Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 155 - Seances in The White House
Today we discuss the history of the Lincoln's, The Booth's and the intersection of the White House and the Occult. But more importantly, this history is really a reflection of a nation divided, and the aftermath of grief. It doesn't seem so far away from the current state of the state.
Sources
- Whitehousehistory.org article by Alexandra Kommel: Seances in The Red Room.
- CSUN University Library: The Edwin Booth Family Collection
- National Geographic Article by Parissa Djangi: Seances at the White House
- In The Houses of Their Dead by Terry Alford
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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. My name is Abbey Brinker and I am sitting here with Alan Kudan.
Speaker 2:Hello.
Speaker 1:And today we are talking about seances in the White House.
Speaker 2:What.
Speaker 1:So this is a really interesting topic. That's sort of come to me a few different ways over the years and I've researched it in different capacities. But a very mysterious friend of ours wrote a really cool story that's sort of inspired by this and we wanted to present that on the podcast next episode. But before that story plays, we really wanted to highlight the fascinating history of seances in the White House and you know what it felt like a good time to reflect on that.
Speaker 2:Okay, this is a real wild card. It is, it's fun, I don't know, Last time you did this it was Dancing Plague and that was a winner. So now the bar is very high.
Speaker 1:We'll see if I can top it or at least rise to the occasion.
Speaker 2:So our mysterious person, are they affiliated with the White House?
Speaker 1:We will reveal nothing. Wow, I know.
Speaker 2:Cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe I don't know. Okay, Without getting too much into politics, does this person want to make America great again?
Speaker 1:Not, no, no, they don't, they don't. But I will say it feels like both a really good and bad time for this episode, Because we're really going to talk a lot today about Abraham Lincoln in this episode, and you know, Lincoln certainly is a complex human not the pure hero I think that he's often believed to be, but he did a lot of radical and good things while he was in office, which is obviously starkly different from the world's burning situation that's happening right now.
Speaker 2:So we're talking about Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, to some we're really talking about his wife, but he's involved, what's?
Speaker 2:his wife's name.
Speaker 1:Mary Todd Lincoln.
Speaker 2:Mary Todd Lincoln. Yeah, okay, so this is a very different period of American history.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's kind of again both like a weird time to reflect on that, but maybe a good time to reflect on American history.
Speaker 2:So Abraham Lincoln was really into spooky stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to talk about it. I mean, he wasn't really into spooky stuff.
Speaker 2:He tolerated it, but his wife was. Yeah, a tale as old as time.
Speaker 1:But do you remember our Doppelganger series? Nope, you don't remember it at all. Do you remember that it existed?
Speaker 2:I recall that we had something on Doppelgangers.
Speaker 1:A big part of that series was Lincoln, because Lincoln thought that he saw his own Doppelganger and that it was like this really horrible reflection of himself, and then he ended up being assassinated not too long after that. So, anyway, we're going to get into all of that, but the truth is I've really always been fascinated to some degree with Mary Todd Lincoln.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 1:Especially because there's a really deep connection between spiritualism which, as you know, is my favorite, my favorite occult movement and the Civil War. But again, I just think it's so badass that Mary hosted seances in the White House. So anyway, today we're going to discuss the history of ghost stories in the White House, the seances performed by Mary Todd Lincoln and the history of the Booth family.
Speaker 2:Are the tables oval-shaped?
Speaker 1:What.
Speaker 2:For the Oval Office. Do they have an oval oval shaped table or is it round? In the oval office it looks like an eyeball doesn't.
Speaker 1:Isn't that where his desk is?
Speaker 2:where else you can do the seance no, they were not.
Speaker 1:They were in the red room the red room we're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that let's talk about our sources before we get too far.
