Readers scare up their memories of Georgetown’s ‘haunted’ Halcyon House
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in ghost stories, which is why I had so much fun writing last week’s two-part Halloween chiller about Halcyon House. The Georgetown mansion — which dates to 1787, when the first portions were built by Benjamin Stoddert, America’s first secretary of the Navy — has a reputation for things that go bump in the night.
But surely those manifestations are easily explainable as the home’s foundation settling or floorboards creaking?
Maybe not, said Bill Stearman, a U.S. Navy veteran who took an apartment in Halcyon House in October 1967 after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam. “I never believed in ghosts before that, but I certainly do now,” he wrote.
