We spent the weekend with Kelly’s parents and took the opportunity to visit downtown DC and Ford’s Theater. What a profound experience that turned out to be for me and I’m not really sure why. The building has a somber reverence to it, too, not simply sadness but one of anguish. I felt compelled to remove my hat before I entered. No other museum has ever prompted me to do that.
This is no ordinary museum, though, since it is the site of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. I tingled the whole time I was in there, feeling an unseen energy. At one point touring the basement exhibits, I turned to Hallie and whispered “I feel ghosts are here.” She looked at me curiously and grinned. As I walked among the exhibit displays, I wondered if I might be sensing the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, yet that didn’t seem like the right identification. Thinking about it later, I surmised that the energy I was feeling did not belong to Lincoln but to John Wilkes Booth.
Searching the Internets once I got home, I found this UPI story from 1972 which reported rumors that Booth’s ghost still walks the theater floor. It would not surprise me in the least.
Times Standard, The (Newspaper) – December 20, 1972, Eureka, California
Some Blame Booth’s Ghost For Bad ‘Vibes’ at Ford’s
Wednesday, December 20, 1972 Page 23
By PAMELA M. LAKRATTWASHINGTON (UP1) For theater people there have always been “bad vibes” before that curses, hexes, shadows on stage followed by bad reviews the next day.
But at Ford’s Theater, the place where Abraham Lincoln was shot, it’s not only the actors who think the ghost of John Wilkes Booth inhabits the premises. Workmen and guards, one spooked so thoroughly he took to the street without trousers, say the booted assassin haunts the scene of his crime. So far no one claims to have seen Booth, but some say he can be both heard and felt in the old building in downtown Washington.
Ford’s is a living theater, restored to use in 1968 after a century of standing idle as a place of horror where a great president was murdered. For this purpose, there is a Ford’s Theater Society, a mustering of box office, backstage and publicity employees. Some of these have tendencies towards the occult.
It is also a museum, run by the government, a repository for the dry mementos of April 4, 1805, when the comely actor-brother of Shakespearean Edwin Booth entered the presidential box and fired a derringer into the head of the 16th President. The museum-keepers are more wary.
There is a growing confederacy about the idea that the shade of Booth walks restlessly about. He doesn’t float, he clumps.
Bootsteps have been heard by the electrician in the theater building, and at least on spooked guard across the street at Petersen House, where the dying Lincoln was carried, has run out into 1Oth Street clad only in his shorts.
Tales are told of actors mid-scene getting their line upended and scrambled. Apparently this only happens when the lines are being delivered from points on the stage along Booth’s approximate escape route from Lincoln’s box to the wings.
There was Hal Holbrook in a one-man Mark Twain variety and there was Jack Aranson in a Herman Melville package both getting chills as the; wafted soliloquies from position near the cursed path.
Two years ago on Halloween according to the theater society’s resident numerologist, the portrait of George Washington inside Lincoln’s flag-draped box leaned over 45 degrees. Jill Carlson, who hands out number readings as though they were souvenirs, is convinced the soul of Booth wants forgiveness, and that he got bad press.
“He hasn’t been exorcised yet,” Mrs. Carlson said recently. “John Wilkes seems to be a very sweet lad. He’s very sad. I wish somebody would come and let him go. He wants exonerating.”
Indeed, Booth is still gelling a bad press. Courtesy of the government, the assassination recreated every day in a sound and light show in the theater and Booth, given a voice by actor Stacey Keach, emerges a veritable fiend.
Accepted historical accounts and clips pasted up in the museum both set the assassin down as a maniacal villain.
The most impressive evidence of Booth’s ectoplasm around Ford’s Theater is a couple of photographs by famed, Lincoln-era photographer Matthew Brady, reprinted in the government report on restoration of Ford’s, published upon its completion in 1968. Skeptics have suggested that the photos, on pages 40 and 42 (one is an enlargement of the other), were clumsy mixes of Brady’s shadow amid the explosive powder needed in those days for interior shots. But Brady usually was more skillful with his tools, primitive as they were.
The photos show a transparent disproportionate figure standing in an empty Ford’s Theater the day after the assassination, close by the dead president’s box in the dress circle, or first balcony.