Be careful what you say about Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing if you visit the Fort Lesly J. McNair Officer’s Club in Washington, D.C.
You just might get slapped if you “trash talk” him.
“Gen. Pershing supposedly slapped an Army officer in the Pershing Room when the officer made a disparaging remark about him years after his passing,” said retired Army Civilian Historian Kim Holien.
Pershing commanded the American expeditionary force in France during World War I. He also served as a military governor in the Philippines.
He was nicknamed “Black Jack” because led the Buffalo Soldiers, the African-American cavalry unit in the Spanish-American War.
“The officer said after he made the remark, he found himself flat on his back and picked himself up and got out of there,” said Holien.
Holien said many people have seen the ghost of Mary Surratt near McNair’s Grant Hall (Building 21) which was the site of her trial and hanging for her alleged role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
Surratt and her co-conspirators were tried in Grant Hall and hung just outside the building.
“There are so many documented cases of people who lived in the building when it was married officers’ quarters and they related stories of their sick children, all of sudden they become very quiet,” said Holien. “The next day after the fever broke and the parents went back in to see the children, they asked why did they become quiet?”
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The children responded, “the lady standing behind you put her finger to her lips, the universal sign to be quiet, so they got quiet.”
When the children were shown a picture of Surratt, they said “yes, that’s the lady,” said Holien.
People would also come back to their quarters in the building and find everything had been turned upside down.
“The people who used Building 21 as an office building after the married quarters were done away with, the people from the National Defense University, said many times they would come into a conference room and find the chairs upside down,” said Holien. “The conference room had been locked, the building had been locked,”
A Catholic chaplain, a former Golden Gloves boxing champion, who was stationed at the base in the 1990s, told Holien that he had to leave the building.
“One night he came back into the building. The building was locked as it should be, his apartment was locked as it should be,” said Holien. “He went into the laundry room and the washer and dryer were facing the wall.”
Holien also recounted what happened to him when he was giving Hollywood actress Connie Stevens and her entourage a tour of the building.
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The group was on the third floor of the building, in a side room off the Surratt trial room.
“I’m backing into the side room, which overlooked where the gallows were, and all of a sudden the entourage start backing away from me,” he said. “I stopped and said what’s the problem.”
The group told Holien to turn around. That’s when he spotted 200 to 300 dead flies in the corner.
“It didn’t affect me,” said Holien, who was told that the dead flies meant a ghost was in the room.
Holien says Fort McNair is reportedly haunted by another ghost, that of Walter Reed, the doctor who discovered that mosquitos carry yellow fever. Reed died of blood poisoning after emergency surgery for appendicitis at the base’s medical center.
“Many of the medical staff, doctors, nurses, say they have seen an apparition,” said Holien.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com.