Josiah Quincy and Washington’s Ghost

In the spring of 1806, Josiah Quincy III, a Massachusetts member of Congress who would later be mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, visited Mount Vernon. The estate then belonged to George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court justice, who offered his guest the bedchamber in which Washington had died in December 1799. According to the family story, Quincy had been hoping to see the first president’s ghost, and during the night he did.

The story is known only at second hand. It was told by Quincy’s son, Josiah Quincy Jr., in a book of reminiscences, Figures of the Past, published after his death in 1883; he was reportedly too young to have witnessed it himself. The American Battlefield Trust notes that the tale gained attention during the late nineteenth-century wave of interest in Spiritualism. The son also related that Quincy was later shown the family tomb and found the velvet cover of the coffin hanging in tatters, which he blamed on relic hunters, and which the family tale linked to the ghost’s restlessness.

Quincy is not the only person to report something at Mount Vernon. The research historian Mary Thompson has said that she began hearing ghost stories from colleagues within weeks of joining the staff. Staff accounts include a sighting in the 1980s of an elderly man with a moustache in nineteenth-century clothes who vanished, later identified from a portrait as Harrison Howell Dodge, the estate’s superintendent for 52 years until his death in 1937, and a supervisor in 2006 who felt hands push her shoulders in the upstairs bedrooms. Thompson says she has never had such an experience herself.

The Quincy account is best understood as a family anecdote with a famous cast: a future college president, the nation’s founder and a room with a deathbed history. It shows how soon after Washington’s death the idea of his restless spirit entered American folklore.

An apparition of George Washington reported by a guest in the room where he died; later staff accounts of a figure resembling a former superintendent and of unseen hands.

The bedchamber where Washington died, upstairs in the mansion, and the family tomb on the grounds.

The story appears in ghost anthologies, in Mount Vernon’s own history pages and in American Battlefield Trust features, and has been repeated in newspapers every Halloween.