Speaker 1:The first is a book the first is a book, the other is not a book the book is called in the houses of their dead, the lincolns, the booths and the spirits, written by terry alford. And then I also used three articles a whitehousehistoryorg article by alexander comel called seances in the red room, sea sun university library article. The edwin Family Collection. And a National Geographic article by Parisa de Gange, seances in the White House. But long before Lincoln was ever elected, edwin Thomas Booth was born on November 13, 1833. During his lifetime he toured the United States as an actor and a stage manager. But even though Booth was considered to be one of the most talented Shakespearean actors in the 1800s, a shadow besmirched his reputation. Edwin Booth is the older brother of John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine having to live your whole life and be like, yeah, your little brother is going to assassinate Lincoln someday, so fuck you.
Speaker 1:Edwin and John Wilkes' father was an esteemed actor named Junius Brutus Booth.
Speaker 2:Great name.
Speaker 1:Junius named his son Edwin after Edwin Forrest and Thomas Flynn, of course, both actors that Junius worked with. Junius immigrated to the United States in 1821 from England. Edwin Booth was born in Maryland on the family farm in 1833. The dynamic between brothers, edwin John Wilkes and Junius Jr, a third son, was fascinating because all three ended up as performers, just like their father. This incited constant competition between the brothers.
Speaker 2:Because they're both actors.
Speaker 1:All three of them are actors.
Speaker 2:All three of them are actors and they're competing.
Speaker 1:That's right. Edwin debuted on the stage in Boston on September 10th 1849. He acted with his father in the famous play Richard III Get some new material. John, Edwin and Junius Jr continued to put on plays together throughout the United States long after their father passed away in 1852. In 1861, Edwin married fellow actress Mary Devlin. The couple had a daughter named Edwina. Very interesting, I suppose, to name her after her father. How'd they?
Speaker 2:get that name.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, mary Devlin passed away two years after their marriage. To really understand the events surrounding the Booths and the Lincolns, we really need to understand the tragedy of the Civil War. Quoting from Seances in the Red Room by Alexandra Kamel, quote the bloodiest conflict in the nation's history was the American Civil War from 1861 until 1865. Fought over the expansion of slavery, the Civil War resulted in approximately 750,000 American fatalities nearly equal to the total number of American deaths in the Revolutionary Wow.
Speaker 1:The survivor understands the meaning of their loved one's life and death in order to properly grieve. End quote More than three million men fought in the war and two percent of the total population of the United States was killed during the war. But battle wasn't the only reason for death. Disease took more lives than weapons did. Two men to every one who died on the battlefield died due to sickness. It was a horrible loss of life. It was graphic and violent and invasive, and it makes a ton of sense that the country saw a rise in a belief in the afterlife in the years that followed, and not just a belief in the afterlife, but a belief in the ability for the living and the dead to interact.
Speaker 1:Spiritualism is a religion based on the belief that there is an afterlife and spirits not only exist but want to communicate with the living. Within spiritualism, the spirit world is believed to be a place where spirits continue to evolve and become more advanced than humans. It is also believed that because of this advanced state that those in the afterlife seek to guide the living and provide spiritual direction. Spiritualism was at its height of popularity between 1840 and 1920. At its peak, there were about 8 million followers of the practice. Most practitioners were from the upper and middle classes, and I really can't stress this enough. But one of the reasons that spiritualism rose in prominence is really a direct result of the Civil War. It wasn't just you know, you lost your dad or your brother or your son, you lost your cousin, you lost your uncle, you lost your neighbor, you lost your teacher, like everybody around you was impacted, and there was a desperation, I think, to try to understand and rectify that and to reverse it to some degree.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:The rise of industrialization and urbanization of the country made it easier for people to access new types of thinking and alternative religions with access to newspapers and periodicals. There are many historic spiritualist newspapers that are very cool to read, and you can find them on Etsy or like copies and scans of them in different library databases. It's also thought that the value of the family unit increased and family size decreased, resulting in more grief with individual deaths and losses. Right, so people started having smaller families, meaning that not that your relationship with people is finite or whatever, but just that there's more emphasis placed on the loss of one of four versus one of 10.
Speaker 2:I mean sure. Why do you think families got smaller though? Did the families get smaller because they lost members or just going forward after the Civil War? They just wanted smaller families.
