the parents’ room and a large reception room. The house stood almost directly on the road, surrounded by dark green trees. A forlorn metal sign farther back was the sole indication that this was considered a historical landmark: If you didn’t know the sign was there, you wouldn’t find it unless you were driving by at very slow speed.

  Mrs. Amos never felt comfortable in the house from the moment they moved in, and after eight months of occupancy the Amos family left. But during those eight months they experienced some pretty strange things. One day she was alone in the house when it suddenly struck her that someone was watching her intently. Terrified, she ran to her bedroom and locked the door, not coming out until her husband returned. The smaller of the two girls kept asking her mother who the strange men were she saw sitting on the back stairs. She would hear them talk in whispers up there.