"The Thing": The Mysterious Teenage Ghost That Haunted Taft's White House

[left-of-center2012]

“My dear Clara,” Major Archie Butt wrote in the summer of 1911, “It seems that the White House is haunted.”
So began what would become the only written record of the mysterious Executive Mansion ghost known only as "The Thing."

That July, word of an apparition appearing to servants in William Howard Taft’s White House reached Butt, a military aide to the president who served as a kind of personal secretary and attaché.
Reported encounters with a ghost had been scaring domestic staffers for months, as he recounted in a letter to his sister-in-law Clara.
The spooky tale he told her remains an enduring question mark for White House scholars even today.

As the gossip of the time went, The Thing was felt more often than seen. Taft’s housekeeper—“a spooky little thing herself,” as Butt put it—reported that servants told stories of feeling The Thing appear as a slight pressure on the shoulder, as if a curious kid were leaning over to see what they were doing.
Butt scolded the housekeeper, telling her, "ghosts have not the sense of touch, at least those self-respecting ghosts of which I have heard." But the servants maintained that it was, in fact, the spirit touching them.

More at:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/504800/thing-mysterious-teenage-ghost-haunted-tafts-white-house

[mvd]

1. The White House might be one of the country's most haunted houses, but..

we all know the scariest thing in the WH is living.