The Good Friday Presentiment: Lincoln Foretold His Own Assassination

LONG SHADOWS: More Ghosts and Haunts of the Civil War

Some say this late war photo of Lincoln is the image of a man who has had a vision of his own funeral.

On Good Friday in April of 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.

Far away to the north, young Mary Brennan, an Irish immigrant only recently arrived to our shores, remembered well that dreadful day, etched in her memory for the rest of her life.  Mary was a devout Catholic, but like many a devout Protestant of the day, she regarded Good Friday, the day Christ died, as a somber and solemn holy day. It was not a day to be honored with laughing, frivolity or going out to see a musical comedy at the theater.

Ford’s Theater. The box where Lincoln was shot.

“He never would have died” Mary would often say, “had he not gone to see that play on Good Friday.”  Great grandmother was a font of omens and superstitions; her numerous descendants can still recite one or another piece of her Old World wisdom at will.

Abraham Lincoln, however, was never a “technical Christian,” as another Mary–Mary Todd Lincoln–once explained to an interviewer. Indeed, President Lincoln had ample reason to celebrate that Good Friday.   Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his entire army had surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant scarcely a week before, and that very morning the Grant was delivering his report to the President and Cabinet in person. 

For the first time in four years, Lincoln, who frequently suffered from “melancholy” seemed uncommonly hopeful, now that the end of the Rebellion was in sight.  Lincoln could at last look ahead to the future, forward to peace and the task of rebuilding a nation torn apart by a deadly fratricidal conflict.

As his Cabinet chatted before the official beginning of the meeting, Lincoln casually told them that Good Friday about the “usual dream” he had had only the night before.  He explained that before every major event of the war, he had dreamed the same dream: of a ship sailing towards a distant shore.  It always portended important war news.  Lincoln, raised on presentments, omens and prophetic dreams, believed that this latest portent was a sign of something momentous about to happen.

Nor was this the first time Lincoln had experienced a vision or prophetic dream warning of his impending death: “visions of grandeur and gloom,” his law partner referred to them as. Right after receiving news of his election in November of 1860, Lincoln experienced a waking vision of two images of him, one well and alive, the other corpse-like. There were other presentiments–or premonitions–including a fateful dream only ten days before the cabinet meeting, where he dreamed he was walking through the White House. He could hear the sounds of subdued sobbing and occasional wailing, until entering the East Room, where he saw a body lying in state. He asked a guard who it was that lay there, to which the man replied: “the President. He was killed by an assassin!” All these omens and presentiments are documented in greater detail and backed by primary sources in The Paranormal Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

“Coming Events Cast Their Shadow Before” Here an artist makes fun of the President’s well-known belief in omens, visions and prophetic dreams.

On April 14, Lincoln was expecting news at any time from Sherman in North Carolina, where “Uncle Billy” had run to ground the once proud Confederate Army of Tennessee, now commanded by “Uncle Joe” Johnston.  Johnston’s force was but a hollow shell of what it had once been, but the proud Rebels, barefoot and in rags, could still fight like wildcats—cornered wildcats.  Lincoln hoped to hear that Johnston too had surrendered, marking the end of organized resistance.  Surely the “usual dream” portended this, thought Lincoln.

Later that day, as Lincoln and his wife readied for the theater, the President was in an uncommonly optimistic mood, not realizing the prophetic dream he had the night before the April 14 meeting portended not good news about Sherman and the Confederates in North Carolina but was, instead, a presentiment of his own death.  For even as Abraham and Mary dressed for the night, across town a band of conspirators were also preparing for the night—only their performance would end in death and mayhem.

Much has been written about that day and about the conspirators led by John Wilkes Booth; yet, to this day there remains some uncertainty as to how deeply the Booth Conspiracy ran. The Confederate government’s papers relating to its espionage department conveniently burned when Richmond fell to the Union Army. How far the conspiracy to do away with Lincoln and his Cabinet extended has never been fully explored.

To be sure, many persons were arrested and the leading conspirators executed.  But Mary Lincoln, for one, had her suspicions that there were others involved who got away, including some high placed in the Lincoln administration.  Mrs. Grant too, had an incident and experienced a premonition that day causing her to make General Grant turn down the President’s invitation to attend the theater. 

Historians, however, hate loose ends and strands of evidence pointing to a broader conspiracy lie moldering in archives and museums little looked at or considered. Who knows, the truth may still be out there, waiting to be uncovered.

In Chapter 31 of Ghosts and Haunts of the Civil War, I go more deeply into strange circumstances surrounding the assassins and other ignored aspects of the Conspiracy. Just as Lincoln’s ship of state was about to reach that ‘far and distant shore’ of peace, the captain—Lincoln—was cut down. Lincoln’s last Presentiment was so compelling, Walt Whitman even made a poem out of it.

It is difficult, even now, to fathom what the Nation lost that fatal Good Friday at Ford’s Theater. Let us remember, Lincoln not only preserved the Union; he signed the Morill Act, which created land-grant universities to provide free college education, the Homestead Act, which redistributed millions of acres of land free to any homeless person who had a will to settle and till it; and of course, he fought and died for the principle racial equality, and the fundamental right of all working people to be paid for their labor.

These and other progressive reforms were what truly made Lincoln great—not simply his leadership of a war that was forced on him by the Slaveocracy and the textile manufacturers who benefitted from human bondage.  In the end, Lincoln paid for his achievements with his life.  As we commemorate Good Friday and Easter Sunday this April, this too should be borne in mind.

 The Paranormal Presidency chronicles his prophetic dreams, premonitions and beliefs, as well as his participation in séances and Spiritualism

Old Hickory Haunts the White House

Andrew Jackson, one of the Nation’s greatest presidents, was a man who was among the most beloved–and most hated–of American Presidents. His ghost has been reported in both the Hermitage and the White House.

