White House Ghosts

The White House has been home to every American president since John Adams moved in, unfinished, in 1800. It was burned by British troops in 1814 and rebuilt, gutted and reconstructed under Truman, and over two centuries it has seen the deaths of two presidents in office within its walls, the grief of families who lost children there, and the pressures of war. It is little surprise that it has a ghost lore of its own – one the White House Historical Association, the nonprofit founded by Jacqueline Kennedy, has gathered from letters, memoirs and staff tradition.

The stories begin with real grief. After eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever in the White House in 1862, Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the Red Room in hope of contacting him, and she later claimed to have heard Andrew Jackson stomping and swearing in the halls. Staff in the 1870s said they saw Willie himself. Around 1901–04 a long-serving staff member, Jerry Smith, regaled colleagues with sightings of Lincoln, Grant, McKinley and several first ladies, and in 1911 President Taft’s military aide, Major Archibald Butt, wrote to his sister about a ghostly presence frightening the staff – stories Taft reportedly ordered them to stop spreading.

Abraham Lincoln is by far the most frequently reported ghost. Grace Coolidge is credited as the first to describe him, standing at a window of the Yellow Oval Room looking out toward the Potomac; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, visiting in 1942, is said to have answered a knock at night and seen him in a frock coat and top hat (the popular claim that she fainted is contradicted by a 1996 Dutch account). Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary said she saw him pulling on his boots in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Winston Churchill reputedly met him by the fireplace after a bath. Harry Truman, who heard unexplained knocks, wrote to his wife in 1946 that the place was “haunted sure as shootin’.” Other figures in the lore include Abigail Adams in the East Room, where she once hung laundry, Dolley Madison guarding the Rose Garden, a British soldier from 1814, and David Burnes, who owned the land before the city was built.

None of the accounts is documented beyond the say-so of those who told them, and several – Churchill’s especially – come to us third-hand, decades later. Taken together, though, they are a revealing piece of American folklore: a house so loaded with history and grief that its residents half expected it to be haunted.

Reported phenomena include Lincoln seen standing at windows, lying on or sitting by the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom, or pulling on his boots; knocks on doors at night; footsteps in empty corridors; the smell of laundry and lavender in the East Room; and figures of first ladies, a child and a soldier.

The Lincoln Bedroom (Lincoln’s former office and Cabinet Room), the Yellow Oval Room, the Red Room and the East Room in the executive residence, and the Rose Garden and grounds. Most stories come from residents, guests and household staff at night.

The White House ghosts are a perennial Halloween feature for news outlets, and the White House Historical Association publishes a guide to the mansion’s ghost stories. Lincoln’s ghost has inspired books, documentaries and countless retellings, and presidents from Truman to more recent occupants have joked about it.