“Ghosts in the White House”
History.com
“H
AVE YOU SEEN
this?” Professor Donald Hemmet said as he thrust a print-out at Kimber in the faculty dining room of Union North the next morning.
Hemmet was a large man with an equally large brain. Kimber usually liked to talk to him, but he often saw problems where there were none – or, at least, problems where there were none that she cared about.
She smiled in what she hoped was a non-committal manner, and took the print-out, placing it under her orange tray. The dining room hadn’t been redesigned since the teens, and smelled like it. The entire area reeked of decades-old hamburgers. But it was the only place on campus that still served eggs fried in butter, the way that her grandmother used to make them.
When the stresses of the job got in her way, Kimber skipped the oatmeal covered in fresh fruit and went straight for the fat and grease. And right now, the stresses had increased. The Living History technology was changing
again
, and she had to go to California to investigate the new equipment. As if she knew how it all worked. She only knew that it
did
work. She would, of course, bring techs with her, but techs always wanted to upgrade everything, even if the upgrades meant that the equipment no longer did the job it was meant for.
She sat at one of the wooden tables near the window overlooking the quad. When she’d taken over as head of the department, she had never expected the work to take most of her research and planning time. She thought it a small addition to her salary, with a few hours spent here and there advising her colleagues on tiny matters that no one really cared about.
How wrong could a woman be?
She dug into her eggs – heavenly, with butter dripping off them – and studied the print-out that Hemmet gave her. He was watching her from another table. He knew better than to approach her during a meal. She had begun to think of eating as her only free time, and she guarded it jealously.
The print-out relayed stories told by several Living History graduate students. While standing in the Yellow Oval Room at the White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s valet, Cesear Carrera, heard a voice. When Carrera looked in the direction of the voice, he heard someone say, “I’m Mr. Burns.” But no one was there.
Others heard the same thing in the same spot. Reports had shown up in various documentation that everyone from a Truman Administration guard to a housemaid in the 1960s heard a male voice claim to be Mr. Burns in the Yellow Oval Room. The Truman guard actually checked to make sure that the speaker hadn’t been Secretary of State James F. Byrne. The search made it into the records, even though Byrne himself hadn’t been in the White House at the time.
White House historians from the previous century even had a theory on the subject. Mr. Burns was, they said, the unhappy previous owner of the land, David Burns, who had been forced to give up his land to make room for the White House in 1790.
Kimber knew of Burns and knew that he had indeed been unwilling to give up his land. She’d always meant to use the time travel technology to visit the meeting in which Burns pissed off George Washington by slandering his wife. Kimber wanted to see if the story was true.
By the time, Kimber finished reading, her eggs were cold and congealed. She ate them anyway. Ghost stories abounded in houses like the White House, houses with a lot of history and a large amount of people going through. She wasn’t surprised that a lot of people had claimed to see spirits over the years.
The only thing that did surprise her in the print-out was the last bit, the one from a Living History administrator. One of his students, using a protected observation portal to explore the entire White House on what everyone thought was a particularly empty day, broke the rules and answered his phone in the middle of the view.
He listened to the voice on the other end and then said, loudly, “I’m Mr. Burns,” before the administrator took him away – and banned the unthinking Mr. Burns from the viewing area for the next two years.
She ran a hand over her face, and set the print-out down. She heard a clank, and saw that Hemmet – and his tray, filled with pastries and two cups of coffee – had joined her. She wanted to tell him to go away. Take that print-out and shove it. Take her job and do it himself.
But she didn’t.
“You realize this is impossible,” she said. “The technology does not bleed through and even if it did, no one would notice.”
“That’s the thing,” he said, shoving the print-out toward her. “I think we have some serious technical issues.”
Two of these conversations in two days. How fun. And this time, from someone she respected. She couldn’t escape, so she decided to play along.
“Okay, even if I grant that,” she said, “it doesn’t really matter. We’re not influencing anyone in the past. We’re not changing history.”
“Oh,” Hemmet said, softer than she thought he could speak. “I believe history
is
changing, and it is changing because of us.”
She sighed and wished she hadn’t had the eggs after all. They sat like a lump in her stomach. Had someone decided to haze her? Had the department chosen this busy week to have everyone pull a prank on her? Did they want to see how she’d handle it?
She wanted to tell Hemmet to leave her alone, but she was supposed to be diplomatic. After all, she was the department chair, which was, in its way, as close to an in-house diplomatic post as a university employee could hold.
“You think we’re changing history because people are hearing ghosts?” She couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of her voice. “People have always heard ghosts, Dr. Hemmet. Shakespeare wrote about ghosts for a reason.”
“Shakespeare’s ghosts.” Hemmet picked up one of the pastries and shook it at her. “You realize that the early drafts of the plays contained no ghosts at all.”
Ambra had shaken a tablet at her. To Kimber’s knowledge, no one had shaken anything at her in a conversation before this week. Maybe that was part of the conspiracy as well.
Kimber was getting real tired of this. “Dr. Hemmet, no one knows which drafts
are
the early drafts.”
“No one
used
to know,” he said.
She put a hand up to her face and rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t followed Shakespearean scholarship. She considered Shakespearean scholarship both literary history and British history, and as such, outside of her purview.
She sighed. He was watching her, his florid face filled with – of all things – concern.
“What have you
personally
found that’s changed?” she asked. “And I don’t mean from your own visits to the past. I mean within the established historical
document
scholarship.”
His lips thinned. “Eleanor Roosevelt held séances in the White House.”
Before Kimber could stop herself, she made a sound of disgust. “One of our most revered and
sane
first ladies? Are you kidding me?”
