Willard Hotel Abraham Lincoln ghost lore

The Willard Hotel has hosted longstanding reports and popular accounts of sightings of Abraham Lincoln's apparition since the late 19th century; contemporaneous newspaper stories and later books have repeated such sightings in the hotel's rooms and lobby. Abraham Lincoln did stay at the Willard prior to his 1861 inauguration, an event documented in historical records. The sightings are folkloric and frequently retold in tourism and popular history, but they are not established as empirical fact.