Funkstown – Foggy Bottom Ghosts and Graveyards

By Frank Leone

In Foggy Bottom’s marshes, the “incessant croaking of frogs at night furnished material for ghost stories.”  One such story involves a bridge over Rock Creek, linking Foggy Bottom and Georgetown. The bridge at M Street (then known as Bridge Street) was built in 1788. One tempestuous night, the bridge collapsed, sending a stagecoach plummeting into Rock Creek, which was wider and deeper then. The driver and horses drowned. Thereafter on dark and stormy nights, the apparition of a stagecoach would appear, driven frantically by the “ghostly figure of the driver, with his coach and horses crossing it as he had been wont to do in the days of the flesh.”

Sam McKeever the body snatcher lived who in Hughes Mews was reported to be uncommonly tall with big feet and “shovel-like” hands  (Frank Leone, October 2024).

Nearby, there was a bridge carrying K Street over Rock Creek, which has been replaced by the Whitehurst Freeway. A 1908 report tells of “the headless man of the K Street Bridge.” How he lost his head or why he (presumably) seeks it in this area was not disclosed.  Yikes. Is this guy still around?

The current, much sturdier, M Street Bridge (Library of Congress, 1980)

More recently, “Ghost Hunter” Hans Holzer reported that a house on 25th Street (described only as near Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, but 25th Street is in Foggy Bottom) possessed ghosts who communicated with mediums. The ghosts included “a very old black man who kept telling the assembled witnesses that he hated them for some reason” and “Elizabeth Hanford, who claimed that her father had been in Lincoln’s Cabinet, and that she had died by hanging when she was only twenty-four.”

Graveyards are good places to find spooks. No graveyards currently exist in Foggy Bottom, but Christian Hines recalled a number in Early Recollections of Washington City (1866). The area across 26th Street from the State Department, known as Potomac, Navy, and Observatory Hill was also called Camp Hill because soldiers were stationed there during the War of 1812. It hosted “a tolerably large graveyard,” but by 1866 “nothing remained but a small quantity of black dust and a few bones.”  Hines notes Isaac Polock, D.C.’s first known Jewish resident and an early DC developer (The Six Buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, 1795-1985), was also buried on Camp Hill (with a tombstone) but no trace remains. 

Another graveyard was located at 24th Street between H and I (now GWU’s Medical School), which may have included the bodies of enslaved people held by nearby resident Robert Peter (husband of George Washington’s step-granddaughter, Martha Parke Custis) and/or soldiers from before 1800. Hines observed that the site was originally “on a considerable hill and on opening 24th Street, each side of the street was dug down to a foot below the graves, leaving on both sides open graves and coffins projecting into the street. I have myself seen pieces of skulls lying in the streets, some of which were the skulls of colored people.”  (Hines offers no explanation for his knowledge of the race of the skulls.)

A small graveyard was located between E and F Streets near the Potomac, where bodies found floating in the river were interred. The area was probably covered by the C&O Canal. Another graveyard located on F Street, between 22nd and 23rd Streets, contained a tombstone in memory of Casper Yost (possibly this person).

For more on haunted Foggy Bottom, see our posts on the Octagon House, the Van Ness Stable, and Hughes Mews resident Sam McKeever, the Foggy Bottom Body Snatcher.  If you are aware of other Foggy Bottom ghost stories or graveyards, let us know!

No Foggy Bottom graveyards remain, but you can visit the nearby Mt. Zion and Female Union Band Cemetery in Georgetown – a historic African American cemetery where Foggy Bottom residents were buried (Frank Leone, June 2024).

Sources:  Funkstown – Haunted Foggy Bottom (Nov. 21, 2021); Funkstown – The Body Snatcher of Foggy Bottom (Oct. 21, 2023); Tim Krepp, Ghosts of Georgetown, Haunted America 2013; Hans Holzer, The Ghosts that Walk in Washington, Doubleday & Co. 1971; Hugh T. Taggart, Old Georgetown, reprinted from the records of The Columbia Historical Society, 1908; Christian Hines, Early Recollections of Washington City, 1866 (Junior League of Washington reprint, 1981);  Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, “Foggy Bottom”, SAH Archipedia; FBA History Project.

October is Indigenous Heritage Month – read about Foggy Bottom’s Native American history HERE. Also for Sept./Oct. Hispanic Heritage Month, HERE is our post on Foggy Bottom’s Avenue of the Americas.