It’s Halloween and time once again to gather family and friends around the
fireplace in a darkened room and listen to the retelling of ghost stories
while sipping chilled cider.
Experts in the field of spectral phenomenon claim that Maryland and
Washington are rich in sightings of the not so dearly departed.
In the spirit of the season, as the wind batters the shutters, the chimney
moans and floors snap and pop, let’s sit back and listen to two
spine-tinglers.
Guarding the gold
Deep in Greenbriar Swamp in the lowlands of Dorchester County, residents
tell the story of Big Liz, the headless African-American slave who guards a
treasure trove buried by her master.
The tale of Big Liz dates to the early days of the Civil War when many of
the Eastern Shore gentry were partial to the Southern cause and helped them
run the Union blockade.
Plantation slaves were used as spies by the Union Army and Big Liz was able
to pass on to Union sources news of shipments planned by her master, many of
which were seized en route to the South.
But her master soon discovered her duplicity.
Because she was a large and powerful woman, he solicited her aid in helping
bury his gold in a desolate corner of Greenbriar Swamp.
As Big Liz was carefully smoothing over the fresh dirt with a shovel, her
master quietly came up behind her and deeply embedded his sword into her neck, cutting off her head in the process.
Because he was fearful of returning to the scene of the murder, the master
lived the remainder of his days as an embittered old man.
“But since then, many people say, the ghost of Big Liz has wandered through
the marshes among the tall grass, waiting to give away the gold,” said the
Sunday Sun Magazine.
Stout-hearted adventurers are advised to stop their car near a little white
bridge over the Transquaking River and honk three times.
“Your car will no longer start, and Big Liz will appear holding her head in
her hands. If you follow, she will lead you through the trees and mud to where the wealth is hidden,” said the magazine.
“But you will not have the nerve,” concludes the legend.
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Visits from Lincoln
Another ghost story dating to the Civil War that has persisted through the
years is that of repeated appearances of Abraham Lincoln, who has been seen
standing in a window of the White House staring toward Virginia, as he had
done often during the war.
Lincoln, who had an interest in spiritualism, has been seen in other rooms
of the Executive Mansion and visited later occupants or their friends, the
stories say.(No sightings, however, have been reported during the notorious
fund-raising exploits of President Clinton’s term, in which heavy hitters have been rewarded with a night in the Lincoln bedroom. Perhaps Lincoln’s ectoplasm is quite ethical about whom it chooses to haunt.)
When Lincoln’s son Willie died from fever during his first term, the
Lincoln family had no grave site in Washington in which to bury him. Supreme
Court Clerk William Thomas Carroll offered the president use of his family’s
tomb in Oak Hill Cemetery.
It was said that Lincoln would spend long hours sitting in the tomb
grieving over the loss of his young son. Contemporary newspaper accounts claim that on at least two occasions he had the crypt opened so he could sit and stare at the remains of his dead son, whom he could not bear to leave alone in the darkness of the stone tomb.
Lynda Johnson Robb, daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who lived in
the room where the boy died, was reportedly acutely aware of what had taken
place there.
President Theodore Roosevelt said, “I think of Lincoln, shambling, homely,
with his sad, strong, deeply furrowed face all the time. I see him in the
different rooms and in the halls.”
Grace Coolidge claimed to have witnessed Lincoln “dressed in black, with a
stole draped across his shoulders to ward off the drafts and chills of
Washington’s night air.”
While Eleanor Roosevelt denied ever having seen the apparition of the 16th
president, she shared with a later occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Dwight
D. Eisenhower, the sense that Lincoln was a constant presence in the White
House.
One story goes that one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s staffers, casually walking by
the Lincoln bedroom one day, broke into a fast trot after observing a tall,
bearded, lanky man sitting on the bed, pulling on his boots. Another says that FDR’s valet once ran screaming and running at full-throttle into the arms of a White House guard, breathlessly explaining that he had just bumped into Lincoln.
During a cocktail party the next evening, Queen Wilhelmina of the
Netherlands, who was staying in the White House Rose Room, coolly described to her shocked listeners her experience of answering a knock at the door in the middle of the night and seeing Lincoln standing there. She was not so cool at the time, however: She also reported passing out and coming to sometime later on the floor.
Even Winston Churchill, who thought nothing of taking on Hitler and
Mussolini, was not happy when assigned to the Lincoln bedroom. Quite often, he was found in a vacant bedroom across the hall the next morning.
In 1946, President Harry Truman was awakened early one morning by two hard
knocks on his bedroom door. After getting up and opening the door, he was
greeted by a blush of cold, damp air that moved away into the darkness of the
corridor.
“Why they would want to come back here I could never understand,” Truman is
reported to have said about the specters floating through the great house.
“No man in his right mind would want to come here of his own accord,” he
said in a letter to his daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel. After he passed onto the great beyond, he told her, he had no intention of ever returning to the White House.