Kimber could believe that Mary Todd Lincoln, who had a history of mental illness, held séances. But Eleanor Roosevelt? The most grounded woman in the mid-century? She would never –
“No, I’m not kidding you,” Hemmet said, “and I have the documentation.”
Kimber’s heart started to pound. She did not want to be convinced of this. She wasn’t sure what she could do about it even if she were convinced.
But she was an information gatherer – that’s what historians were, as she told her students – historical reporters, nothing more, nothing less. And as such, she needed information like she needed air.
“Do the séances correspond with any Living History visits?” she asked.
“Not from our school, but the University of Chicago has some scholars who specialize in Lincoln –”
“Lincoln?” She let out a small breath of air. Relief flooded her. This issue (non-issue?) was bothering her more than she thought. “He has nothing to do with the Roosevelts.”
“But he does.” Hemmet gave her a pitying look. “Lincoln’s ghost started appearing in the 1920s, or so they say, and both Queen Wilhelmina of Norway and Winston Churchill saw him during the Second World War. Churchill, who was getting out of a bath, managed to quip, ‘Mr. President, you seem to have me at a disadvantage,’ before Lincoln disappeared.”
“Well, that sounds completely made-up,” Kimber said. “You know that one of the first things the British Living History teams discovered was Churchill’s gift for embellishment.”
“I don’t think that was a discovery so much as a confirmation,” Hemmet said with a smile.
Kimber refused to smile in return. “Even if it did happen, we don’t have students who look like Lincoln.”
“How do you know?” Hemmet said. “We’re not the only ones using the Living History devices.”
He was right about that too. Even though her department was the oldest Living History department in the entire world, other schools had adopted the discipline. Over forty schools in the English-speaking world alone had Living History devices, with more adopting the technology and the discipline all the time.
“If the devices were malfunctioning, we’d know,” she said.
Hemmet picked up a coffee cup and took a sip. “I think we do know.”
“Two incidences of séances and an ‘I’m Mr. Burns,’ are not proof,” she snapped.
“
Two
incidences?” he asked.
She flushed. Could he really not know about Ambra? Was Kimber the only person Ambra contacted on a regular basis?
“Believe me,” Kimber said, “the first incident doesn’t count.”
Hemmet frowned at her. She got the sense, not for the first time, that he understood her better than she wanted him to.
“If you say it doesn’t count, then I’ll believe you.” His tone said otherwise, of course. “But, I think we should look into this before all those time travel paradoxes actually come true.”
This exact same discussion had precipitated her divorce, all those years ago. Her ex-husband kept citing science fiction writer after science fiction writer, bad movie after bad movie, physicist after physicist, about time travel paradoxes, and asking her why she wasn’t worried about them.
I don’t want to be married to the woman who destroyed history as we know it
, he had said one particularly difficult afternoon.
That’s the point,
she had replied harshly.
We don’t know history. And without these devices, we never will
.
She wasn’t going to go into any of that with Hemmet. She knew that he knew as much about current time travel theory as she did.
Still, she had to say, “Time travel paradoxes are a myth.”
“So were germs, once upon a time,” Hemmet said. “And bacteria. And global warming –”
“All right,” she said. “You’ve made your point.”
She just wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do about it.
3.
“B
ARBARA AND
I haven’t seen the ghost of Abraham Lincoln walking the halls, but this is our first Halloween in the White House, so maybe we’ll see him tonight.”
George H.W. Bush
October 31, 1989
T
HE FIRST THING
Kimber did do was postpone her own scheduled trip at the end of the week. She wouldn’t take a time travel trip until she figured out what was going on, if something actually
was
going on. With that in mind, she reviewed the archives by searching for
séance
in the official calendar of each First Family. Disturbingly, she found two more First Ladies involved in séances, Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton.
Kimber believed Nancy Reagan, who took all of that California-at-mid-twentieth-century-New-Age crap a little more seriously than most, might hold a séance, just to see what it was like. But Kimber didn’t believe Hillary Clinton would.
Kimber had actually met Hillary once. (The first name reference had become a historical convention to distinguish Hillary from the rest of her family (Clinton [aka Bill] and Chelsea).) Hillary had been formidable, even though she had been in her mid-nineties. It was easy to see why heads of state paid attention to her and how she managed to maintain her iron-lady reputation all those years. She was probably one of the smartest people Kimber had ever met.
Hillary had even known about the Living History project which was then in its infancy.
You know what they’re calling it at the Supreme Court, don’t you?
Hillary had said over dinner. Hillary and Kimber had been seated near each other at one of those glittering White House dinners that seemed to happen no matter who the president was.
They’re talking about this at the Supreme Court?
Kimber had asked.
Oh, yes,
Hillary had said,
and they’re very happy that, at the moment, the people in the past can’t sue. No one else will have standing. Because the Court really doesn’t want to consider the Constitutional implications of all of this stuff you’re meddling in.
Constitutional implications?
Kimber said.
But our scientists have shown that we can’t have an impact on history. So we can’t meddle with the Constitution–
My dear Professor,
Hillary had said with a bright smile that always surprised people.
Of course we can meddle with the Constitution. It’s a living document, after all, one that we “interpret.” And the group on this particular court is very happy that it will not be interpreting the right to privacy for long-dead Americans. Think about it: Do we value their privacy rights over our right to publish treatises about the past? Is that free speech? Do we have the right to invade each other’s homes at the most vulnerable times? Is there truly a need to know? Or is it just historical voyeurism?
At the time, Kimber had thought Hillary was worried for her past self, particularly about those days when the Monica Lewinski scandal broke in the late 1990s. No matter who you were or how famous, you really didn’t want some historian listening in as you berated your husband for his adulteries.