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The People's Haunted House: A True History of the White House, the Capitol, and the American Dead
Paperback
Series: Haunted Histories
Parapsychology19th Century United States HistorySouth
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ISBN13: 9798174719330
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 16 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 16 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Harry Truman said it first: The damned place is haunted, sure as shootin'. Every night, when the tour groups leave and the lights go down, the most famous house in America starts to talk. Floors pop. Drapes move. A door you are certain you closed swings open. Presidents have heard it. First Ladies have held séances in it. A queen fainted in its hallway, a prime minister met Lincoln by its fireplace, and two First Daughters lay awake listening to 1920s piano music drifting out of a cold fireplace. Most of that is story. Some of it is history. This book tells you which is which - on every page. Historian Robert Griffith walks the White House, the Capitol, and the haunted city around them on the night shift, rating every ghost story as Documented, Mixed, Legend, No Basis Found, or Debunked, with the letter, the diary, or the yellowed newspaper page to back it up. What survives the light is stranger and sadder than the legends ever were:
- Mary Lincoln's eight séances in the Red Room - and what she told her sister she saw at the foot of her bed
- Lincoln's real death-dream, recorded in a cabinet secretary's diary hours before Ford's Theatre - and the famous coffin dream that almost certainly never happened
- The doorman who invented the ghost of Lincoln on a slow news day, and the reporters who printed it
- The exorcism that never was, the curse a jeweler wrote to close a sale, and the Tecumseh curse that broke the moment anyone was keeping score
- The first person ever to die in the White House: an enslaved infant, born in the kitchen in 1802, whom no one has ever reported as a ghost
Each chapter closes with a Night Shift Tale - short fiction told by the ushers, clerks, masons, and mailmen who actually kept the house - and the book ends with two appendices found nowhere else: a five-route Haunted Walk Through Washington and The Dead of the House, the first complete register of everyone known to have died under that roof. Written for the 250th anniversary of the United States, The People's Haunted House is a ghost book for readers who want the truth to be the scariest thing in it. Because a ghost story you can trust turns out to be a rarer thing than a ghost. Includes 49 historical images and photographs.
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