by Hans Holzer
The July, 1959, issue of the American Institute of Architects Journal contains a brief account of the long service record of employee James Cypress. Although he himself never saw any ghosts, he reports that at one time when his wife was ill, the doctor saw a man dressed in the clothes of one hundred fifty years ago coming down the spiral staircase. As the doctor looked at the strange man in puzzlement, the man just disappeared into thin air.
After some correspondence with J. W. Rankin, Director of the Institute, my wife and I finally started out for Washington on May 17, 1963. It was a warm day and the beautiful Georgian mansion set back from one of the capital’s busier streets promised an adventure into a more relaxed past.
Mr. Rankin received us with interest and showed us around the house which was at that time fortunately empty of tourists and other visitors. It was he who supplied some of the background information on the Octagon, from which I quote:
The Octagon ghosts—Washington, D.C.
The White House and the Octagon are relations, in a way. Both date from the beginning of government in the national capital; the White House was started first but the Octagon was first completed. Both have served as the official residence of the President.
It was early in 1797 that Colonel John Tayloe of Mount Airy, Virginia, felt the need for a town house. Mount Airy was a magnificent plantation of some three thousand acres, on which the Colonel, among many activities, bred and raced horses, but the call of the city was beginning to be felt, even in that early day; Philadelphia was the Colonel’s choice, but his friend General Washington painted a glowing picture of what the new national capital might become and persuaded him to build the Octagon in surroundings that were then far removed from urbanity.
Dr. William Thornton, winner of the competition for the Capitol, was Colonel Tayloe’s natural selection of architect.
On April 19, 1797, Colonel Tayloe purchased for $1,000 from Gustavus W. Scott—one of the original purchasers from the Government on November 21, 1796—Lot 8 in Square 170 in the new plot of Washington. Although, as the sketch of 1813 shows, the site was apparently out in a lonely countryside, the city streets had been definitely plotted, and the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street was then where it is today.
Obviously, from a glance at the plot plan, Colonel Tayloe’s house derived its unique shape from the angle formed at the junction of these two streets. In spite of the name by which the mansion has always been known, Dr. Thornton could have had no intention of making the plan octagonal; the house planned itself from the street frontages.
Work on the building started in 1798 and progressed under the occasional inspection of General Washington, who did not live to see its completion in 1800. The mansion immediately took its place as a center of official and nonofficial social activities. Through its hospitable front door passed Madison, Jefferson, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, Decatur, Porter, Webster, Clay, Lafayette, Von Steuben, Calhoun, Randolph, Van Renssalaer and their ladies.
Social activities were forgotten, however, when the War of 1812 threatened and finally engulfed the new nation’s capital. On August 24, 1814, the British left the White House a fire-gutted ruin. Mrs. Tayloe’s foresight in establishing the French Minister—with his country’s flag—as a house guest may have saved the Octagon from a like fate.
The winding staircase at the Octagon and the chandelier that moves at times
From this landing Colonel Taylor’s daughter jumped to her death
Colonel Tayloe is said to have dispatched a courier from Mount Airy, offering President Madison the use of the mansion, and the Madisons moved in on September 8, 1814.
For more than a year Dolly Madison reigned as hostess of the Octagon. In the tower room just over the entrance President Madison established his study, and here signed the Treaty of Ghent on February 17, 1815, establishing a peace with Great Britain which endures to this day.
After the death of Mrs. John Tayloe in 1855, the Octagon no longer served as the family’s town house. That part of Washington lost for a time its residential character and the grand old mansion began to deteriorate.
In 1865 it was used as a school for girls. From 1866 to 1879 the Government rented it for the use of the Hydrographic Office. As an office and later as a studio dwelling, the Octagon served until about 1885, when it was entrusted by the Tayloe heirs to a caretaker.
Glenn Brown, longtime secretary of the American Institute of Architects, suggested in 1889 that the house would make an appropriate headquarters for the Institute.
When the architects started to rehabilitate the building, it was occupied by ten Negro families. The fine old drawing room was found to be piled four feet deep with rubbish. The whole interior was covered with grime, the fireplaces closed up, windows broken, but the structure, built a century before, had been denied no effort or expense to make it worthy of the Tayloes, and it still stood staunch and sound against time and neglect.
Miraculously the slender balusters of the famous stairway continued to serve, undoubtedly helped by the fact that every fifth baluster is of iron, firmly jointed to the handrail and carriage. Even the Coade Stone mantels in drawing room and dining room, with their deeply undercut sculpture, show not a chip nor scar. They had been brought from London in 1799 and bear that date with the maker’s name.
On January 1, 1899, the Institute took formal possession of the rehabilitated mansion, its stable, smokehouse and garden.
So much for the house itself. I was given free rein to interview the staff, and proceeded to do so. I carefully tabulated the testimony given me by the employees individually, and checked the records of each of them for reliability and possible dark spots. There were none.
In view of the fact that nobody was exactly eager to be put down as having heard or seen ghosts, far from seeking publicity or public attention, I can only regard these accounts as respectable experiences of well-balanced individuals.
