The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln

The first well-documented sighting came from Grace Coolidge, wife of President Calvin Coolidge.

She reported seeing Abraham Lincoln standing at the window of the Oval Office. Standing and looking out. In the direction of the Potomac River. In the direction, roughly, of the old battlefields.

She did not scream. She did not faint. She observed what she was seeing and then reported it, matter-of-factly, the way you might report an unusual bird at the feeder.

This was Grace Coolidge. She was a composed and practical woman. She was not given to dramatics.

Lincoln, in her account, was just standing there. Looking out. He did not appear to notice her. He was doing what he apparently does: standing at the window, looking toward the battlefields, thinking about something.

You have to wonder what.

The Civil War had been over for sixty years by the time Grace Coolidge saw him. The battlefields were parks by then. The country had recovered, more or less, in the particular way that countries recover from things, which is to say incompletely.

Maybe he was watching the recovery. Maybe he found it insufficient. Maybe he just liked the view.

Nobody has been able to ask him.

This one is my favorite. And I say that with full acknowledgment that it is a terrible thing to have happen to a person.

Winston Churchill visited the White House during World War II. He was given the Lincoln Bedroom, which is named Lincoln Bedroom because Lincoln used it as an office, not because Lincoln slept in it, but which is still, by all accounts, heavily Lincoln.

Churchill liked to take long baths. He liked to have a scotch during his bath and walk around his room afterward without clothes on, which is a man who was very comfortable with himself.

He walked out of the bathroom. He was undressed. He was holding his scotch.

Abraham Lincoln was standing by the fireplace.

Lincoln looked at Churchill.

Churchill looked at Lincoln.

Churchill said, reportedly: 'Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage.'

Lincoln smiled. And disappeared.

Churchill refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom after that. He moved to a different room for the rest of his stay. Winston Churchill, who had stared down the Blitz, who had refused to negotiate with Hitler, who had delivered the most defiant speeches in the English language: he moved rooms because of a ghost.

I think that tells you something about the quality of the haunting.

Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands also stayed at the White House. She was also given a room. She was also, it seems, not told everything she needed to know before bed.

She heard a knock at her door during the night.

She got up and answered it.

Abraham Lincoln was standing in the hallway. In his stovepipe hat. Looking at her with the expression that Lincoln apparently has, which is: serious and somewhat sorrowful and entirely too present for a man who died in 1865.

Queen Wilhelmina fainted.

She was found on the floor. Staff helped her up. She was, by all accounts, not a person who fainted easily. She was a monarch. She had held the Dutch government in exile during the Nazi occupation. She was made of serious material.

But she fainted.

When she came to, she confirmed what she had seen. She did not doubt it. She did not try to rationalize it. She had answered the door and Abraham Lincoln had been standing there and that was what had happened.

There is something both very polite and very alarming about Lincoln knocking. He did not just appear in the room. He knocked. He waited at the door like a proper guest. A proper guest who is also a ghost who has been dead for eighty years and was not invited.

Theodore Roosevelt said he felt Lincoln's presence in the White House. Roosevelt was not a man who said things he did not mean. He was not fanciful. He was a man who boxed, hunted large game, led a cavalry charge, and read a book a day. If Theodore Roosevelt said he felt something, that is worth noting.

Herbert Hoover reported it too. Hoover was an engineer by training. An engineer is exactly the kind of person you would expect to not report ghost experiences, and yet.

Harry Truman heard knocking on his bedroom door. Regularly. He wrote about it in his diary. He wrote: 'I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches, and all of a sudden I think of Lincoln and his almost super-human efforts.' He also wrote that he heard knocking. He also wrote that nobody was there.

Eleanor Roosevelt said she could feel Lincoln's presence when she worked late. She found it, by her account, companionable. She was not frightened. She felt that Lincoln was still working too. That he was still there, late at night, thinking about something. She found it comforting.

I am trying to imagine finding a presidential ghost comforting and I think I am almost there.

Here is the question everyone asks and nobody can answer.

Why would Lincoln stay?

He finished his work. He won the war. The Union held. The Confederacy surrendered. Slavery was abolished. He had one more term ahead of him and plans to bind the nation's wounds, as he put it, with malice toward none.

And then he was shot in the back of the head at a theatre.

Maybe that is why.

Maybe there is such a thing as unfinished work. Maybe the Reconstruction he planned went sideways in ways he finds troubling. Maybe he just likes the building. He spent four of the hardest years in American history in that building. He made the most consequential decisions ever made in those rooms. Maybe the place holds him the way some places hold people.

Or maybe it is simpler than that. Maybe Abraham Lincoln, who believed in spirits and held seances and dreamed prophetic dreams, is not entirely surprised to still be there. Maybe he is exactly as he was in life: standing at the window, looking out, thinking about the country, wondering if it is going to be okay.

The good news is that he seems calm.

The bad news is that when he knocks on your door in the middle of the night, nobody warns you first.

Sleep tight.