Lincoln's Tomb

At Lincoln's Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, people keep hearing things they can't place. Footsteps pacing the tile floors with no one walking. Whispers. The sound of someone weeping somewhere in the corridors. Now and then a visitor reports a tall figure near the crypt, watching, and they take it for Lincoln himself.

The first of those sightings go back to the construction years, when his body lay in the unfinished tomb and a far stranger thing was happening below.

On election night in 1876, a gang of Chicago counterfeiters pried open the sarcophagus and dragged the cedar casket partway out. They meant to ransom the president's body for $200,000 and win the release of a jailed engraver. A detective's pistol went off by accident and scattered them into the dark; the body never left the building. They were arrested ten days later at the saloon where the plot had started.

Then the tomb's custodian, terrified of a second attempt, did something the mourning public never knew. He had the casket lifted out, cemented the empty lid back into place, and carried the real coffin into the black passages between the halls. There he set it down "near some boards that had been left behind in the construction," covered it with debris, and left it.

For roughly two years, visitors filed past the sarcophagus and grieved over a box with nothing inside it. Lincoln was a few feet below them, under lumber, in the dark.

A handful of men formed a secret brotherhood with lapel badges, the Lincoln Guard of Honor, sworn only to keep the location quiet. The body was moved again and again. In 1901 it was lowered into a steel cage and sealed under two tons of concrete, ten feet down, and no one has moved it since.

Every April, a phantom funeral train is said to run the old route from Washington toward Springfield, draped in black, carrying his coffin. Trackmen along the line swore they saw it pass each year on the anniversary. It never arrives.