In the Looking Glass
Many people have portrayed Lincoln as a man given to belief in omens-particularly those relating to his assassination. An incident often cited in this regard occurred at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln related it to a few friends and associates, including Noah Brooks in 1864. Brooks shared it with the readers of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine the following July-three months after Lincoln’s death-recounting the president’s story “as nearly as possible in his own words”: It was just after my election in 1860. . . . I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau, with a swinging-glass upon it...my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other...the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened...I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was “a sign” that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term. (Brooks 1865, 224-225)

The same story was told by Ward Hill Lamon in his book, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln...In Lamon’s account it was not Mrs. Lincoln but the president himself who thought the “ghostly” image foretold “that death would overtake him” before the end of his second term (Lamon 1995, 111-112)....
Dreams of Death
The mirror incident sets the stage for claims of even more emphatically premonitory experiences. These were dreams Lincoln reportedly had that foretold dramatic events. One he related to his cabinet on April 14, 1865. The previous night he had dreamed he was in some mysterious boat, he said, “sailing toward a dark and indefinite shore.” In another version it was of “a ship sailing rapidly” (Lewis 1973, 290). When Lincoln was assassinated only hours later, the dream was seen as weirdly prophetic. The story grew in the retellings which spread, says Lloyd Lewis in Myths After Lincoln (1973, 291) “around the world.”
In fact, Lincoln had not thought the dream presaged his death. He had actually mentioned it in reply to General Grant, his guest that Good Friday afternoon, who had expressed worries about General Sherman’s fate in North Carolina. Lincoln felt that Sherman would be victorious because, he said, the dream had often come to him prior to significant events in the war. According to Lewis (1973, 290): “For a President of the United States, in a time like the Civil War, to dream that he was sailing rapidly to an unseen shore was certainly not remarkable. Most of his waking hours, across four years, were spent in wondering where the Ship of State was going.”Lincoln supposedly described an even more ominous dream to Mrs. Lincoln, not long before his assassination, then again to Ward Hill Lamon (1895, 115-116) ...Lamon’s account may be true, although he has been criticized for having “fed the fire of superstition that people were kindling about the name of Lincoln” (Lewis 1973, 294). In fact, however, Lamon had added a sequel to the story which is invariably ignored:
Once the President alluded to this terrible dream with some show of playful humor. “Hill,” said he, “your apprehension of harm to me from some hidden enemy is downright foolishness. For a long time you have been trying to keep somebody-the Lord knows who-from killing me. Don't you see how it will turn out? In this dream it was not me, but some other fellow, that was killed. It seems that this ghostly assassin tried his hand on some one else.” (Lamon 1895, 116-117)  In any event, that Lincoln should have dreamed of assassination-even his own-can scarcely be termed remarkable...
Among the Spirits
Lamon (1895, 120) insisted that Lincoln “was no dabbler in divination-astrology, horoscopy, prophecy, ghostly lore, or witcheries of any sort.” Yet soon after his death spiritualists sought to use Lincoln to give respectability to their practices by citing the occasions he had permitted seances in the White House, as well as to claim contact with his own departed spirit. The extent of Lincoln’s involvement with spiritualism has been much debated. Actually, it was Mrs. Lincoln who was involved with spiritualists. She turned to them in her bereavement over the death of Willie, the Lincolns’ beloved eleven-year-old son who died of “bilious fever” in 1862. One such spiritualist medium was Henrietta “Nettie” Colburn (1841-1892). Mary Todd Lincoln met her at a “circle” or seance at the Georgetown home of Cranstoun Laurie, chief clerk of the post office in Washington...At least one biographer has suggested that Lincoln’s marginal involvement may have stemmed from a desire “to protect his gullible wife” (Temple 1995, 199). That was exactly what Lincoln did with regard to a trickster named Charles J. Colchester... Lincoln himself was not interested in seances, but, according to Lloyd Lewis’s Myths After Lincoln (1973, 301), “In these dark hocus-pocuses Mrs. Lincoln found comfort, and Lincoln let them go on for a time, careless of whether the intellectuals of the capital thought him addle-pated or no.”
Spectral Visits
It is ironic that Lincoln did not believe in spiritualism, since his ghost is now reportedly so active... The first person to report actually seeing Lincoln’s ghost was Grace Coolidge (First Lady from 1923 to 1929), who saw his tall figure looking out an Oval Office window (Scott and Norman 1991, 74; Cohen 1989, 10). ...These examples are typical of many ghost sightings that are due to common "waking dreams,” an experience that occurs when someone is just going to sleep or waking up and perceives ghosts, lights, or other strange imagery (Nickell 1995, 41, 46). Other apparitions are most likely to be seen when one is tired, daydreaming, performing routine chores, or is otherwise in a reverie or dissociative state (see e.g., Mackenzie 1982). This may help explain sightings such as one by Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretary, who passed by the Lincoln Bedroom one day and was frightened to see the ghostly president sitting on the bed and pulling on his boots (Alexander 1998, 43; Jones 1996, 8)... Not only Queen Wilhelmina but also “Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman all said they heard mysterious rappings, often at their bedroom doors” (Scott and Norman 1991, 74). However, ghosthunter Hans Holzer (1995, 70) concedes: “President Truman, a skeptic, decided that the noises had to be due to 'natural' causes, such as the dangerous settling of the floors. He ordered the White House completely rebuilt...