Mary Todd Lincoln's White House Séances

The Visitor in the Red Room

The room was dark, or close to it, and a half dozen hands were joined around a table in the White House's Crimson Room, the room now called the Red Room. The medium was a young woman named Nettie Colburn, brought to the family by a Georgetown clerk's household, and the music meant to summon the dead was already playing when the president came down the stairs and stepped inside to watch¹. He did not join the circle so much as observe it, a man finishing a long day's work who stood at the edge of his wife's grief without fully entering it himself^2,3.

Among the people who passed through that room over the following two years was a medium named Charles Colchester, a man Mary trusted enough to let near the family again and again. Nobody in the Lincoln household seems to have known, or at least to have said aloud, who else occupied his evenings⁴.

The grief filling that room had a date attached to it. Willie Lincoln, eleven years old, died in the White House on February 20, 1862, probably of typhoid fever caused by the building's contaminated water system^5,6. Mary took to her bed for three weeks and could not bring herself to attend the funeral; she never again entered the Green Room, where his body had been embalmed^7,5. Abraham, by his own account, shut himself in a room afterward and wept alone⁵.

Spiritualism was not a fringe curiosity by then. The belief that the dead could be reached through a medium had grown into a significant American religious movement through the 1850s and 1860s, and the Civil War's mounting toll gave it new urgency as families everywhere searched for some assurance that their dead still existed^8,9. One frequently repeated account has former first lady Jane Pierce, who had lost her own young son in a train accident years earlier, urging Mary toward the practice, though the exact circumstances of that advice are thinner in the record than the fact of Mary's grief itself^10,6.

Colburn later said that in the Red Room sitting, the spirits speaking through her did not stop at comforting Mary over Willie. She claimed they urged the president toward the Emancipation Proclamation and told him it would be the defining act of his life⁶. Mary, for her part, told her half-sister Emilie Todd Helm that Willie came to her every night and stood at the foot of her bed with his familiar smile, sometimes bringing their younger son Eddie with him^6,11. Historian David Herbert Donald, working from surviving documents, estimated she may have held as many as eight séances inside the White House, though no complete contemporaneous log of every sitting has ever surfaced⁶.

The most dramatic episode on record came in April 1863, when the Boston Gazette reported a séance in the same Red Room involving President Lincoln, Mary, the medium Charles E. Shockle, two unnamed cabinet members, and the reporter who wrote the piece, Prior Melton. The spirits allegedly consulted that night included Henry Knox, the nation's first secretary of war, and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's old political rival^12,13. It is a vivid story, and also a shaky one: it survives only as a newspaper account, Lincoln's own secretary John Nicolay later denied any such séance ever took place at the White House, and the identities of the cabinet members in attendance were never consistently recorded¹³.

It was Colchester, not Shockle or Colburn, who mattered most in the end. He had become, by some accounts, the one who warned Lincoln most directly that his life was in danger, and when a friend repeated the warning to the president, Lincoln reportedly answered, "Colchester has been telling me that"². What nobody around Mary seems to have reckoned with was where Colchester got his information. He was, as it turned out, a friend and sometime drinking companion of John Wilkes Booth, the actor who would shoot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865⁴.

After the assassination, investigators searching for Booth's associates tracked Colchester to a Washington hotel, but he had already vanished, as thoroughly as any spirit he claimed to summon⁴. Mary's belief in the practice did not die with her husband. She went on hosting séances at her Chicago home and later sat for the self-styled spirit photographer William Mumler, who produced an image showing what looked like Lincoln's ghost standing behind her, a picture widely regarded as a fake that Mary nonetheless found comforting^2,3. The man who had come down the stairs that December evening in 1862 to watch quietly from the edge of the room never left behind a record of what, if anything, he believed about what he saw there.

Timeline

1. February 20, 1862Willie Lincoln dies at the White House, probably of typhoid fever.
2. December 1862Medium Nettie Colburn holds a séance in the White House's Crimson (Red) Room; Lincoln reportedly observes.
3. April 1863The Boston Gazette reports a séance in the Red Room involving Lincoln, Mary, medium Charles E. Shockle, and two cabinet members.
4. Winter 1864-1865Later accounts place additional séances with mediums Charles Colchester and Charles Foster.
5. April 14-15, 1865Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre and dies the next morning; Colchester, Booth's acquaintance, disappears.

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