The building itself was then and still is in the care of Alric H. Clay, a man in his thirties, who is an executive with the title of superintendent. The museum part of the Octagon, as different from the large complex of offices of the American Institute of Architects, is under the supervision of Mrs. Belma May, who is its curator. She is assisted by a staff of porters and maids, since on occasion formal dinners or parties take place in the oldest part of the Octagon.
Mrs. May is not given to hallucinations or ghost stories, and in a matter-of-fact voice reported to me what she had experienced in the building. Most of her accounts are of very recent date.
The haunted stairs
The carpet where the girl landed and died continues to fling itself back and forth by unseen hands.
Mrs. May saw the big chandelier swing of its own volition while all windows in the foyer were tightly shut; she mentioned the strange occurrence to a fellow worker. She also hears strange noises, not accounted for, and mostly on Saturdays. On one occasion, Mrs. May, accompanied by porters Allen and Bradley, found tracks of human feet in the otherwise undisturbed dust on the top floor, which had long been closed to the public. The tracks looked to her as “if someone were standing on toes, tiptoeing across the floor.” It was from there that the daughter of Colonel Tayloe had jumped.
Mrs. May often smells cooking in the building when there is no party. She also feels “chills” on the first-floor landing.
Caretaker Mathew reports that when he walks up the stairs, he often feels as if someone is walking behind him, especially on the second floor. This is still happening to him now.
Ethel Wilson, who helps with parties, reports “chills” in the cloakroom.
Porter Allen was setting up for a meeting on the ground floor in the spring of 1962, when he heard noises “like someone dragging heavy furniture across the floor upstairs.” In March, 1963, he and his colleague saw the steps “move as if someone was walking on them, but there was no one there.” This happened at 9:30 A.M.
Porter Bradley has heard groaning, but the sound is hard to pin down
as to direction. Several times he has also heard footsteps.
Alric H. Clay was driving by with his wife and two children one evening in the spring of 1962, when he noticed that the lights in the building were on. Leaving his family in the car, he entered the closed building by the back door and found everything locked as it should be. However, in addition to the lights being on, he also noticed that the carpet edge was flipped up at the spot where the girl had fallen to her death in the 1800s.
Clay, not believing in ghosts, went upstairs; there was nobody around, so he turned the lights off, put the carpet back as it should be, and went downstairs into the basement where the light controls are.
At that moment, on the main floor above (which he had just left) he clearly heard someone walk from the drawing room to the door and back. Since he had just checked all doors and knew them to be bolted firmly, he was so upset he almost electrocuted himself at the switches. The steps were heavy and definitely those of a man.
In February of 1963 there was a late party in the building. After everybody had left, Clay went home secure in the knowledge that he alone possessed the key to the back door. The layout of the Octagon is such that nobody can hide from an inspection, so a guest playing a prank by staying on is out of the question.
At 3 A.M. the police called Clay to advise him that all lights at the Octagon were blazing and that the building was wide open. Mr. Woverton, the controller, checked and together with the police went through the building, turning off all lights once more. Everything was locked up again, in the presence of police officers.
At 7 A.M., however, they returned to the Octagon once more, only to find the door unlocked, the lights again burning. Yet, Clay was the only one with the key!
“Mr. Clay,” I said, “after all these weird experiences, do you believe in ghosts?”
“No, I don’t,” Clay said, and laughed somewhat uneasily. He is a man of excellent educational background and the idea of accepting the uncanny was not at all welcome to him. But there it was.
“Then how do you explain the events of the past couple of years?”
“I don’t,” he said and shrugged. “I just don’t have a rational explanation for them. But they certainly happened.”
From the testimony heard, I am convinced that there are two ghosts in the Octagon, restlessly pacing the creaking old floors, vying with each other for the attention of the flesh-and-blood world outside.
There are the dainty footsteps of Colonel Tayloe’s suicide daughter, retracing the walks she enjoyed but too briefly; and the heavy, guilt-laden steps of the father, who cannot cut himself loose from the ties that bind him to his house and the tragedy that darkened both the house and his life.
* 54 The Octagon Revisited
BACK IN 1965 I published a comprehensive account of the hauntings and strange goings-on at one of Washington’s most famous houses. Frequently referred to as “the second White House” because it served in that capacity to President Madison during the War of 1812, the Octagon still stands as a superb monument to American architecture of the early nineteenth century. Most people hear more about the Pentagon than about the Octagon when referring to Washington these days, but the fact is that the Octagon is still a major tourist attraction, although not for the same reasons that brought me there originally. As a matter of fact, The American Institute of Architects, who own the building, were and are quite reluctant to discuss their unseen tenants. It took a great deal of persuasion and persistence to get various officials to admit that there was something amiss in the old building.
