These are the many ghosts that are said to haunt the White House (2025)

DOES Donald Trump sleep well at night?

The thick-skinned president may not be kept awake by political dilemmas but, if he believes in ghosts, there could be other things that disturb his slumber.

The White House, it seems, has a history of hauntings, and even the most illustrious guests have reported ghostly sightings.

Presidents, First Ladies and even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill havr come across apparitions and heard things that go bump in the night.

The cornerstone for the iconic building was laid in 1792 and it became the official presidential residence in 1800, when John Adams moved in.

The spirits said to wander the corridors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue range from former presidents to an unnamed teenage boy.

Abigail Adams

Abigail was the wife of John Adams, the second President of the US and the first to live in the White House.

The couple moved from the former U.S. capital in Philadelphia to the swampy land, which was to become the town of Washington

Legend had it that Abigail dried her washing in the East Room of the new house because it was the warmest and driest.

Although she died in 1818, in Massachusetts, her ghost is reported to have been seen heading for the East Room with her arms outstretched, as if carrying her laundry.

David Burns

Landowner David Burns was the man who sold the ground that Washington stand on to the US government.

In 1961, Lillian Rogers Parks, a seamstress who worked at the White House for 30 years, wrote a memoir in which she claimed that a valet to PresidentFranklin D. Rooseveltheard a disembodied voice coming from the Yellow Oval Room, saying “I’m Mr. Burns.”

A guard working there during Harry S. Truman’s presidency reported hearing a similar voice which he thought was the Secretary of State James Byrnes.

When he went to look for him, he was told that the secretary hadn’t been at the White House that day.

Andrew Jackson

Five years before becoming the seventh president, in 1929, Andrew Jackson had been defeated buy John Quincy Adams and had held a grudge against Adams’ supporters even while in office.

In the 1860s, when Lincoln was in the White House, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln – who believed strongly in the occult – held séances to contact her dead son Willie who died of typhoid and was also said to haunt the house.

She also told friends she had heard Jackson stomping and swearing through the halls of the presidential residence.

Jackson’s bedroom, The Rose Room, is believed by some to be one of the most haunted rooms in the mansion

In June 1945, Harry Truman felt the presence of his predecessors.

He wrote to wife Bess: “I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches–all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study.

“The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth–I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt].”

Abraham Lincoln

The revered 16^th president, assassinated in 1865, is among the most frequently spotted ghost with Churchill, Ronald Reagan and First Lady Grace Coolidge among those reporting sightings.

Grace, the wife of Calvin Coolidge, was the first person to say she had seen him, recalling the late president looking out a window of the Oval Office to the former Civil War battlefields.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor used Lincoln’s bedroom as her office and said she would feel his presence when she worked there late at night.

During a state visit, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands heard a knock on her bedroom door in the night and when she answered it, she reportedly saw Lincoln’s ghost, wearing his top hat. She fainted.

Winston Churchill, who stayed at the White House numerous times during the Second World War, told a story of emerging naked from his evening bath smoking his customary cigar, only to find a ghostly Lincoln sitting by the fireplace in his room.

The fearless Prime Minister was too frightened to stay in the guest room ever again.

An image taken during Truman's reconstruction of the house, in 1950, reveals a ghostly figure in the rubble that some think is Lincoln.

Ronald Reagan claimed that a family member, thought to be his daughter Maureen, had also seen the ghost.

He told journalist Joan Gage: “A member of our family and her husband always stay in the Lincoln Bedroom when they visit the White House. Some time ago the husband woke up and saw a transparent figure standing at the bedroom window looking out. Then it turned and disappeared.

“His wife teased him mercilessly about it for a month. Then, when they were here recently, she woke up one morning and saw the same figure standing at the window looking out. She could see the trees right through it. Again it turned and disappeared."

The Thing

In 1911, Major Archie Butt, an aide to William Howard Taft wrote to his sister about strange happenings that had been scaring the domestic staff.

He wrote: ““My dear Clara. It seems that the White House is haunted.”

The problem was a spirit referred to as “The Thing” by terrified servants, who reported feeling a pressure on the shoulders, as if a curious boy was leaning on them to see what they were doing.

Only one person reported actually seeing the ghost and that was a personal maid to First Lady Helen Taft.

She said she felt pressure on the shoulder and turned round to but seeing an ethereal figure, described as a young boy of about 13 or 14 with light, unkempt hair and sad blue eyes.

We recently revealed the secrets of the White House, including the shopping mall in the basement and the secret code word when the president wants sex.

Twitter users were also freaked out by a secret door in the Oval office.