Capitol Hill Ghost Walk – Photo Essay

Capitol Hill Ghost Walk – Photo Essay

by Larry Janezich

Posted October 27, 2025

Last Friday night, Capitol Hill historian Robert Pohl lead a tour of Capitol Hill’s reputed haunted houses, sponsored by the Capitol Hill Restoration Society for its members.  Here, at the tour’s beginning on Eastern Market Metro Plaza, Pohl related the story of the haunting of the US Capitol’s old House Chamber (currently Statuary Hall) by John Quincy Adams, who returned to the House of Representatives after serving as President of the United States. 

A house across from the Marine Barracks at 822 G Street, SE, was owned by a curmudgeonly career Marine named “Old Howard.”  After his passing, the family rented it out to successive tenants who reported the presence in the house of a poltergeist – presumably “Old Howard” – who would move the bed around the room while it was occupied.  Old Howard’s restless spirit eventually departed the premises.

The Marine Commandant’s House at 801 G Street, SE, is reputed to have three ghosts:  Two sergeants who in 1814 were directed to hide the Barrack’s payroll on the grounds before departing to try to halt the British army’s advance on Washington (where they were killed in the battle) and the ghost of Archibald Henderson known as the “Grand Old Man of the Marine Corps” for his record 38-year tenure as Commandant who by his causing his portrait to fall off the wall during a reception, seemed to be protesting the admission of women to the Marine Corps as clerical workers. 

The John Phillips Sousa House at 636 G Street, SE, was the occasion for relating the history of the Marine Band leader and the claim that on foggy days, the “lonesome sound of the Sousaphone can be heard over Congressional Cemetery,” where Sousa is buried.  (On November 6, the Marine Band remembers Sousa with a birthday concert at his grave site in Congressional Cemetery.)

The MPD 1^st District Substation on Marion Park was the site of the murder of an MPD police captain by a disgruntled officer in the late 19^th Century, which could be the genesis for the report of a late night appearance of a solitary dripping wet figure who entered the front door of the station and disappeared through a locked side door.

The hour-plus long tour became darker figuratively as well as literally near the end which was at The Maples, at 619 D Street, SE.  One of the oldest houses on Capitol Hill, The Maples was purchased in 1871 by Emily Edson Briggs, the first female reporter in the here-to-fore all male Senate Press Gallery.  Briggs’ husband died shortly thereafter.  His widow, who continued to live in the house, began experiencing unexplained sounds of weeping and piano playing which culminated  in evidence of a slept-in guest room bed and a presence – and departure – marked by the leaving of a single pearl on the bed’s pillow.  The peculiar happenings ceased after the pearl incident.  A possible connection, Pohl suggested, was the ghastly suicide in the house of a friend of the wife of a previous owner.  That owner, one Augustus Nicholson, the Marine Barracks Quartermaster in the 1840s, was by all accounts a bounder, who had been keeping company with another woman, Sally Carroll, who he married six months after his wife’s suicide. 

Robert Pohl is the author of “Wicked Capitol Hill: An Unruly History of Behaving Badly”