Lincoln's Tomb

Abraham Lincoln's body was moved 17 times and his coffin opened five times between 1865 and 1901, including a failed 1876 heist by Chicago counterfeiters and two years hidden under scrap lumber while visitors mourned at an empty sarcophagus. A secret brotherhood called the Lincoln Guard of Honor protected the remains until they were finally sealed in a steel cage under two tons of concrete.

Abraham Lincoln's coffin was moved 17 times between 1865 and 1901. His casket was opened five times. For two years in the late 1870s, visitors to Springfield's Oak Ridge Cemetery paid their respects at an empty sarcophagus while Lincoln's actual body lay hidden under a pile of scrap lumber in a passageway below.

The whole bizarre saga started on Election Night, 1876. A gang of Chicago counterfeiters led by Big Jim Kinealy sent two men, Terrence Mullen and Jack Hughes, to steal the president's body from the tomb. The plan: ransom the corpse for $200,000 (about $5.5 million today) and the release of their best engraver, Benjamin Boyd, from Joliet prison. A third man, Lewis Swegles, joined the crew. He was a Secret Service informant.

Mullen and Hughes broke into the tomb on November 7, pried open the marble sarcophagus, and managed to pull Lincoln's cedar casket partway out. Then a detective's pistol fired by accident. Agents and police mistook the shot for return fire and bullets flew in the dark for a few confused seconds. The thieves bolted. They were arrested ten days later at a Chicago saloon called the Hub.

What happened next is stranger than the robbery attempt. Custodian John C. Power, terrified that someone else would try, quietly moved Lincoln's casket out of the sarcophagus and hid it in the tomb's labyrinth, a dark network of passages beneath the memorial hall. He covered it with old boards and debris. For two years, the public mourned above, unaware the coffin below their feet was empty.

In 1877, Power recruited eight other men to form the Lincoln Guard of Honor, a secret brotherhood that included Major Gustavas Dana and General Jasper Reece. They had lapel badges made. Their sole job: guard the secret of the tomb. The group oversaw every subsequent move of Lincoln's body, through a brick and mortar vault in 1886, through multiple relocations during a full monument reconstruction from 1899 to 1901.

On September 26, 1901, Leon P. Hopkins chiseled a small opening in the lead-lined coffin so witnesses could confirm the body was still Lincoln's. Hopkins had been part of this ritual before. He claimed to be the last man to look upon Lincoln's face when the coffin was first sealed in 1865, and he'd opened it again in 1886. This time, the witnesses confirmed the identification, and workers lowered the casket into a steel cage buried ten feet below the floor, then poured two tons of concrete over it. Nobody has moved Abraham Lincoln since.

The ghost stories started almost immediately after the body arrived in Springfield on May 3, 1865. During the years of construction on the permanent tomb (1868 to 1874), workers and visitors reported a tall figure near the crypt that looked like Lincoln. Those sightings haven't stopped. Visitors and staff at Oak Ridge describe footsteps on the tile floors, muffled voices in the corridors, and the sound of someone weeping. Others in the cemetery have reported a small boy and a woman in a red cape, though neither has a clear identity.

Then there's the ghost train. According to a story first published in the Albany Evening Times around the 1870s, a phantom version of Lincoln's funeral train rides the original 1,654-mile route from Washington to Springfield every April around the anniversary of his death. The account describes an engine draped in black streamers, a band playing dirges, the coffin visible in the center car, and "vast numbers of blue-coated men, some with coffins on their backs." Clocks and watches along the route stop as it passes, running five to eight minutes behind once it's gone. Sightings cluster around April 26 to 27 in Albany, New York, April 28 to 29 in Urbana, Ohio, and early May in Illinois.

The tomb at Oak Ridge is one of those places where the real history outpaces anything a ghost story could invent. A body ransomed by counterfeiters, hidden under lumber for two years, guarded by a secret brotherhood with lapel pins, opened five times, and finally sealed under two tons of concrete because nobody could figure out how else to keep grave robbers away. Lincoln's coffin was moved more times after his death than most people move apartments in a lifetime.