Terry Alford, author of "In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits"

The Lincoln Group of D.C. celebrates our annual holiday luncheon on December 5. Dr. Terry Alford will discuss the book Sidney Blumenthal has called “Lincoln in the Bardo – for real.” In the Houses of Their Dead traces the oddly uncanny connections to spiritualism shared by both the Booth and Lincoln families. The New York Times described the book as "a lively study of two wildly disparate clans." While Lincoln was usually seen as rational, empirically-minded man, he was also deeply superstitious and often drawn to the irrational. The Booth family shared this tendency. Even more bizarrely, the Booths and the Lincolns even used some of the same mediums, including the infamous Charles Colchester. Alford puts this spiritualism into the context of the times and shows how it affected both families, especially Mary Lincoln after son Willie's death in February 1862. This is a luncheon you will not want to miss!

Alford is an author and Professor Emeritus of History of Northern Virginia Community College. He received his Ph.D. in History from Mississippi State University. He is a founding board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington, DC and a recognized authority on John Wilkes Booth and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His multi-award-winning book, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, is considered the gold standard of Booth biographies. In addition to his frequent appearances on television networks, Dr. Alford has been a consultant on many films and documentaries and serves on the Advisory Council for Ford’s Theatre.

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