Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On a lonely night in 1946, President Harry Truman went up to bed at about 9 p.m. About six hours later, he heard it.

Truman was startled. He later wrote in a letter, quote,

I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there. Went back to bed

after locking the doors, and there were footsteps. Jumped up and looked at no one there. The

damn place is haunted, sure is shooting.

Truman didn't shoot anyone that night,

but like other White House occupants,

he was convinced that the old place was haunted by more than political ghosts.

Whether you believe this stuff or not, the many accounts that have spilled out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

over two centuries give ghosts an undeniable place

in the country's history. They also make that address arguably the nation's most famous

haunted house. Abraham Lincoln said he received regular visits from his son Willie, who died of

typhoid fever in the White House when he was 11 years old.

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who was so grief-stricken by the loss that she remained in her room for weeks,

spoke of seeing her son's ghost once at the foot of her bed.

There were also reports of her hearing Thomas Jefferson playing the violin and Andrew Jackson swearing.

Not only did President Lincoln see ghosts, he actually became one.

After his assassination in 1865, First Lady Grace Coolidge spoke in magazine accounts of seeing

Lincoln look out a window in what had been his office.

Many more sightings would come in the decades in presidential administrations that followed. Queen Wilhelmina

of the Netherlands was sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom in 1942 when she reportedly heard a knock

...