Lisa's History Room

Willie Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was deeply interested in psychic phenomena. Following the death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, (1850-1862) of typhoid fever, Lincoln was consumed with grief. He was persuaded by wife Mary to participate in several séances held in the White House. Mary believed that professional mediums could pierce the veil between this life and the next, thus allowing her and her husband to communicate with their dead son. Once Lincoln attended a seance in which a piano lifted up and moved around the room. It was in the opinion of the mediums who worked with President Lincoln that he was definitely “the possessor of extraordinary psychic powers.” (1)

Séances became popular in the mid-to-late 19th Century as Americans longed to reconnect with their many loved ones killed in the Civil War.

The day after his first election to the presidency in 1860, Lincoln called his good friend journalist Noah Brooks (1830-1903) into his office. He had been startled by a vision of seeing two of his faces at once in a mirror and wanted to tell Brooks about it. Brooks made a written record of the conversation, later including it in his White House memoirs, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (1895). Adapted from Brooks’ work, these are Lincoln’s words:

Abraham Lincoln photographed by Mathew Brady, February 27, 1860

It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day and there had been a great “hurrah, boys,” so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it (and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position), and looking in that glass I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler — say five shades — than the other.

Abraham Lincoln photographed by Alexander Gardner, February 5, 1865

I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it — nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as if something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home again that night I told my wife about it, and a few days afterward I made the experiment again, when (with a laugh), sure enough! the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was somewhat worried about it. She thought it was a “sign” that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term. 

(1) Wallenchinsky, David and Wallace, Irving. The People’s Almanac (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1975)