Washington D.C. Tourist Attraction: Haunting at the Heurich House

When I was a senior at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, I worked as an actress at the Washington Historical Society on O Street and New Hampshire Avenue. I played the role of an Irish housemaid named Lena. My task was to lead guests through the kitchen and other rooms in the basement. It was very quiet and sort of creepy down there.

One night during the holidays in 1997, there was an uprising at the DC jail and six prisoners escaped. Since there were cast-iron bars on all of the windows, we weren't worried that anyone was going to break in.

At the end of the night, around 10:00pm, the three other women and I were to straighten up our areas and lock up the house before going home. This was the part I absolutely HATED. I was all by myself in the basement, and had to shut off all the lights before going upstairs. Not fun, especially for someone who had just started working there. (I had been there less than a month.)

I turned off the lights in the kitchen, then in the boiler room, followed by the parlor where I instructed an activity on how to make a Victorian fan out of paper and popsicle sticks. The last room was the Bierschtuben (what we called the Beer Schtube) where Heurich (the man that built the house) would have his beer every evening. He had always said it was his favorite room in the house, as it reminded him of Germany.

Maintenance had replaced the velvet ropes with a plastic barrier in front of the door. I crawled under the barrier and turned out the lights, leaving just the hall light on. As I turned around to leave the room, there was a man sitting in the corner. My voice caught in my throat and I couldn't scream. I went to run out of the room, but forgot about the plastic barrier and was knocked on my back. The man didn't more-- He just sat there and stared at the table with these watery blue eyes. I quickly shimmied under the barrier and ran up the stairs. When I got to the foyer, Natalie and Joan were staring at me. After I told them what happened and described the man, they told me that it was Heurich.

Natalie didn't believe me. She decided to go downstairs and see for herself. As she started walking down the stairs, a breeze started blowing her hair around her face. The closer she got to the bottom of the steps, the more her hair blew. Se stopped on the last step and looked as though she was stuck in a windstorm. She turned and looked at me and Joan standing on the top of the stairs. She thought better of going into the Beer Schtube and raced up the stairs.

I haven't been back there since.