According to folklore, the Octagon House is one of the most haunted buildings in Washington, D.C. People have reported experiencing various paranormal phenomena there since the mid-1800s after Ann Ogle died.

Stories about paranormal activity were in circulation in the late 1800s.

Virginia Tayloe Lewis

The unexplained ringing of the bells used for calling the servants was one of the most widely claimed paranormal activities at the house. Homeowners rang bells to call their slaves and servants in the 19th century.

Folklore that dates back to the mid-1800s says that slaves sometimes returned as ghosts to harass their masters by ringing the bells loudly. However, at the Octagon, the ringing followed the death of the master of the house.

Virginia Tayloe Lewis reported she learned from older family members that after her grandfather, John Tayloe III, died in 1828, the bells rang loudly and persistently. The ringing continued even after they cut the bell wires. The servants would come running when they heard the ringing, only to be told that no one had called them.

General George D. Ramsay

According to a story, Tayloe once requested his friend Brigadier-General George D. Ramsay (1802 –1882) to stay overnight at the mansion while he was away because he did not want his daughters to be alone overnight.

While dining, the bells rang several times, forcing Ramsay to leave the table to investigate. Each time the general left the table to see who was ringing, he returned puzzled.

The incident unnerved the house servants, who declared in fright that it was due to supernatural causes. Ramsay tried to stop one of the bells from ringing by holding to the wire that controlled it, but the bell continued ringing.

In her 1873 book, Ten Years in Washington, author Mary Clemmer Ames wrote that folklore claimed that all the bells would sometimes ring together.

The bells rang while Tayloe entertained guests

Local legend says that once, while Tayloe entertained guests, the bells started ringing.

A skeptical guest tried to disprove claims of supernatural agency by holding on to the wires. But they moved under the influence of a mysterious force, and the guest struggled to hold the wires while the ringing continued.

Some sources reported that investigations found that the building was rat infested and that the bells rang when the vermin disturbed the wires.

But after various failed efforts to stop the ringing, the family resorted to calling an exorcist to cleanse the house of spirits. However, the cleansing ceremonies and prayers didn’t work, and the ringing continued until the family stopped using bells to call the servants.

A group investigated the allegations of paranormal activity

A widely circulated newspaper report from the late 1800s claimed that a group of men stayed overnight at the Octagon House to investigate stories they’d heard about hauntings and paranormal phenomena in the building.

The men took up positions in different parts of the house to increase their chances of detecting strange activity that occurred overnight.

At midnight, three men were walking on the second floor when they heard a woman screaming from a room. Terrified, the men huddled together in the same room for mutual protection. They heard noises in the house throughout the night, including stomping footfalls.

Tayloe family ghosts

Some newspapers published reports about hauntings in the house involving ghosts walking or running up and down the building’s spiral staircases. Some visitors said they saw the ghosts of members of the family who lived in the house from the early- to mid-1800s.

Accounts circulating in the 1900s claimed that one of the girls fell down the stairs to her death a few years before the War of 1812 started.

A version of the folklore claims that the girl clashed with her father over her relationship with a British military officer. As she stormed out of her father’s presence in a room on the second floor, she tripped and tumbled down the stairs to her death.

The girl’s ghost has haunted the building since then, legend claims. People claimed to have seen her ghost walking up the stairs to the second floor holding a candle or lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs where her body fell.

Another of Tayloe’s daughters died a few years later in similar circumstances, according to local folklore. She eloped with a man but later returned home to reconcile with her parents. She met her father on the third floor of the building and fell down the stairs during a heated exchange.

Thus, while the first sister haunted the stairs leading to the second-floor landing, the second sister haunted the stairs leading up to the third-floor landing.

Tayloe’s daughters didn’t die at the Octagon House

Historians have debunked the stories about Tayloe’s daughters dying by falling down the stairs during an argument with their father. None of the girls died while living at the Octagon.

History records that Tayloe and Ann lost a one-month-old daughter in 1800 before the family moved into the house. Another daughter, Rebecca Plater, aged 18, died at the family’s Mount Airy plantation house in Virginia in 1815 after an illness.

A third daughter, Elizabeth Mary, died in 1832 in her mid-twenties, a few years after she got married and moved out of the Octagon.

Tayloe died four years earlier, in 1828, at the Octagon House. His wife, Ann, died in the house in 1855.

Dolley Madison’s ghost

Some people claimed to have seen the ghost of the former First Lady Dolley Madison at the Octagon House. She and her husband, President James Madison, lived there for six months, from September 1814 to March 1815.

The Octagon House in the 1940s

A man who worked in the building in the 1940s claimed that a doctor he called when his wife took ill said he met a man on the stairs dressed in a 19th-century-style military uniform.

The mysterious man walked up the stairs and disappeared into the dark.

The Octagon House in the 1960s

The building opened as a museum in the 1970s after being named a national landmark in 1960. The museum management worked in the 1990s to restore the building’s original 19th-century looks and feel.

A museum official from the 1970s claimed that ghosts haunted the building in the 1960s and that they constantly played pranks at night, switching lights on and off and banging doors.

The 1970s and 1980s

A story claimed that a man employed to keep the house in the 1970s said he once encountered a gentleman dressed in an all-black late 1800s costume walking up the stairs to the second floor.

The strange gentleman tipped his hat at the worker as he passed.

Another man who also worked in the house in the 1980s said he saw a man in black walking up the stairs from the first floor.

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