It was in Strange Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground, where I published the first modern account of Andrew Jackson’s hauntings. It recounts the encounter by two founders of the Ladies Hermitage Association with the ghost of Andrew Jackson.

In the 1890’s, Old Hickory’s home, the Hermitage, had been in sad condition: the stately manse was in a shabby state, its white columns turned to gray, the grounds gone to seed and overgrown with weeds, with only Jackson’s devoted servant, Uncle Alfred, blind and alone, still residing out back in an old log cabin. The two ladies camped inside the run-down mansion as the first step towards the Association beginning the hard task of restoration, only to find out that, though buried in the garden behind the house, Old Hickory’s spirit still resided within.

Since then, generations of volunteers and full-time staff have restored the venerable estate into the jewel you will see today if you visit it, and I am told the ghost of Jackson still occasionally makes his presence known.

Since my first report on his ghost, others have retold the story of Old Hickory haunting the Hermitage many times and camera crews occasionally visit to sneak a peak, if they can, of his shade. But if you prefer the original account to a rehash, by all means read it in Strange Tales, which also includes Old Hickory’s mostly true encounter with the dread Bell Witch.

Less known than this haunt of Old Hickory’s is the fact that Andrew Jackson’s ornery shade also frequents the hallowed halls of the White House, in Washington D.C., although some say his spirit also makes an occasional visit at another White House—the old stagecoach stand in White House, Tennessee.

Old Hickory’s haunting of Big White is less recognized, one may surmise, because the White House is one of those places awash in hauntings by former residents. For example, I relate Lincoln’s apparition appearing there in a chapter of The Paranormal Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. And with so many spooks bedeviling staff and visitors, one may be forgiven if Andrew Jackson’s spectral visitations there from time to time get lost in the shuffle.

Although nowadays Jackson is out of favor with the politically correct crowd, he remains one of our greatest presidents in history. After all, how many leaders have a whole age named after them, not to mention a political revolution? Still, even in his own day, Old Hickory was a man who incurred not only deep affection but also intense hatred among people.

As President, Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokees removed to west of the Mississippi, sparking the tragic “Trail of Tears”

His treatment of Native Americans—even those tribes who had allied with him during the War of 1812—was particularly egregious. At the time he claimed it was to protect them from the depredations of whites. His regard for minority rights was less than righteous, which in turn reminds one of an old definition of democracy as “five wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.”

To Jackson, the bankers were “the many headed monster” and fought to keep their money and power from corrupting government.

But Jackson also ushered in an era of greater Democracy in America. Among his greatest reforms was to break the power of the bankers, whose greed and graft was having undue influence over the nation’s politics and threatened to replace the growing movement towards Democracy with an oligarchy of the rich and powerful. Would that we had another Jackson to do that today.

Moreover, when an attempt was made to weaken and divide the Nation, Old Hickory acted decisively to prevent Sectionalism from threatening the Union. During the Nullification Crisis, Old Hickory is alleged to have said, “John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation I will secede your head from the rest of your body.” Unfortunately, that was an empty threat. His eight years in the White House were tumultuous and there was bad mixed in with the good he did, but after his term, the Nation would never be the same again.

A man with that strong a spirit and that iron a will cannot help but leave his mark, and that is perhaps why Old Hickory’s shade still lingers within the walls of the White House.

It’s hard to say exactly when anyone first noticed his presence in the White House. We know that during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, for though Jackson had been of a different party, like Lincoln, Jackson was a staunch defender of the Union and a great Nationalist. Perhaps Old Hickory’s adamantine spirit was invisibly guiding the rail-splitter from Kentucky through the war to preserve the Union.

It has been reported that Mary Todd Lincoln, who attended a number of seances during the war (many with her husband), claimed that she could hear the ghost of Andrew Jackson “cussing” in the Rose Room and stomping around the canopied bed there. What was the cause of Old Hickory’s cussing, Mary was never able to divine, but her description of the ghost’s behavior certainly fit what we know about Jackson’s temperament.

The next documented encounter with Andrew Jackson’s ghost in the White House was by Harry Truman in the 1940’s. He had only been President for two months, when in June 1945, he wrote to his wife about experiencing a number of paranormal encounters: “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 in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth.” Truman theorized “old Andy and Teddy” were having an argument over “Franklin.”

A few years later, longtime White House seamstress, Lillian Rogers Park, had a frightening encounter in the Rose Room: “I remember when I was working at the bed in the Rose Room…as I hemmed a bedspread, I suddenly felt that someone was looking at me. I felt something coldish behind me . . . I didn’t finish the spread until three years later.”

During the 1940’s, a White House maid, Katurah Brooks, also encountered Old Hickory’s spirit. Katurah was busy one day doing chores, when she heard laughter in the Rose Room. She stated the sound had a “hollow” or “otherworldly” quality. She too was more than a little spooked.

The most recent report of Andrew Jackson’s ghost haunting the White House is in 1964. Liz Carpenter, noted Washington pundit, was Lady Bird’s press secretary during the Johnson administration and one day, during a routine visit with the First Lady, reported hearing swearing and shouting coming from the Rose Room. She was convinced it was Jackson’s ghost in an uproar.

Some have noticed a pattern to Old Hickory’s White House visitations. They note that ole’ Andy seems to appear during wartime or times of national crisis: the Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War era, etc.

It could be that the fiery Andrew Jackson only reappears when the Nation needs firm leadership or is at threat and his ghost is there, they theorize, to provide motivation and moral support. Whatever the cause, the tough old ghost still graces the rooms and halls of the President’s residence.