In Brief
At the New York State Capitol in Albany, staff still report a watchman in uniform making his rounds on the upper floors. They say he's Samuel Abbott, who died in the 1911 fire — found two days later, just short of a door he had the key to.
The Full Story
The New York State Capitol in Albany keeps an old man on the upper floors. Staff report a watchman in uniform walking his rounds, a heavy ring of keys jingling when no one is near, doorknobs rattling and doors closing in corridors that are supposed to be empty. They say he is Samuel Abbott, and they think they know why he stayed.
Abbott was 78, a Civil War veteran who had lieutenant's bars and a cane he carried from a war wound. He had watched the Capitol and the State Library since 1895. His beat covered three floors of the library, and on the morning of March 29, 1911, he was on duty when the fire started.
It began around 2:10 a.m. An Assembly proofreader named Dwight Goewey saw it and pulled Fire Box 324. By the time 125 firefighters arrived behind thirteen horse-drawn engines, the building was gutting itself. The fire took the State Library — roughly half a million books, hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, colonial records written in Dutch, the million-card catalog. It is still counted among the worst library disasters in modern history. The cause was never settled. A frayed wire, a dropped cigar.
Abbott was the only person to die in it. Around 3 a.m. he was seen opening windows on an upper floor, by most accounts trying to save the records. Then he was gone. His body was found two days later, on March 31, on the fourth floor, in a passage near where the fire began. By the accounts that get retold, he had a key in his pocket that fit a locked door onto a staircase out, only a few steps away. He had almost made it.
The fourth floor is the quiet part of the building now, smaller and set apart, once joined to the library he guarded. It is also where the stories cluster. People standing on the spot where his body was found say a smell rolls in without warning, smoke and wet ash, then lifts. The accounts come without names, passed along secondhand. A tour-office worker locking up late around the year 2000 is said to have seen a tall, shadowed figure near that same place. A Senate staffer working a late budget session is said to have looked up to find a white-haired man in strange old clothes in her office, asking why she was still there, and then gone.
He went unhonored for over a century. In 2018, on the anniversary of the fire, the state finally fixed a plaque to the wall for him. By then the staff had long since stopped pretending the upper floors were empty.
New York does not hide him. Every October the state runs free Capitol Hauntings tours, and they take you to the spot on the fourth floor where Abbott was found.