After my first account appeared in Ghosts I’ve Met, which Bobbs-Merrill published in 1965, I received a number of calls from people in Washington who had also been to the Octagon and experienced anything ranging from chills to uncanny feelings. I also found that the executives of The American Institute of Architects were no longer quite so unfriendly towards the idea of a parapsychologist investigating their famous old headquarters. They had read my account and found in it nothing but truthful statements relating to the history and psychic happenings in the house, and there really was nothing they could complain about. Thus, over the years I remained on good terms with the management of The American Institute of Architects. I had several occasions to test the relationship because once in a while there seemed to be a chance to make a documentary film in Washington, including, of course, the Octagon. It didn’t come to pass because of the difficulties involved not with The American Institute of Architects but the more worldly difficulties of raising the needed capital for such a serious-minded film.
* * *
Originally I became aware of the potential hauntings at the Octagon because of a Life magazine article in 1962. In a survey of allegedly haunted houses, Life claimed that some visitors to the Octagon had seen a shadow on the spot where a daughter of Colonel Tayloe, who had built the house, had fallen to her death. As far as I could ascertain at the time, there was a tradition in Washington that Colonel John Tayloe, who had been the original owner of the Octagon, had also been the grieving father of a daughter who had done the wrong thing marriage-wise. After she had run away from home, she had later returned with her new husband asking forgiveness from her stern father and getting short shrift. In desperation, so the tradition goes, she then flung herself from the third-floor landing of the winding staircase, landing on a spot near the base of the stairs. She died instantly. That spot, by the way, is one of those considered to be the most haunted parts of the Octagon.
A somewhat different version is given by Jacqueline Lawrence in a recent survey of Washington hauntings published by the Washington Post in October of 1969. According to Miss Lawrence, Colonel Tayloe had more than one daughter. Another daughter, the eldest one, had fallen in love with a certain Englishman. After a quarrel with her father, who did not like the suitor, the girl raced up the stairs and when she reached the second landing, went over the bannister and fell two flights to her death. This, then, would have been not a suicide but an accident. As for the other daughter, the one who had brought home the wrong suitor according to tradition, Miss Lawrence reports that she did not marry the man after all. Her father thought of this young Washington attorney as a man merely after his daughter’s money and refused to accept him. This was especially necessary as he himself had already chosen a wealthy suitor for his younger daughter. Again an argument ensued, during which he pushed the girl away from him. She fell over that same ill-fated bannister, breaking her neck in the fall. This also according to Miss Lawrence was an accident and not suicide or murder.
In addition to these two unfortunate girls, she also reports that a slave died on that same staircase. Pursued by a British naval officer, she threw herself off the landing rather than marry him. According to Miss Lawrence, the young man immediately leaped after her and joined her in death.
It is a moot question how easily anyone could fall over the bannister, and I doubt that anyone would like to try it as an experiment. But I wondered whether perhaps the story of the two girls had not in the course of time become confused into one tradition. All three deaths would have had to take place prior to 1814. In that year Washington was taken by the British, and after the burning of the White House President Madison and his family moved temporarily into the Octagon. They stayed there for one full year, during which the Octagon was indeed the official White House.
Only after President Madison and his family had left the Octagon did accounts of strange happenings there become known. People in Washington started to whisper that the house was haunted. Allegedly, bells could be heard when there was no one there to ring them. The shade of a girl in white had been observed slipping up the stairway. The usual screams and groans associated with phantoms were also reported by those in the know. According to Miss Lawrence, seven years after the Civil War five men decided to stay in the house after dark to prove to themselves that there was nothing to the stories about the haunting. They too were disturbed by footsteps, the sound of a sword rattling, and finally, human s
hrieks. Their names, unfortunately, are not recorded, but they did not stay the night.
After some correspondence with J. W. Rankin, Director of the Institute, my wife, Catherine, and I finally started out for Washington on May 17, 1963. The beautiful Georgian mansion greeted us almost as if it had expected us. At the time we did not come with a medium. This was our first visit and I wanted to gain first impressions and interview those who actually had come in contact with the uncanny, be it visual or auditory. First I asked Mr. Rankin to supply me with a brief but concise rundown on the history of the house itself. It is perhaps best to quote here my 1965 report in Ghosts I’ve Met. (See quote on page 313.)
Only one prior account of any unusual goings-on at the Octagon had come to my attention before my visit in 1963. The July 1959 issue of The American Institute of Architects’ Journal contains a brief account of the long service record of a certain employee named James Cypress. Although Mr. Cypress himself had never seen any ghosts, he did report that there was an unusual occurrence at one time when his wife was ill and in need of a doctor. The doctor had reported that he had seen a man dressed in the clothes of about one hundred fifty years ago coming down the spiral staircase. The doctor looked at the stranger somewhat puzzled. At that instant the apparition dissolved into thin air, leaving the medical man even more bewildered. A short time before publication of Ghosts I’ve Met, Joy Miller of the Associated Press wrote to me about the Octagon ghosts, adding a few more details to the story.
Legend has it that on certain days, particularly the anniversary of the tragic affair, no one may cross the hall at the foot of the stairway where the body landed without unconsciously going around an unseen object lying there.