To hear some sources, George Washington wasn’t done even after he shuffled off the mortal coil. His home, Mount Vernon, has been the site of numerous ghost stories. The best ones involve the ghost of the great man himself. One such is attributed to members of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, America’s first national historic preservation organization, and the country’s first women’s patriotic society. The MVLA raised money to purchase a dilapidated Mount Vernon in the nineteenth century, in order to restore and preserve it for posterity. In the early years, when members were in the area, they slept in the mansion, sometimes in the four poster bed in which Washington died.
Many who slept in Washington’s bed were adamant that they felt the presence of his ghost, often described as “a strange and brooding spectre“. On one occasion, as two MVLA members shared Washington’s bed one night, they saw a figure as their bedside candle went out with a noise. Alarmed, one of them told her friend: “You are on the side of the bed where Washington died!” Her friend replied: “No, I’m not. He died on your side!” That killed their sleep that night. Both got up, dressed, and sat around wide awake until sunrise, terrified by every squeak. As an 1890 newspaper article put it: “They all agree that Washington visits his chamber in the still watches of the night“.
Newspaper illustration about an encounter with George Washington’s ghost. Mount Vernon
The Ghost of George Washington?
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Josiah Quincy III (1772 – 1864) was one of Massachusetts’ more prominent figures. He served in the US House of Representatives from 1805 to 1813, as mayor of Boston from 1823 to 1828, and as President of Harvard University from 1829 to 1845. In 1806, he visited Mount Vernon, inherited by George Washington’s nephew Bushrod Washington. Quincy stayed overnight, and Bushrod hosted him in George Washington’s bedroom – the one which the great man had died. By then, rumors already abounded of spooky encounters with Washington’s ghost in that bedroom. Quincy, who like most Americans of his generations revered George Washington, was not afraid.
Quincy actually hoped “that he might be found worthy to behold the glorified spirit of him who was so revered by his countrymen“. As his son Josiah Quincy Jr. recounted decades later, his father was not disappointed. At some point that night, he reported that he did, indeed, meet the ghost of George Washington. Frustratingly, however, Quincy Jr. gave no details, other than inform readers that his father’s “assurance in this matter was perfect“. We are thus left to wonder what might have passed between the Massachusetts bigwig and the spooky ghost of America’s first president.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
