Surratt House Museum

The 1852 home of Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the US government, and a stop on John Wilkes Booth's escape route after Lincoln's assassination.

John and Mary Surratt built this ten-room farmhouse in 1852, operating it as a tavern, post office, and polling place. The area was named Surrattsville (now Clinton) in their honor. During the Civil War, Mary's son John became a Confederate courier and right-hand man to John Wilkes Booth, recruiting co-conspirators and inviting them to meetings at the family properties. From September 1864 to April 1865, the house became entangled in the plot to kidnap President Lincoln — weapons, ammunition, rope, and supplies were hidden beneath joists in a second-floor room.

After shooting Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, Booth's first stop on his twelve-day escape was the Surratt house to retrieve the hidden carbines. John Lloyd, who was renting the tavern, later testified that Mary had visited three days before the assassination and told him to have "the shooting irons" ready. This testimony sealed her fate. On July 7, 1865, at 1:22 PM, Mary Surratt was hanged at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary (now Fort McNair) alongside three other conspirators — becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government. Her final words as she felt dizzy were: "Please don't let me fall." President Andrew Johnson refused clemency, reportedly stating: "She kept the nest that hatched the egg."

Museum director Laurie Verge, who worked at the house for over 25 years, calls herself a skeptic but admits she cannot explain the footsteps. "I can't explain the footsteps," she stated. "I absolutely can't." During one staff meeting with five or six employees, everyone stopped talking when they heard heavy footsteps downstairs — someone walking in the front door, down the hall, and out the back. When they investigated, no one was there. Verge herself has felt a man's presence walking out of a bedroom and staring at her: "Although I never saw anything, it was enough to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

Tour guide Julia Cowdery reported two unexplained incidents: a mysterious whistle like a "come here" signal with no source, and a teacup in a downstairs exhibit that rattled "as if someone had picked it up and returned it to its saucer" — despite being alone in the building. Visitors have seen a bearded man reflected in a mirror sitting in a rocking chair, vanishing when observed directly. A child in period clothing was glimpsed under a bed during a tour when no children were present.

Ghost-chaser Hans Holzer, famous for investigating the Amityville Horror case, visited in the 1950s with trance medium Sybil Leek, who allegedly identified hidden items from a century prior. Holzer's 1969 book "Windows to the Past" featured the house, though Verge criticized his approach for "making the history fit the ghost." Holzer's case files were later reopened for Travel Channel's "The Holzer Files," bringing renewed attention to the location.

Verge theorizes the footsteps belong to John Lloyd doing penance for his testimony that "put the rope around her neck." But Mary Surratt's apparition has also been spotted — floating around the staircase, appearing on the porch, and drifting through the rooms where she once lived. Men's apparitions have been seen on the back stairs, and muffled voices echo through empty halls.

At Fort McNair, where Mary was executed, soldiers have seen her ghost wearing a dark cloak, walking from the building where she was imprisoned to the former gallows site — now a tennis court. One officer heard a woman scream "Don't let me fall!" — her final words. In the building where her daughter Anna watched the hanging, windows mysteriously fog up as if someone were pressing their face against the glass and crying. Following her violent death and proclamations of innocence, many believe Mary Surratt's spirit remains trapped between worlds — a restless ghost still protesting her conviction 160 years later.