Speaker 1:I'm not a historian on this topic, but I would just wildly speculate. Yeah, my wild speculation would be that maybe with disease, with loss, with, with all you know that people wanted smaller families, or there was less money to support bigger families. Maybe there was less, like, with the urbanization and industrialization, there was less of a need for, like, huge families to support agriculture. Right, I think it.
Speaker 2:It's all of those things maybe, but that's just me guessing oh yeah, I guess it was a moving away from everybody being a farmer right when was the? Industrial, the Industrial Revolution 1760. Wow, so this is post-Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1:Well, so it began in Great Britain in the mid-1700s 1760. But it sort of spread to the United States around 1840.
Speaker 2:So it was exactly this time period that we're talking about. That makes sense. Yeah Right, you don't need 12 kids to work your fields when you don't have fields.
Speaker 1:Right, that's very true. That's a quote for a t-shirt.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Spiritualism was also a way to express moral and ethical concerns. Many prominent spiritualist leaders were women, and most supported women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery. At the time, few women were able to speak publicly in the US. Spiritualism was also an opportunity for power and self-expression that did not exist for them otherwise. Additionally, the spiritualist view of the afterlife or heaven resulted in a moral place that they felt was lacking on earth.
Speaker 1:But one of the most interesting spiritualists though there were many was Mary Todd Lincoln, who actually held seances hoping to connect with her deceased son in the Red Room of the White House. Mary Ann Todd Lincoln was born on December 13, 1818, into a wealthy family in Kentucky, and just to acknowledge that, mary Todd's family did have enslaved people working for their family, and she obviously grew up and changed her political beliefs, but that is part of her history. As an adult, mary Todd became a huge supporter of her husband's political ambitions and the message and, interestingly, she was courted by Stephen A Douglas before she married Lincoln, who was Lincoln's major political opponent. Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln were married on November 4th 1842. The couple had four sons Robert Todd Lincoln, edward Baker Lincoln, william Wallace Lincoln and Thomas Lincoln.
Speaker 2:She's zero creativity with her last name.
Speaker 1:Edward, or Eddie, died of tuberculosis at age six. William Willie died of typhoid fever at age 11. Thomas, also known as Tad, died at age 18 from an unknown cause. Tad, yeah, I mean, you missed the point of that sentence, which was that three of the four sons passed away.
Speaker 2:To tuberculosis.
Speaker 1:No Typhoid fever tuberculosis, and one was unknown.
Speaker 2:Oh, what's the unknown one you think? Go ahead speculate.
Speaker 1:Needless to say, mary Todd lived a grief-stricken life and she was completely overcome with the loss of her children, particularly the loss of her son Willie in 1862. Quoting again from seances in the White House by Alexandra Comel, quote First Mary Todd Lincoln became inconsolable after the passing of Willie and desperately searched for an outlet for her grief. Shortly after his death she was introduced to the Lorries, a well-known group of mediums that were located in Georgetown. Mrs Lincoln found such comfort from the seances held by the group that she started hosting her own seances in the Red Room of the White House. There's evidence to suggest that she hosted as many as eight seances in the White House and that her husband was even in attendance for a few of them. The seances proved to be an effective coping mechanism for Mrs Lincoln that she once remarked to her half-sister.
Speaker 1:That quote Willie lives. He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet, adorable smile that he always had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie, her son that perished at the age of four, is sometimes with him. End quote. That's spooky, very spooky. In December of 1862, mary Todd hosted medium Nettie Colburn in the White House as typical in the Red Room. Quoting from the National Geographic article by Parisa Daganji, quote Colburn later claimed that the president joined the seance and that, in her trance-like state, she didn't limit herself to communicating with Willie Lincoln. Instead, the spirits she channeled urged the president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation which they predicted would quote be the crowning event of his administration and his life. Sessions with Colburn and other mediums stoked the First Lady's faith that Sol survived death.
Speaker 2:We've got some highly politicized ghosts.
Speaker 1:What do you mean?
