White House

The White House has attracted ghost stories since the nineteenth century. First Lady Abigail Adams is said to appear carrying laundry — an echo of her using the East Room to hang the washing. But the persistent legend is Abraham Lincoln, assassinated in 1865: staff and guests have reported for generations that they saw him pacing the halls or standing at a window in the Lincoln Bedroom. The White House Historical Association points to a far more earthly origin: the tales that Jeremiah Smith, the house's cleaner for some thirty-five years, told reporters on slow news days. And there is a material explanation for the noises: when Harry Truman described them in his letters of 1945-46, the building really was falling apart — so much so that it had to be gutted and rebuilt from the inside between 1948 and 1952.

Most famous haunted houses are haunted by strangers: a name on a gravestone, a story someone's grandmother told. The White House is different. Almost everything in its ghost repertoire was first said out loud by somebody whose name is on the payroll or on the mail — a duster, a military aide, a first lady, a president writing to his wife. And almost all of it was said while the building was quietly falling apart. The oldest thread starts before the plaster was dry. John and Abigail Adams moved into an unfinished President's House in November 1800. The vast room James Hoban and George Washington had designed as a "Public Audience Room" — what is now the East Room — had no use yet, so the first lady used it to hang out the wash. That is the documented fact, kept by the White House Historical Association in its own room-by-room history of the house. The ghost story grew out of it later: staff describing the smell of damp laundry and lavender in the grandest room in the building, and Abigail Adams still at work in it. The man who probably did more than anyone to populate the house with spirits was not a president. Jeremiah "Jerry" Smith came to the White House during the Ulysses S. Grant administration in the late 1860s as a footman and stayed roughly thirty-five years, working as butler, cook, doorman and "official duster". Reporters called him the Knight of the Feather Duster, and the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston posed him with it in 1889. The historian William Bushong, writing for the White House Historical Association, makes the case plainly: the legend of Lincoln's ghost "may have emanated from stories that Jeremiah 'Jerry' Smith would spin for reporters". A Chicago newspaper in 1889 described him as "a firm believer in ghosts and their appurtenances", convinced "that the White House is haunted by the spirits of all the departed Presidents, and, furthermore, that his Satanic majesty, the devil, has his abode in the attic", a conviction he refreshed "at intervals" with "some new strange noise he has heard". Smith said he had seen Lincoln, Grant and McKinley, and that they tried to speak to him but could only produce a buzzing sound. He was also the man who shouted the news of McKinley's shooting down a White House stairwell. Theodore Roosevelt visited him at home in Washington shortly before he died of throat cancer in 1904; the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the White House was more changed by his disappearance than by the architects who remodeled it". Other nineteenth-century residents of the story have simply been forgotten. In 1883 the Washington Critic printed a "White House attaché's" description of an old man haunting the Second Floor bedrooms — "an aged and bent man with long, phosphorescent, white beard and hair" whose "walk is noiseless but stately". In 1897 a White House policeman investigating a light in the greenhouse complex on the west side of the building said he was met by "a tall, beautiful lady dressed in the fashion of the early nineteenth century", who vanished leaving "a musical laugh". He went back a month later, felt a rush of air and a touch on his shoulder, and fainted. Having told his superiors, he was discharged. The best-documented episode of all belongs to the Taft years, and it survives because someone wrote it down at the time. On 26 July 1911 Major Archibald Butt, President William Howard Taft's military aide, wrote to his sister Clara: "It seems that the White House is haunted . . . The ghost, it seems, is a young boy—from its description, I should think about fourteen or fifteen years old . . . They say that the first knowledge one has of the presence of the Thing is a slight pressure on the shoulder, as of someone were leaning over your shoulder to see what you might be doing." When Butt repeated the staff gossip to the president, Taft flew into "a towering rage" and ordered him to tell the housekeeper that the first member of staff to repeat the story would be fired. And then comes Harry Truman, who is the reason this file exists. In a letter to Bess dated 12 June 1945 — the National Archives catalogues it under the subject heading "Ghosts" — the new president wrote: "I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches—all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth—I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country." On 9 September 1946 he wrote again: "The damned place is haunted, sure as shootin. . . . You and Margie had better come back and protect me before some of these ghosts carry me off." He was describing a structural failure. The floors swayed underfoot, joints popped and cracked, and rats moved through holes in the walls. In 1948, while Lorenzo Winslow was building the balcony on the South Portico, the leg of Margaret Truman's piano went through the floor of her sitting room on the Second Floor. A photograph taken on 7 March 1950 shows the cracked wooden beam that had been carrying it. Engineers concluded that the entire second floor was unsafe and that the interior load-bearing walls were grossly inadequate. On 8 November 1948, on the recommendation of the Federal Works Administrator, the presidential household moved across the street to Blair House and the Mansion was closed to visitors. Truman then did something no ghost story can compete with: he put the diagnosis in writing to Congress. In a letter dated 16 February 1949 he asked for $5,400,000 and reported that "structural conditions in the Executive Mansion are more critical than was anticipated, and that it cannot be used for residence or other purposes without the completion of major repairs". He noted that razing and rebuilding would probably be cheaper, and refused. On 25 March he asked Congress to create a supervising commission; the bill was approved on 14 April 1949. In December 1949 crews began dismantling the interior. Foundations were dug twenty-two feet below the existing footings, a steel skeleton was raised inside the original stone walls, and everything within them was torn out. The cracked Georgia longleaf pine beams James Hoban had installed after the 1814 fire were trucked to Knipp & Co. in South Baltimore, where a crew of a dozen men — one of them Earvin Ruddick, interviewed decades later by Robert Klara — cut out the splintered sections and milled the rest into moulding for the ground-floor rooms. The Trumans moved back in on 27 March 1952, into a house whose exterior was ancient and whose interior was one year old. The final bill came to about $5.7 million, and Truman thought it outrageous: "With all the trouble and worry it is worth it—but not 5 ½ million dollars! If I could have had charge of the construction it would have been done for half the money and in half the time!" Later that year he walked a television audience through the result alongside Walter Cronkite, Bryson Rash and Frank Bourgholtzer — the transcript is in the National Archives — and told the story of Dolley Madison saving the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington in 1814. He had, in the most literal sense available, exorcised the house: the floors that popped no longer existed.

