Ep. 13 - The Tragic Rathbones

President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary were not the only people sitting in their box at the Ford's Theater to watch the production of "Our American Cousin" on the evening that the President was assassinated. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiance, Clara Harris, were also sitting in the box and played witness to the whole horrible scene. Clara's satin dress was splattered with blood. The Major never  recovered from the horrific event and it may have led him to do a horrible thing later. That event and the assassination have all left behind an energy, part of which has spawned tales of ghosts and a haunted satin dress.

Henry Reed Rathbone was born in Albany, New York on July 1, 1837 to Jared and Pauline Rathbone. Jared was a wealthy merchant and Albany's mayor. He died shortly after Henry was born. Pauline now had four children to raise on her own, but Jared had left her and the children with a sizable sum of money. She later met Ira Harris, who was a United States Senator and widower with four children of his own. The couple married in 1848. One of Ira's daughters was Clara, who had been born on September 9, 1834. She and Henry grew very close and eventually fell in love. Henry asked her to marry him shortly before the Civil War broke out. He had become a lawyer, but traded in his law books for a uniform and he joined the Union Army.

Henry became an officer in the 12th U.S. Infantry and his first battles were southeast of Richmond in 1862. That fall he fought in the bloodiest battle of the war at the Battle of Antietam and then he moved on to the Battle of Fredericksburg where he served on the staff of General Ambrose E. Burnside. By the end of the Civil War, he had attained the rank of Major. While Henry had been fighting in the war, Clara had struck up a friendship with Mary Todd Lincoln. Clara had written in a letter of the friendship, "We have been constantly in the habit of driving and going to the opera and theater together." Washington, D.C.was jubilant with the ending of the war and the nights were filled with parades and fireworks. Clara joined the Lincoln's at the White House and watched as President Lincoln gave a speech to a large crowd outside. She wrote of the event, "After the speech was over, we went into Mr. Lincoln's room. He was lying on the sofa, quite exhausted, but he talked of the events of the past fortnight . . . and Mrs Lincoln declared the last few days to have been the happiest of her life."

The Lincolns decided they wanted to go see a new play in town on Good Friday, which was April 14th that year. The play was a comedy called "Our American Cousin" and it was showing at Ford's Theater. Originally, the couple had invited General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia to join them. Since the war had just ended, the Grants were anxious to get back to their children in New Jersey, so they declined. Mary Lincoln was relieved as she did not care much for Julia. The feeling was mutual and more than likely the reason why the Grants declined the invite. The Lincolns then invited Henry and Clara to join them. The night of April 14th in 1865 was chilly and damp, melancholy if you will. There was a foreboding in the air when the black presidential carriage pulled up to Senator Harris' house at 8:20pm to pick up their guests.

The play was already under way when the foursome arrived and everything was halted as the orchestra played "Hail to the Chief" as the President made his way to the presidential box. He took a seat in a rather plush rocking chair that was nearest the box's door. Henry sat on a couch at the rear of the box and Clara and Mary took seats side by side in the middle of the box. The group enjoyed themselves through the first two acts, unaware that earlier that morning a Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth had written in his diary, "Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done." At 10:13 p.m., during Act 3, Scene 2, Booth slipped in through the door to the box when the guard stepped away for a moment. He carried with him a loaded derringer and a Bowie knife. An actor on stage named Harry Hawk had just delivered the comic line, "you sockdologizing old man-trap," which drew a riot of laughter. At that moment, Booth fired his gun at the back of Lincoln's head and the laughter made it hard for anyone to hear the gunshot or Booth yell, "Freedom!"

Henry did hear though and he saw the commotion through the gun smoke. He leapt up and launched towards Booth, grabbing hold of him. The two men wrestled and Booth managed to grab his knife and plunge it into Henry's arm. The strike hit him near his left armpit, piercing the bicep to the bone and nearly cutting two major blood vessels. The blow forced Henry to let go, but he managed to grasp a piece of Booth's clothing as he leapt from the box to the stage below. Henry yelled, "Stop that man!" The crowd was left in a state of shock and confusion thinking that the scene before them was all part of the play. The presidential box was in chaos and Clara's beautiful white satin dress was stained with blood, most of it Henry's. She screamed that the president had been shot, but doctors were hampered from entering as Booth had wedged a music stand against the door. The badly bleeding Henry managed to free the door as help rushed in, greeted by Mary who was in hysterics.

It was decided to move the President to a boarding house across the street as he was too wounded to transport back to the White House. Henry and Clara helped Mary across the street where she kept a death vigil. Henry himself passed out and was taken back to the Harris house to be stitched up. Clara joined him later at the house and found him pale as a corpse. He had lost a lot of blood and he murmured in delirium about the President, the gunshot and death. An Army surgeon arrived at the house and stitched Henry's wound. Henry recovered and a few weeks after President Lincoln succumbed to his mortal wound, Clara was standing before a photographer, wearing the white satin dress she wore the night of the assassination. She told a friend she was trying not to think about the assassination. "But I really cannot fix my mind on anything else," she wrote. That dress would be put away into a closet, but it would hold sway in the lives of the Rathbones and even beyond.