Speaker 2:We had a ghost that came to urge her to give the Emancipation Proclamation.
Speaker 1:Well, that was to Lincoln directly. That was one of the seances that Lincoln was at.
Speaker 2:So he took part in these yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow, yep, at least a few times A spooky couple Could be us.
Speaker 2:Do you think he wore the hat during the seance?
Speaker 1:What if we're reincarnated them? We kind of have the right body types. I think what You're like tall and lanky. I'm as you described earlier today. Have a good foundation.
Speaker 2:Is there a picture of her?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hard to say. My beard is quite different.
Speaker 1:But we're not totally writing it off.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:The red room in the White House is a drawing room that serves as the president's antechamber. It borders the president's office and the chamber rooms. Typically, presidents use it as a sitting room. Despite the comfort we can assume she found in these spiritual practices, mary Todd did eventually take a step back from these rituals after societal pressure won out. Some believe that the Lincolns linger in the White House even after death, notably the majority of ghost sightings and encounter claims from this historic landmark center around Willie Eddie and Abraham Lincoln. So Abraham and two of his sons, and of course, don't even get me started on the Abraham Lincoln funeral train, which I know I've talked about in many different capacities. I have an article up on lunaticsprojectcom. I have videos up on our social media.
Speaker 2:Well, if you'd like to know more about the Abraham Lincoln funeral train, check out our episode on ghost trains.
Speaker 1:Or keep listening. Lincoln himself has been spotted in a yellow oval room not the oval office, because I had to clarify that and the Lincoln bedroom. So there's been sightings of his ghost in the yellow oval room and the Lincoln bedroom. Both First Lady Grace Coolridge and Queen Wilhelmina from the Netherlands have claimed to see the Lincoln's spirits in the White House. Jeremiah Smith, also known as Jerry, was the official White House duster for about 35 years. My God.
Speaker 1:Starting in the late 1860s. He often spoke to reporters on property about the ghost sightings of the Lincolns and I think he sort of personally did a lot to fan the rumors and the legend that the lincolns live on in the white house you just it, just it sounds like something out of like medieval times bring, bring in the royal duster, I know well.
Speaker 2:I mean, it kind of seems like an easy job so the only thing that I can think, the only reason why I can think, why you need to have an official duster- yeah.
Speaker 2:Is because there's going to be some artifacts outside of cases that need to get dusted, that need to be handled with like museum preservation quality. I can understand why you don't want having, you know, any random cleaning staff, but also you're not having any random cleaning staff in the white house in the first place, right? But also, do you think he did more than just dust, or is that it? It's like if there's a spill he has to call a different team no, okay.
Speaker 1:So, though, uh, government documents listed him as a laborer. He took on tons of different roles, including footmanman, valet custodian and, most notably, duster.
Speaker 2:Footman. What's a footman?
Speaker 1:A liveried servant whose duties include admitting visitors and waiting at table. That's from dictionarycom.
Speaker 2:Okay, sure, so like a sub-butler. Yeah, like a butler, second chair butler second chair got it, so he's butler second chair he was valet that which is obviously parking your horses do they have cars?
Speaker 1:yet no, did lincoln have a car?
Speaker 2:probably not. No, I mean he invented the first lincoln you think there was cars.
Speaker 1:You think lincoln invented the first lincoln yeah, think there was cars. You think Lincoln invented the first Lincoln.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why else would they call it that?
Speaker 1:You're right. There's no other reason.
Speaker 2:So, okay, he parked the horses.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That must have been murder. You put them in their little slot and they start wandering around.
Speaker 1:You're right, there was no ropes back then at all, so it was just a real fool's errand. You're right.
Speaker 2:Okay, but it's like, yeah, bring her on my horse.
Speaker 1:He would sound like he was overall good guy Overall. Yeah, he was a legend.
Speaker 2:But official duster.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What do you think was his hierarchy of duties, like if someone asked him to dust, another person asked him to bring their horse.
Speaker 1:I think it depends who asked him.
