About This Location
The 1838 home of President Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States, preserved as a museum in Concord.
The Ghost Story
On January 6, 1853, two months before Franklin Pierce was to be inaugurated as the fourteenth president of the United States, a train carrying the Pierce family derailed near Andover, Massachusetts. The coach tumbled down a fifteen-to-twenty-foot embankment, destroying the car. Eleven-year-old Benjamin 'Bennie' Pierce, who had been standing at the time of the accident, was the only fatality. His parents, sitting nearby, survived with minor injuries but watched their last surviving child die before their eyes. It was the third son the Pierces had lost. Franklin Jr. had died in infancy in 1836. Frank Robert had died of typhus at age four in 1843. Bennie was the last, and his death broke something in both parents that never healed. The Pierce Manse in Concord, New Hampshire, is the house where Bennie spent his happiest years. Franklin and Jane Pierce lived here from 1842 to 1848, after Jane persuaded her husband to resign his United States Senate seat and return to New Hampshire. The modest frame house on Montgomery Street was the center of their family life during the only period when all three Pierce sons were alive. Franklin practiced law in Concord, and the family attended South Congregational Church. It was from this house that Pierce was drawn back into politics, ultimately accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 1852. Jane Pierce, raised as a strict Puritan, had always opposed her husband's political ambitions. After Bennie's death, she became convinced that God had taken their son as punishment for Franklin's decision to pursue the presidency. She did not attend the inauguration. When she finally moved into the White House, she spent most of the presidential term secluded in the upstairs rooms, dressed entirely in black, writing letters to her dead son. According to multiple historical accounts, Jane Pierce held seances in the White House, attempting to communicate with Bennie's spirit. It was one of the earliest documented instances of spiritualism practiced in the executive mansion. Franklin Pierce left the White House in 1857 as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history, his administration consumed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the accelerating crisis over slavery. Jane died in 1863. Franklin, his drinking worsened by decades of grief, died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869 at the age of sixty-four. He is buried in Old North Cemetery in Concord, alongside Jane and all three sons. The Pierce Manse was saved from demolition in 1971 by the Pierce Brigade and moved to its current location at 14 Horseshoe Pond Lane. Today it operates as a house museum, its rooms restored to the 1840s period when the Pierce family lived there. Docents report that the house carries an unmistakable melancholy that visitors frequently remark upon, a heaviness in the upstairs rooms where the boys once slept. Some visitors describe sudden cold spots near the children's bedroom, and a few have reported hearing what sounds like a child's laughter followed by an abrupt, oppressive silence. Whether the haunting is paranormal or simply the accumulated weight of so much documented sorrow, the Pierce Manse remains one of the saddest houses in American presidential history.
