This new item caught our eye this morning.
Did Abraham Lincoln’s Assassin Get Away? DNA Could Soon Answer the Question.
The way it’s written in history books, John Wilkes Booth was cornered 12 days after shooting President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre and killed in a tobacco barn before being laid to rest in a family plot. But there have been several historians over the years not entirely satisfied with this version.
“If the man who killed our greatest president got away and a giant hoax was perpetrated on the American people, then we should know about it,” historian Nate Orlowek told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Descendants of Booth’s have heard various stories about whether he was actually able to live another 38 years, traveling around the country and changing his name several times before killing himself, according to The Inquirer.
As a student of history and occasional consumer of really cool conspiracy theories, this story has some appeal, but we link it here specifically because we recall an episode of Ghost Lab from about a year ago where the San Antonio-based team investigated a furniture store in Enid, Ok that was once a hotel, and by one account, the place where the escaped, pseudonym’ed Booth took his own life in 1903. They even captured a confessional EVP there of the spirit identifying himself as John Wilkes Booth. (For our money, it probably wasn’t the best Ghost Lab episode we’ve seen, and it has drawn some harsh criticism from TV paracritics…)
My guess, and nothing than that, is that the ‘conspiracy theory’ will prove to be either completely debunked (they are testing Booth’s brother’s DNA to see if it matches the assassin’s, from whom they have a few vertebrae) or judged inconclusive. I know little about the details around the Booth-escaped theory, but I am particularly skeptical of the Klinge brothers’ claim they may have “rewritten history” by getting Booth to posthumously confess his identity via EVP – for one thing, the EVP itself wasn’t very compelling. Once the DNA analysis is complete, I’d be curious to see whether the Klinge brothers actually comment about it. Not holding my breath.
This does, however, suggest an intriguing possibility, whether or not the spirits of historical figures – famous or not – can demonstrably and verifiably disprove or alter settled historical fact via EVP. (We don’t know if the psuedonym’ed Booth suicide figure could be exhumed, or whether they even know where he is buried.)
But as a general thought, if EVP’s could disprove history (it’d have to be something more than ‘I didn’t kill him, it was the other guy’), could there be a more compelling case for the reality of EVP’s as voices of the dead?