Speaker 2:That's true, it's a good idea whatever lincoln said, he did but what if? What if mary todd asked him to go grab her horse?
Speaker 1:oh, well, he actually. He was there after them, so we don't know he's not even part of the story no, he's the one who did claim to see their spirits after they died. I don't even know what they looked like. You're right, there was not portraits back then either that's a good point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he just looked at the five, let's keep it moving here.
Speaker 1:And because we are talking about the freaky things that the lincolns did in the white house oh my I also want to call back to our deep dive, very briefly, into doppelgangers, so let's give you a little bit more context here. Tuesday, november 6th 1860, the evening of abraham lincoln's first election. Okay, so, so the duster did overlap with them. Anyway, lincoln claimed to look into the mirror the night of his first election and see two faces staring back. What was the duster's name? Jeremiah Smith.
Speaker 2:Oh, what a missed opportunity. I really hope his name was like Dusty.
Speaker 1:So Lincoln, two faces staring back. I do want to point out that lincoln was actually very open with his close friends and family. He was truly a believer in the paranormal. The double looked pale and sickly. So lincoln got off from the couch that he was resting on to take a closer look. Right so he's on a couch, he looks over, sees himself in the mirror. He's taken aback. He is like who is that ghostly, sickly man in the mirror? That can't be me. He takes a closer look and the ghostly version disappears. But when lincoln sat back down on the couch and glanced again, he saw the double vision reappear. Lincoln's wife, mary, interpreted this vision as a sign that lincoln would be re-elected for a second term but that he would not survive it given the sickly twinge that he saw on his double. And of course she was right.
Speaker 2:Huh.
Speaker 1:Lincoln was assassinated on April 15th 1865, just a few months into his second term. In addition to this early doppelganger sighting, lincoln also had dreams leading up to his assassination of his own death, and I do imagine that you're probably super stressed in the position that he was in, so I don't know. It makes sense to me that he was having stress dreams and he was afraid that he would die right. There was probably all kinds of threats on his life.
Speaker 2:He's already superstitious.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now he's getting stress dreams. Yeah, of course he's getting stress dreams yeah, of course he's gonna see ghosts that want to kill him yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I said that he's seeing ghosts that want to kill him yeah yeah, that was what I said I mean they gotta stop in. You know inviting john willis booth over for dinner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know it's a real gamble, so this is a little wild card quote here, quoting from ward hill lamin's book the recollections of Abraham Lincoln. Quote it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards and there was a throng of people gazing mournfully upon the corpse whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House, I demanded of one of the soldiers. The president was his answer he was killed by an assassin. End quote.
Speaker 1:All right, let's talk about John Wilkes. John Wilkes Booth blamed Lincoln for the war and the staggering loss of life. When he was gearing up for re-election, john Wilkes' hatred for the president grew even stronger. As the election loomed, wilkes started to develop plans to kidnap the president from his summer home a few miles away from the White House and move him across the Potomac River into Virginia. After Lincoln won his second term by a landslide, the Booth brothers, john Wilkes and Edwin, continued to argue, both with opposing political views. Though Wilkes actually did attend Lincoln's inauguration he was a guest of his secret fiancée Lucy Hale but he did not attempt to assassinate him then. He later claimed that he had an excellent chance if he had wished to do it.
Speaker 2:Now he's just showing off.
Speaker 1:When he discovered that Lincoln would be going to the production of Still Waters Run Deep at a hospital, wilkes assembled a team to kidnap the president from this event, but Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute. On April 11, 1865, wilkes was in attendance outside the White House when Lincoln gave a last-minute address about giving suffrage to former enslaved people, a message that continued to anger Wilkes. The next day, on April 12th, robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. On the morning of April 14th, good Friday, booth learned that both Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant would be attending a performance of the play Our American Cousin later that evening. He set out making plans right away. Other members of his group had orders to assassinate other political figures that would be in attendance the Secretary of State William H Stewart and Vice President Andrew Johnson.
Speaker 2:Was anyone else attacked that night, or was Lincoln the only one that got Luigi'd?
