Legend Has It the Museum’s Haunted

For a few nights each fall, the National Building Museum becomes the Otherworldly Building Museum by offering ghost tours.

Equipped with your own lantern, you explore the eerie Museum after hours. You meet 24 other visitors on the loading dock long after dark. Suddenly, the doors fly open as if by their own power, and there stands the ghost of Mary Surratt, the first woman executed in the United States and your guide for the night. Feeling her presence in the dimly-lit Great Hall and hearing her first few chilling words spooked one past visitor: “…This was to be the biggest mistake of my life,” Mary utters. “It was Mr. Lloyd who would provide the most damning evidence against me in the trial.”

Accused and convicted of aiding in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, Mary haunts the Museum to this day, looking for evidence to prove her innocence. The building’s architect and engineer, Montgomery Meigs, another of the Museum’s purported supernatural visitors, is said to have hidden documents within the many columns that line the arcaded balconies. Mary believes the key to her acquittal lies inside one of the columns...she just doesn’t know which one.

These two are not the only ghosts known to haunt the Museum’s halls. The building’s haunted history starts last century with reports of strange incidents. Night watchmen told stories of seeing changing shapes within the veins of the massive faux-marble columns in the Great Hall. Others have reported sightings of ghost-like figures walking along the balconies.

As you scout out the building with Mary, she searches for vindication and tells ghost stories. Each story she tells has been reported and experienced by someone in the building throughout the years. It is more than a tour of the Museum. “It’s like time-travel through stories,” said one visitor. Each story takes you to a different period in history with Mary explaining what the time period was really like and the building’s role in that era.

Mary tells each story in the location where the ghost sighting actually occurred, in hopes of catching another glimpse. As you walk along one balcony Mary believes she has found the column containing the proof she needs and asks you to feel inside the pitch-black hole. When Mary suddenly runs away, you are left to find your way out with only your lantern and the help of a security guard making his rounds…

If you are prepared to be scared, join us for this year’s Ghost Tours.

Get National Building Museum news.