Franklin Pierce Manse

Jane Pierce held séances in the White House, trying to reach her eleven-year-old son Bennie. This Concord house is where it started.

Jane Pierce held séances in the White House. She was trying to reach her eleven-year-old son Bennie, whose body she had watched die in a train derailment on January 6, 1853, two months before her husband's inauguration as the fourteenth president of the United States.

That's the weight the Franklin Pierce Manse carries. The house on Horseshoe Pond Lane in Concord is the only home Franklin Pierce ever owned, and the only place where Jane and Franklin lived with all three of their sons at once. Franklin Jr. died in infancy in 1836. Frank Robert died of typhus in this house at age four in 1843. The family moved away in 1848. Bennie, the last, died on that train.

The Pierces lived here from 1842 to 1848, after Jane talked Franklin into resigning his Senate seat and leaving Washington. It was supposed to be a retreat from politics. Franklin practiced law. The family attended South Congregational Church a few blocks away. Jane was a strict Puritan from a prominent Portsmouth family, shy and chronically ill, and she believed the presidency would destroy them. After Bennie died, she decided God had taken the boy as punishment for Franklin's ambition. She refused to attend the inauguration. She spent most of the presidency upstairs in the White House in mourning dress, writing letters to a dead child.

The spiritualism part is historical record, not a ghost tour invention. Jane's interest in séances during the 1850s is one of the earliest documented instances of spiritualism inside the executive mansion. She was trying to close a hole she couldn't close.

The Pierce Manse was nearly demolished for urban renewal in the 1960s. A group of preservationists called the Pierce Brigade saved it in 1971 and moved it to its current location, where the original 1838 Greek Revival structure is now furnished to the 1840s. Docents who work there will tell you the upstairs has a quality visitors notice without prompting. The temperature drops near the room the boys shared. A few people have described what sounded like a child laughing, cut off by a silence that feels like a held breath.

Franklin died of cirrhosis in 1869. He's buried in Old North Cemetery in Concord with Jane and all three of their sons. The Manse is the last place they were ever a family.