Speaker 1:We're going to get to it in a second. So Grant declined the invitation at the last minute after his wife insisted that the couple traveled to New Jersey to visit family Typical. Because Booth was a former actor, he was able to move through the theater at will. I think he either had connections there like he knew, you know, he had like access behind the scenes. He'd be like oh, you're here because you're an actor.
Speaker 2:It's just funny to think that acting gives you superpowers.
Speaker 1:Well, he was like pretty famous, I think. Booth quietly entered Lincoln's box at 10.14 pm and proceeded to shoot the president in the back of the head A true coward's move. Why Shoot him in the back of the head? He was right next to him. He didn't turn and look at him.
Speaker 2:The true coward's move is to drop a drone on the hospital from across the other on the other side of the planet.
Speaker 1:I think both can be true. Major Henry Rothborn, also in the box, along with his fiancee Clara Harris and Mary Todd, attempted to detain Booth, but Booth stabbed the man and the women were unharmed. Dramatically, booth next jumped from the box to the stage. He raised his knife and yelled sick semper tyrannis Latin, for thus always to tyrants, a nod to Brutus's declaration at the killing of Julius Caesar. Some claim that Booth also shouted I have done it, the South is avenged. Though his dramatic leap to the stage was not as smooth as he had intended, other witnesses claim that he fractured his leg during the maneuver when the spur on his boot caught onto a flag.
Speaker 1:One conspirator was able to stab the Secretary of the State, but the man survived. The other lost his nerve and spent the evening drinking and never made an attempt on Andrew Johnson's life. By April 18th, wilkes was still on the run, but a mass of citizens lined up to mourn and publicly view Lincoln's body. On April 21st 1865, the Lincoln special left Washington DC. The train carrying Lincoln's coffin and a coffin containing the body of his son, willie, was headed to Springfield, illinois.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's the funeral train.
Speaker 1:There you go. About 300 people accompanied the procession. Abraham Lincoln's portrait was attached to the front of the train. William Wallace, lincoln or Willie, had passed away at age 11 from bilious fever, likely typhoid fever. Willie died on February 20th 1862, during his father's second year in office. Lincoln was 56 years old when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
Speaker 2:Far too old to be president.
Speaker 1:His body on board. The train departed Washington DC six days later. The Lincoln special traveled over 1,600 miles. While the locomotive passed through 400 cities, there were 13 major scheduled stops. Throughout the journey, hundreds of thousands of mourners gathered to pay their respects At big stops. Lincoln's coffin was removed from the train and transferred to a horse-drawn carriage. From there the carriage would parade Lincoln's body among the grieving crowds. Many also gathered along the tracks and made bonfires, sang hymns and played instruments to honor him. When the train made it to Philadelphia, Lincoln's body was put on display in the east wing of Independence Hall, the same room where the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.
Speaker 1:Abraham Lincoln was buried on May 4, 1865, in Springfield, Illinois, alongside his son Willie. The pair were buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery. Eventually they were joined by Mary Todd Lincoln and all of the Lincoln children except for one. But the story of the Lincoln special doesn't stop there, because it is one of the most famous cases of a ghost train. The funeral train is one of the most consistently spotted instances of a ghost train. The train is known to emerge from a dark fog, it stops, clocks and watches as it passes and it sends a chill through nearby people and towns and it never seems to reach its final destination, perpetually looping, this particular ghost train is believed to travel between Washington DC and Springfield, Illinois, mimicking the original route through the northern states. Mimicking the original route through the northern states. It's also mostly seen in april, when the original train traveled the same path and, by chance, when this episode is coming out it seems like uh, the lincoln ghost train is really the?
Speaker 2:uh key to global warming just have it keep circling the the earth, cooling down every town. It passes through good point and it never stops.