Clara and Henry were married two years later in 1867. Their life together would not be wedded bliss. Henry suffered from what was more than likely post traumatic stress disorder. He never recovered and would slip into bouts of depression. The couple had three children and were very well off, living in a 22 room home on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Henry continued with the Army, but nervous disorders forced him to retire in 1870. His mental condition continued to deteriorate and he would hallucinate. The walls were giving off noxious vapors meant to kill him and he was positive that people were spying on him from outside his suite, just waiting to kill him.

On a day that should be full of joy for families, Christmas Eve, the mental illness growing in Henry's mind would come to a deadly head. Clara had endured years of living with a man who hated himself for not saving the President. She watched as he lost touch with reality. They would fight and he would rave about her leaving him and taking the children. He may have even gotten violent with her on occasion and yet, she stayed with him. The couple were living in a German apartment on Heinrichstrasse in Hanover on Christmas Eve in 1883, when Henry would grab a pistol and a knife and try to enter the children's room. Clara pulled him back to the master bedroom and Henry shot her several times. He then stabbed her in the chest with a knife. He then slashed himself. It was almost as though he were reenacting the assassination. And when the authorities arrived, he claimed someone else had come into the home and attacked them both.

Clara's sister Louise had been with the family on their European tour and she took the children to a hotel. They would later attend Clara's funeral and then return to America. Henry was taken to a hospital and eventually the German courts sent him away to a former Benedictine monastery that was converted to the Provincial Insane Asylum. Visitors would find Henry Rathbone grizzled and very thin, weighing only 140 pounds. He would never talk about two things: the assassination of President Lincoln and the murder of his wife. One doctor diagnosed Henry with "delusions of persecution." A friend who had visited said of Henry, "He is hopelessly insane. He is suffering from the worst form of Melancholia and imagines that everyone is conspiring against him. He realizes fully what he has done and says that it is the result of a conspiracy."

Henry remained at the asylum until he died at the age of 73 on Aug. 14, 1911. Not many paid attention to his death. He was buried next to his wife, but many years later the cemetery would claim that the graves were abandoned and it made the plots available for others and no one knows what became of the couple's remains. There are claims; however, about their spirits, which seem to be at unrest. Stories of hauntings related to the Rathbones begin with their home in Albany. It was in this closet that Clara had hidden away the white satin dress. She could not bring herself to get rid of the dress, so she decided to brick up the closet. Some say that the real reason Clara wanted the dress and closet bricked up was because she was visited by the spirit of President Lincoln. A year after the assassination, she heard the low laughter of Lincoln as if they were back at the play. Perhaps it had just been a dream. But then, the next year, a guest staying in the room heard the same disembodied laughter.

People who lived in the house after the Rathbones claimed some bizarre happenings. A shot was heard ringing out at the closet on the anniversary of the assassination. The ghost of Lincoln was seen as well. A woman in blood-soaked attire was seen as a sobbing apparition. In 1910, Henry Riggs Rathbone, the couple's son, broke down the brick wall at his family's summer home and burned the dress because he felt it had cursed his family. Louis C. Jones wrote the book, "Things That Go Bump in the Night." He grew up in Albany and shared a story in regards to the Rathbone residence:

    "A family who were descendants of the family who occupied the house after the Rathbone’s moved out had one house guest that experienced this haunting. They were related to the then Governor of Massachusetts. He was pondering a political problem while he visited them. A bill that had been passed in his state was causing a heated controversy. He was having trouble falling asleep worried whether he should take the side that would be politically expedient for his career or do what he considered to be the right thing. He finally fell asleep to be awoken abruptly. There was someone in the room with him. He raised himself up on his elbow and saw the figure of Lincoln standing in the moonlight. Lincoln appeared to be calm and had an understanding smile upon his lips-- he then just vanished. The governor turned to switch on the light and a book of Lincoln’s speeches fell to the floor. As he picked it up and saw these words, “Hew honesty to the line; let the Lord take care of the chips.” The governor stuck to his guns and supported the bill. He was re-elected and went on to serve his state more ably than before. The family that lived in the house was skeptical about what he saw but during a renovation in the bedroom he had stayed in they found the tiny closet that had been closed off. In it was the dress with Lincoln’s bloodstains. They sealed it back up."

Rumors about ghosts in the house were so prevalent in Albany that in 1929, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews wrote "The White Satin Dress" about the haunting events.As was mentioned, the remains of the Rathbones were removed from their graves and no one knows what happened to them, but more than likely, whatever happened was not respectful. This is why some believe that both of the Rathbone's spirits are at unrest. She has been seen in the Albany home many times and may be the figure of the woman seen sobbing. The home on Lafayette Square scared neighbors after the death of Henry. They seemed to think that it held a curse that carried over from the assassination. Was there a web of fate that would entangle them too? There were claims that Henry's spirit had made his way back across the sea and returned to his former home. There were the screams in the night. And the disembodied crying of a man.

What happened to President Abraham Lincoln was tragic. Imagine how horrifying it would be to be a witness to such a troubling event in history. To have the very dress you are wearing be splattered with the blood of the President. Henry Rathbone may have already had mental illness as a part of his genetic make-up, but the assassination of the President pushed him over an edge that sent him spiraling into a future event no one could imagine. Is it the tragedy involved here that has left so many of these spirits at unrest and connected to each other? Is the Albany home haunted? Do Lincoln, Henry and Clara still wander the earth in the afterlife? That is for you to decide?