Paranormal Travel Guide: The Samuel Mudd House (Waldorf, Maryland)

by Mike Ricksecker:

The Samuel Mudd House in Waldorf, Maryland, notorious for its role as a stopping point in John Wilkes Booth’s flight out of Washington D.C. after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, has become an increasingly popular hot spot in the paranormal community. While some of this traffic is certainly to its feature on television shows such as Ghost Hunters, the house has had stories of the paranormal emanating from it for years.

Originally, the house served as the quiet farm home of the local doctor, Samuel Mudd, and his family. At 4:00 AM on April 15, 1865, a knock on the door in the dead of the night changed the family’s life forever. In disguise and using the name “Mr. Tyler,” John Wilkes Booth was ushered into the house by his accomplice David Herrold in order to have his broken leg treated. The doctor set Booth’s leg in an upstairs bedroom and tended to his basic needs. With a short amount of rest and recovery, Booth and Herold vacated the farmhouse that afternoon with Mudd pointing the way to Parson Wilmer’s, their next destination along the escape route.

Three days later, Lt. Alexander Lovett, an investigator in the Booth escape, called upon the Mudd house to inquire about the man. Mudd insisted that the man whose leg he fixed was a stranger to him, although there were a handful of accounts in which the two had met. Mudd later claimed that on that fateful night Boot was wearing a cloak over his head, a heavy shawl, and bore a mustache. On a return trip to the house on April 21, Lovett discovered an old boot under the upstairs bed that bore the inscription “J. Wilkes —.” Dr. Mudd was taken into custody and later convicted in the conspiracy of the Lincoln assassination, however, he was pardoned in 1869 for his heroics in battling the yellow fever outbreak at Fort Jefferson where he was held prisoner.

It was, perhaps, the paranormal that inspired Mrs. Louise Mudd Arehart to restore the old farm house a century later. At her own home in La Plata, she heard disembodied footsteps, random knocking at her front door, and she began seeing a man  in black trousers and white shirt with a vest around the property. After suddenly passing the apparition of this man while passing through the doorway to her dining room one day, she became convinced that Dr. Mudd had returned in concern over the state of disrepair his old home had fallen.

Since 1983, the Dr. Samuel Mudd house has been open to the public and has never been short on ghost stories. Common disturbances of the home include unanswered knocks at the door, disembodied footsteps around the house, and several sightings of Civil War soldiers. A doll in the upstairs bedroom has reportedly flown out of the chair where it normally sits. The room in which John Wilkes Booth stayed has had reports of coughing emanating from it when no one was there, and periodically an impression can be seen in the bed as if someone were lying there. On one occasion, the door to the attic in the upstairs hallway flew open and a strong gust of wind ripped through the second level. Even Mrs. Mudd has been seen looking out one of the windows of the old home.

Dr. Samuel Mudd

In the autumn of 2008, a group of Civil War re-enactors were camped around the house. They noticed the artificial candles in the windows of the house were still illuminated, so a few of them went inside to put out the candles by loosening the bulbs. When they returned to their positions they noticed the lights were still on. They went back and removed the batteries from the candles, but a half hour later the candles were illuminated once again.

I’ve been to the Mudd House twice, but my most interesting experience occurred the second time I visited. It was a Monday morning, one in which I didn’t realize the home was closed to visitors, but I was fortunate in that a curator drove up behind me at nearly the same time and invited me up to the home while he opened it up for a private tour. My wife was with me, but she wanted no part of entering the house past the entrance hall, standing stock still with chills at the bottom of the stairs leading to second floor while the curator showed me about. While he opened window shades as we walked through I asked him about his paranormal experiences in the home, and he told me of apparitions of Mrs. Frankie Mudd, voices throughout the house, and the incident of the electric candles during the Civil War reenactment. As we ascended the stairs up to the second floor he also told me of the human-shaped bed impression routinely discovered in the room in which John Wilkes Booth had stayed and how the staff gets aggravated at having to fix it most mornings. I’d heard the rumor before, but had never seen anything to substantiate the claim.

When we entered that room he passed by the bed and went straight for the windows, but I looked down and was nearly floored. “So is this one of the impressions?”

He spun about and his face flushed when he saw I was pointing at a human-sized impression sunken into the left side of the bed. “See! That’s what I’m talking about!”

I asked to take a few pictures, which he granted, but he remained visibly agitated. “It’s not like this when we leave the house at night. Then we have to come up here and fix it to make sure everything looks good for the public.”

I was ecstatic with the find. It certainly looked like someone had been lying down on his or her side on the bed, with elbow and feet impressions clearly visible. The whole time, however, my wife had remained downstairs, almost unmovable from the small entrance hall.

The Dr. Samuel Mudd House has played a significant role in our tragic past and is now playing a role in our paranormal present. More details about the history of the home and its hauntings are available in Ghosts of Maryland.