Mary Todd Lincoln House

This Georgian-style brick house was the childhood home of Mary Todd, who would become the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Built in 1806, it's the first historic site restored in honor of a First Lady and is open for tours from March through November.

The Mary Todd Lincoln House at 578 West Main Street in Lexington is the former childhood home of Mary Ann Todd, who would marry Abraham Lincoln in 1842 and become one of the most tragic figures in American history. The Georgian-style house was built between 1803 and 1806 and served as the Todd family residence where young Mary grew up in relative privilege, receiving an education uncommon for women of her era. The house was restored and opened as a museum in 1977, the first historic site in the United States to honor a First Lady.

Mary Todd Lincoln's life was defined by sorrow on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. She lost three of her four sons. Edward died of tuberculosis shortly before his fourth birthday in 1850. William, whom the family called Willie, died of typhoid fever in 1862 at age 11 while the Lincolns occupied the White House. Thomas, called Tad, died in 1871 at age 18. And then there was the assassination — Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, dying the next morning with Mary at his side. The accumulated grief drove her to the edge of sanity and beyond. She began conducting seances in the White House Red Room after Willie's death, desperately trying to reach her dead children. She told her half-sister: "Willie lives. He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him."

In 1872, consumed by loss, Mary hired spiritualist photographer William Mumler to take her portrait. The resulting photograph appeared to show the faint image of Abraham Lincoln standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders — proof, she believed, that her husband was watching over her from the other side. Mumler was later exposed as a fraud who used double-exposure techniques. Mary's eldest son Robert had her committed to an asylum in 1875, though she was released four months later. She died in Springfield, Illinois, in 1882, at the age of 63.

Whether Mary Todd Lincoln's spirit returned to her Lexington childhood home — the last place where she knew unbroken happiness — is a question that visitors and staff have been asking for decades. The wispy figure of an old woman has been spotted in the house, described by those who encounter her as a sorrowful presence who seems forever tormented by grief. Visitors and staff report unexplained noises, disembodied voices, and the unsettling sensation of being touched by unseen hands. Children visiting the house have reported seeing a woman's spirit in Mary's former bedroom. Rocking chairs in the house have been observed moving on their own, and Mary's apparition has been glimpsed in reflective surfaces — mirrors and glass cases — as if she exists just on the other side of the world we can see.

The house is open for tours and is a featured stop on multiple Lexington ghost walk circuits. Historian Jonathan Coleman, who also created the Lexington Cemetery's Civil War walking tour, has been involved in curating the house's history. For those who believe Mary Todd Lincoln found no peace in life, the reports from her childhood home suggest she has found no peace in death, either — still reaching across the veil for the children and the husband she could never hold again.