The White House stands at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., inside President's Park, which the National Park Service administers. Two things are worth knowing before planning anything: the tour is free, and you cannot simply buy a ticket. Public tours are self-guided and must be requested through a Member of Congress if you are a United States citizen, or through your embassy in Washington if you are not. Requests are accepted no more than three months and no less than 21 days before the date you want, and are handled first come, first served with a limited number of places. Tours are generally available Tuesday to Saturday excluding federal holidays; the White House gives the usual windows as 7:30 to 11:30 in the morning Tuesday to Thursday and 7:30 to 13:30 Friday and Saturday. The route covers the State Floor: the Entrance Hall, Cross Hall, East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room and State Dining Room, with Secret Service officers stationed along the way to answer questions about each room. Tours can be cancelled at very short notice, even after confirmation, so call the 24-hour Visitors Office information line on 202-456-7041 before you set out. Manage your expectations about the ghosts. The Lincoln Bedroom, the Yellow Oval Room and the second-floor hallway — where essentially every sighting in this file was reported — are part of the private Residence and are not on any public tour. The East Room, where Abigail Adams hung the wash and where Harrison, Taylor and Lincoln lay in state, is on the route, and so is the Blue Room, which lore assigns to John Tyler. If you have no tour, the White House Visitor Center at 1450 Pennsylvania Avenue NW is the substitute and it is a good one: free admission, around a hundred artefacts from the White House collection, an interactive touchscreen tour of the building, a fourteen-minute film titled White House: Reflections From Within, a National Park Service information desk and the White House Historical Association shop. Entry requires TSA-style security screening. Under the superintendent's compendium, pets other than service animals, knives of any kind including nail clippers, aerosol and non-aerosol sprays, glass containers, food and drink other than water in clear plastic bottles and baby formula, and bags larger than 18 by 16 by 8 inches are not allowed inside. President's Park itself is open year round and free. The classic views are from Pennsylvania Avenue and Lafayette Park on the north side and from the Ellipse on the south side; the South Grounds themselves open to ticketed visitors only during the spring and autumn Garden Tours. Note that temporary closures for events and for Secret Service operations are frequent and are not announced far ahead, and that the White House is an active construction and security environment; check the park's conditions page and the White House site on the morning of your visit rather than relying on anything printed in advance.