Lincoln’s Precognition

On the day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he told his bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, that he had dreamt that he walked into the East Room of the White House to find a covered corpse guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a crowd of mourners. Lincoln asked one of the soldiers who had died and the soldier replied, “The president. He was killed by an assassin.” Some historians have cast doubt on Lamon’s account, which was first published in the 1880s, nearly 20 years after the assassination. Even if Lamon’s story isn’t true, Lincoln’s cabinet recalled that, on the morning of his assassination, the president told them he’d dreamed of sailing across an unknown body of water at great speed.