Ghosts in the House

by Editorial
The "Excorcist Steps"

The "Excorcist Steps"

One of Washington’s most famous ghosts inhabits the Walsh-McLean House, now the Indonesian Embassy, at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue NW.  The apparition of Evalyn Walsh McLean has been seen as a beautiful nude woman drifting down the grand staircase of the former home of the owner of the supposedly cursed Hope Diamond. As soon as she bought the giant blue stone, bad luck struck with a vengeance. First, her son Vinson was hit by an automobile and died. Then her husband became a hopeless alcoholic and was committed to a mental institution. Her daughter died of a drug overdose. Toward the end of her life, Evalyn had to pawn the giant diamond more than once to try and refinance The Washington Post which per inherited from her husband’s family. This beautiful, incredibly wealthy woman who whose parties were written up in newspapers around the world, died a slow and painful death, with barely enough money to survive. The infamous gem is now on display at the Smithsonian, where you can visit it at your peril, and its former owner’s spirit may still be on the loose in the vast rooms and corridors of the Indonesian Embassy.

Lafayette Square, another hotspot for ghostly phenomena, is where the spirits of Stephen Decatur and Dolley Madison are said to make regular appearances in their former homes. The square’s most interesting ghost, however, is that of Clover Adams, whose spirit may still be at large, haunting one of Washington’s most famous hotels. Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great grandson of John Adams, was a well known intellectual, and his wealthy wife, Marian “Clover” Adams, was an intellect in her own right and a talented amateur photographer as well. Henry and Clover were leaders of Washington society in the late 1800’s, so it came as a terrible shock when Clover apparently committed suicide by swallowing chemicals used to develop her photographs.

Henry Adams had a most unusual response to her death. He never uttered her name again, and he burned all her letters and his photos of her. His famous book, The Education of Henry Adams never mentions their marriage. While he did commission a statue in her memory, now a tourist attraction in Rock Creek Cemetery, Clover’s ghost was probably unhappy to have been written off so abruptly. Her spirit haunted the house where she died and even the one that Henry moved into shortly after her death, a semi-detached mansion that they had built to share with their friends, John and Clara Hay. This Hay-Adams house was eventually torn down and replaced with the Hay-Adams Hotel, and workers and staff through the years have told stories about strange noises and sounds of a woman weeping, no doubt the activities of the still restless spirit of Clover Adams.

In 2009, we don’t want to believe in ghosts, restless or otherwise. Still, if you are sitting in traffic at 35th and M Street NW, you can’t help but steal a glance at the interminable steps that seem to lead straight up and disappear into the shadows of a stone archway. Write it off to the memory of the movie and the power of suggestion, but even sitting next to something as banal as a gas station, those perilous looking stairs can send a cold chill up your spine on the hottest Washington day.

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