Ford’s Theatre

The documented evening is precise. Laura Keene played Florence Trenchard, a role she had performed more than a thousand times; General Grant had declined the invitation to join the Lincolns; Booth's guard at the box door, John Parker, had drifted off to watch the play. After the shot Booth dropped to the stage, caught his spur on the flag draped below the box, broke his left leg, and still made it out the back door to a waiting horse. Twelve days later he was shot through a burning tobacco barn in Virginia. The deringer stayed behind, entered into evidence, and never left the government's custody.

John T. Ford had rebuilt the theatre in 1863 on the bones of an earlier playhouse that burned in 1862 — itself a converted Baptist church. After the assassination, public fury made reopening unthinkable; the state took the building, compensated Ford, and ran it for decades as offices and storage, housing the Army Medical Museum and piles of pension records. The 1893 collapse was an engineering verdict on that arrangement. A Lincoln museum opened on the ground floor in 1932, Congress funded a restoration to the 1865 appearance in the 1960s, and Ford's reopened as a working theatre in 1968, administered with the Petersen House as a National Historic Site.

Staff and visitors have long reported a figure in or near the presidential box, footsteps on the rear stairs Booth climbed to reach it, cold spots in the dress circle, and a sharp report like a pistol shot with no source. On 10th Street, passersby describe screams and commotion answering to no one present, and guests at the Petersen House call the death room heavy. Booth himself is said to limp the wings, while Lincoln's ghost is filed at the theatre, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and at half the buildings he ever entered — prompting one paranormal historian to call him the Johnny Appleseed of ghosts, sown wherever he went in life.

The museum displays the evidence of the documented night: the deringer, on view since 1942, the president's overcoat, the contents of his pockets. Above it the box hangs dressed with flags as it was that evening, and performances still run beneath it. Whether the footsteps and cold spots belong to the same record is a question the file leaves open. It is worth noting that the 22 clerks crushed in 1893 — the better-documented dead of this address — are almost never cast in the ghost stories, which prefer a president to a pension file.