Plenty of Ghosts in Washington, D.C.

WASHINGTON - A whiff of lilacs means Dolley Madison is again roaming the Octagon House. Mary Surratt appears in her Chinatown rooming house and at Fort McNair, where she was hanged. At the White House, Abraham Lincoln still treads the hallways. Washington has been home to a lot of troubled souls, and sometimes they seem reluctant to leave the capital.

"Anybody who lives in an old house has the sense of someone being there before them and knows of stories told over the years," said Barbara Franco, the Historical Society of Washington's executive director. "Sometimes, it develops that not everyone left the house." Ms. Franco said many believe ghosts wander the Victorian Heurich Mansion, built by brewer Christian Heurich at New Hampshire Avenue and Sunderland Place Northwest. The building is now the headquarters of the historical society.

Natalie Zanin, an actress who has written a play for each house, said she didn't believe in ghosts until one day when she was working alone at the Heurich Mansion. Someone, or something, repeatedly moved a velvet rope hanging in a doorway to keep visitors out. She replaced it three times. Finally, she spoke aloud, asking the deceased owner of the house to stop. It worked. "I am a believer," she said emphatically.

Ms. Zanin, a historical society staff member, based her plays on Ghosts, Washington Revisited, a recently reissued book by John Alexander. After the White House was burned by the British in 1814, President James Madison and his wife, Dolley, moved to the Octagon House, where Dolley Madison used lilacs to perfume the air. According to Mr. Alexander, some visitors to the house at New York Avenue and 18th Street Northwest, now owned by the American Institute of Architects, have walked into pockets of air mysteriously scented with lilacs.

But the house is better known for the mysterious deaths of two sisters. John Tayloe built the house in 1797, and he and his wife raised 15 children there. Both of the daughters who died had taken up with men their father did not like, and both fell to their deaths from a spiral staircase after arguing with their father. Over the years, visitors have heard girlish screams and a thud as though a body had landed at the foot of the stairs. Or so Mr. Alexander said.

Angie Dodson, curator of education at the Octagon House, said legends and ghost stories - although they may be folklore rather than fact - have a place in understanding the social history of a building. Halloween, she said, is an opportunity to "explain or comment on our haunted history."

For the Decatur House, a National Trust for Historic Preservation property on Lafayette Square, Mr. Alexander tells the story of naval hero Stephen Decatur, who was mortally wounded in a duel on March 14, 1820. He was brought home to die. Within a year, there were sightings of Decatur gazing out a window or slipping out the back door with his dueling pistols.

Molly Neal, director of collections and programs for Decatur House, doesn't discount the stories. "People do believe in ghosts," she said. "Every museum where I have worked, there have been stories of ghosts."