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Paranormal Lincoln - Abraham Lincoln's premonitions of his assassination
Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 1999 by Joe Nickell
His guiding of the United States through its greatest crisis and his subsequent martyrdom have caused the shadow of the tall, sixteenth president to loom still larger. Called "the most mythic of all American presidents" (Cohen 1989, 7), Abraham Lincoln has long been credited by paranormalists with supernatural powers. These include an early mirror-vision, prophetic dreams, and spiritualistic phenomena. His ghost, some say, even haunts the White House.(1)
In the Looking Glass
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Many people have portrayed Lincoln as a man given to belief in omens - particularly those relating to his assassination. An incident often cited in this regard occurred at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln related it to a few friends and associates, including Noah Brooks in 1864. Brooks shared it with the readers of Harper's New Monthly Magazine the following July - three months after Lincoln's death - recounting the president's story "as nearly as possible in his own words":
It was just after my election in 1860. . . . 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. 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 though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when [with a laugh], sure enough, the thing came 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 worried about it somewhat. 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. (Brooks 1865, 224-225)
The same story was told by Ward Hill Lamon in his book, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. Lamon was a friend of Lincoln's, a fearless man who accompanied him to Washington for his protection, being given the special title, Marshal of the District of Columbia. In discussing the matter of the double image in the mirror, Lamon stated: "Mr. Lincoln more than once told me that he could not explain this phenomenon" and "that he had tried to reproduce the double reflection at the Executive Mansion, but without success." In Lamon's account it was not Mrs. Lincoln but the president himself who thought the "ghostly" image foretold "that death would overtake him" before the end of his second term (Lamon 1995, 111-112).
In recent years, paranormalists have gotten hold of Lincoln's anecdote and offered their own interpretations. Hans Holzer states that "What the President saw was a brief 'out of the body experience,' or astral projection," meaning "that the bonds between conscious mind and the unconscious are temporarily loosened and that the inner or true self has quickly slipped out" (Holzer 1995, 65).
Such an explanation utterly fails to fit the evidence. Lincoln did not describe an out-of-body experience - a feeling of being outside one's physical self - but, according to Brooks (1865, 225), "The President, with his usual good sense, saw nothing in all this but an optical illusion."
The nature of this optical illusion can be deduced from the circumstances. The double image was of Lincoln's face only, could be seen in a particular mirror but not others, and vanished and reappeared with respect to a certain vantage point. Taken together, these details are corroborative evidence that the mirror was the cause. An ordinary mirror can produce a slight double-image effect due to light reflecting off the front of the glass as well as off the silvering on the back. In modern mirrors this is usually not noticeable, and the shift in the image is slight in any event. But in the case of old mirrors, whose glass plates "were generally imperfect" (Cescinsky 1931), a distinct double image might be produced, like that shown in Figure 1. (Unfortunately, the actual mirror-topped bureau Lincoln described is no longer to be found at the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, much of the furniture having been dispersed in earlier years [Suits 1998].)
Dreams of Death
The mirror incident sets the stage for claims of even more emphatically premonitory experiences. These were dreams Lincoln reportedly had that foretold dramatic events. One he related to his cabinet on April 14, 1865. The previous night he had dreamed he was in some mysterious boat, he said, "sailing toward a dark and indefinite shore." In another version it was of "a ship sailing rapidly" (Lewis 1973, 290). When Lincoln was assassinated only hours later, the dream was seen as weirdly prophetic. The story grew in the retellings which spread, says Lloyd Lewis in Myths After Lincoln (1973, 291) "around the world."
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