Speaker 1:Very good point. I didn't think about that. Yeah yeah, People who have claimed to see this ghost train have identified it as Lincoln's train because they believe they have seen his coffin, which was draped in the US flag and guarded by Union soldiers. Sightings have been reported all over the route, but notably both in Albany and New York City. John Wilkes Booth was finally captured on April 26th. He had been hiding in a tobacco barn on a farm. Booth refused to come out peacefully, so the soldiers set fire to the barn. When Booth exited, he was shot by Sergeant Boston Corbet, though there are conflicting witness accounts around whether Booth had raised his pistols to shoot the soldiers first or not.
Speaker 1:After John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the Booth family was publicly vilified, Despite the fact that Edwin was a die-hard supporter of Abraham Lincoln. The public scrutiny forced him to temporarily retire from the stage, but about a year later he returned as Hamlet in New York City at the Winter Garden Theater. In 1872, Mary Todd was photographed with the ghost of her late husband by infamous fraudster, spiritualist photographer William H Mumler. As the nation grieved its extreme loss of fathers and sons and spiritualism was on the rise, many turned to this photograph and Mary Todd in general to find solace in the belief that their loved ones lived on and looked over them.
Speaker 2:That makes sense.
Speaker 1:But beyond the obvious, what do all of these stories and characters have to do with each other?
Speaker 2:Hard to say.
Speaker 1:And why are they important to reflect on today?
Speaker 2:Even harder to say.
Speaker 1:To me, the story of the Booths and the Lincolns represents two families impacted by the larger horrors of the country and the impact of grief and loss on a nation. I don't think the political climate of the mid-1800s is so different than it is today and though, if I'm being totally honest, I do have my doubts, but I still have hope that we will be able to peacefully work through our differences and navigate to a better resolution than the fate all of these folks endured, but more important than any one individual, it is the greater good and hopefully, as we wait our way through 2025, we will all try to remember that the sum is greater than its parts.
Speaker 2:They keep saying survive until 25. And Lincoln did not follow that advice.
Speaker 1:What do you mean?
Speaker 2:he didn't survive until 2025 no, um, you've, you've heard that phrase, right? No I guess it's more of a uh, due to the tumultuous nature of the freelance industry. Yeah, everyone is saying, just hang on. As soon as it gets to 2025, things will kind of mellow out and we can continue on. That proved to be quite false, sure.
Speaker 1:It did.
Speaker 2:And there's no catchy thing for 2026 yet 2026.
Speaker 1:Pick up sticks.
Speaker 2:Like I said, there's no catchy thing for 2026 yet, just a lot of unrest. So which means there's good news? Everyone's going to get back into spiritualism.
Speaker 1:That's right. No, I mean, but it will be interesting to see how we evolve and cope with um. I mean, honestly, what's really truly horrifying and what's happening in this country today.
Speaker 2:It's pretty bad.
Speaker 1:It's pretty bad. So get out there, you know, peacefully protest, make your voice heard.
Speaker 2:Clip some locks on cages.
Speaker 1:There you go, do it all you know rage against the machine. Now is the time If you are ever waiting for a time. Sadly, it is upon us. But on a brighter note, next episode. We are so thrilled to share the very special story that inspired this whole little mini deep dive into this very fascinating spiritual, paranormal history associated with the Booths, the Lincolns, the White House.
Speaker 2:Well, this episode was kind of hyper-focused on the Lincolns.
Speaker 1:And the Booths.
Speaker 2:Sure, but do we know of any other presidents or presidential families that were super into the occult?
Speaker 1:I had tried to look up other like they. I didn't find too much.
Speaker 1:I didn't find too much but, but I think, maybe george washington just yeah, yeah, and people maybe just realized that, like mary todd didn't like make a lot of friends with her paranormal belief, so they just kept it quiet, if they had it. Anyway, thank you all for being with us. As always, hug your neighbor, you know, talk to your friends, keep your family close. We will be back next episode with a really delightful story to share with you and I think, again, this history will give you some really fun context to that really epic story that we're going to present to you next episode.
Speaker 2:I'm still very curious about who our mystery, possibly White House adjacent person is.
Speaker 1:That's right. Stay well, stay spooky. We'll talk to you all soon, bye, bye.
