Lincoln's Body: Stolen, Stashed Under Lumber, and Moved 17 Times Before Being Locked in Concrete Forever

On April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. in a boarding house across from Ford's Theatre, but that's not the weird part—everyone knows about the assassination. The truly bizarre element involves what happened to his body over the next 36 years. Lincoln's corpse became something of a macabre tourist attraction and the victim of the most ambitious body-snatching plot in American history. After his funeral train wound its way across the country, drawing millions of mourners, Lincoln was interred in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. But that was hardly the end of his travels. In 1876, a gang of counterfeiters hatched a plan to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom, demanding $200,000 and the release of their master engraver from prison. The scheme fell apart when their insider turned out to be a Secret Service informant. The would-be thieves actually got the casket partway out of the tomb before being caught. This incident so unnerved Robert Todd Lincoln that his father's remains were moved and hidden repeatedly—at one point, the coffin was secretly stashed beneath a pile of lumber in the tomb's basement, where it sat for years. The body was moved a total of 17 times. Finally, in 1901, Robert had his father's casket encased in a steel cage and buried under tons of concrete, ten feet deep. But before they sealed it forever, 23 witnesses demanded one final viewing to confirm the body was actually in there. They opened the casket and, yes, there was Lincoln, remarkably well-preserved, his distinctive features still recognizable 36 years after death. Only then did Abraham Lincoln finally rest in peace. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.