Editorial October 21, 1996 Issue

Haunted no more

Mary Metzner Trammell

"You should see her!" the white-haired Edinburgh Castle guide said, his eyes big with mystery. "She comes sailin' cross the courtyard here, two or three nights a week, her white gown flyin' in the breeze. Just last night, she came to the bedroom where the groundskeeper and his wife were sleeping—and sat on their bed and talked awhile!"

Now, this wouldn't seem so remarkable, if it weren't for the fact that the woman this guide was describing—Mary, Queen of Scots—has been dead for over four hundred years! So he was really telling us that the castle is haunted ... by ghosts of the distant past.

Yet that's something some nine hundred members of the Surratt Society in Clinton, Maryland, wouldn't find hard to believe. They maintain a museum that honors the memory of Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865—many say wrongfully—as a possible accomplice to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As the story goes, her ghost haunts both the museum and the site at Fort McNair where Surratt was executed.^{Michael Farquhar, "The Haunting Tale of Mary Surratt," The Washington Post, Oct. 31, 1991, and Karyn J. Dabaghian, "We lived in a haunted house," Ladies Home Journal, October 1994 .}