Lincoln’s Mirror Vision

Of all the stories told about Abraham Lincoln and the unseen, the mirror vision is among the best attested, because it comes from Lincoln himself. In autumn 1860, after his election as the sixteenth president, Lincoln was still living in Springfield, Illinois, the city where he had practised law for decades. According to the account he later gave to the journalist Noah Brooks, he came home tired from the excitement of the election news and lay down on a lounge in his room. Across from him stood a bureau with a swinging looking-glass.

Looking into the glass, Lincoln said, he saw his own face doubled: two separate and distinct images, the tip of one nose about three inches from the tip of the other. One face, he noticed, was paler than the other, by perhaps five shades. When he got up to look more closely, the illusion vanished; when he lay back down, it returned. He saw it again a few days later but, by his account, never managed to bring it back, though he tried to show it to his wife.

The meaning that was attached to it is what makes it a ghost story. In the version retold from Brooks, Mary Todd Lincoln took the doubled face as a sign: the two images meant that her husband would be elected to a second term, and the paler face meant that he would not live to the end of it. Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, early in that second term, and Brooks’s account of the vision appeared in print that same year, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (July 1865), under the title “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln.” Brooks, who had known Lincoln since the 1856 campaign and was close to the family in Washington, repeated the story in his 1895 book Washington in Lincoln’s Time.

Readers should keep in mind what the record does and does not show. The story reached print only after Lincoln’s death, so the “prophecy” was written down knowing how things ended. The sources opened for this entry do not agree on exactly when Lincoln told it to Brooks, and none names the room in his Springfield home. The vision sits alongside other, separately documented stories of the Lincoln household and the spirit world, notably Mary Lincoln’s grief-driven interest in Spiritualism and the séances she arranged at the White House after the death of their son Willie in 1862. Those stories belong to Washington, but they explain why the Lincolns are remembered in ghost lore at all.

A single reported vision: a doubled reflection of Lincoln’s face, one image markedly paler, which came and went as he stood and lay down. No ghost or recurring haunting is attached to the story.

A bedroom bureau mirror in Lincoln’s Springfield home, autumn 1860, according to the story’s retelling; the sources do not identify the room.

The vision is a staple of Lincoln lore, books on the president’s dreams and omens and ghost anthologies, and is often paired with the stories of Mary Lincoln’s séances and the many reported Lincoln apparitions in Washington.