Assassination Fascination

by Fayeruz Regan 05.2025

When I was 13, I visited the childhood home of John Wilkes Booth. I was visiting my cousins in Bel Air, Maryland when my aunt announced that we were all piling into the station wagon. She had a twinkle in her eye.

Aunt Mary was my “cool” aunt, and we could ride with the windows down no matter how tangled our hair got. She whistled at men on the sidewalk and we howled with laughter. She had married a landscaper named George, and we were picking him up from work at a place named Tudor Hall. The childhood home of John Wilkes Booth wouldn’t open to the public until 1997 – we had exclusive access.

The Fox family lived there at the time. The Gothic revival home was modest in size, with white painted brick and a metal roof the color of the Statue of Liberty. It sat on a long, stately lawn. I observed a rope attached to an iron bell on a post, tempted to ring it.  I was still debating when Mrs. Fox sidled over and said, “You can ring it if you’d like. You know, sometimes on a windless day, we hear the bell ringing outside. When we go to look, no one’s there.” 

She could sense my excitement. She led me to the living room, which still felt colonial to my untrained eye. What struck me was how casual Mrs. Fox was about the paranormal. Ghosts were simply part of life at Tudor Hall, and they were harmless. Most often, residents would feel a slight breeze as if someone were walking by or smell perfume for a fleeting moment. Other times it was hearing distant conversations and glass breaking when there was no one around. The most intense apparition was seeing a Confederate-era soldier climbing out of the first floor window.

In a way, the lore of John Wilkes Booth followed me throughout my youth. In elementary school, my class took a field trip to Ford’s Theatre to marvel at the roped off balcony where Lincoln was shot. As I grew older I would attend plays there, and found my eyes darting to the empty seats, imagining the horror. One rite of passage as a teenager in Northern Virginia was to take a road trip with friends to King’s Dominion. One summer, I remember pulling off the highway into Doswell and hearing my friend say, “John Wilkes Booth was caught and killed somewhere around here. I think it’s at the end of this road.”

That piece of information stuck with me. Even after I moved to LA,  then returned to Richmond - even after motherhood. In the back of my mind, I wanted to complete the cycle and see where John Wilkes Booth’s life ended. The actor that infamously assassinated Abraham Lincoln was, to put it so mildly it’s offensive, the most annoying “theatre person” in the history of theatre people. Anyone ever involved in a stage production knows there is some stiff competition there. 

The final days of Booth’s life were chaotic. He had been on the run and his options were narrowing. He started to panic. The assassin forced a Black family out of their cabin at knife point just to sleep indoors, because he knew he could. 

His final night was at the Garrett Farm in Port Royal, Virginia. The Garrett family didn’t know Booth or his accomplice David Herold prior to their stay. In fact, the family was suspicious that the men were horse thieves and made them sleep in their tobacco barn. When the Union cavalry approached, the fugitives requested a shoot out with the soldiers. This indulgence was denied. Theatre people, am I right?

When they refused to surrender, soldiers set the tobacco barn ablaze to smoke them out. Herold surrendered, while Booth tried in vain to stamp out the flames. He was loading his gun when soldiers shot him through the neck and pulled him out of the fire. It was a fatal hit.

Our family set out for a day trip to downtown Bowling Green, ending at Port Royal to see the Garrett’s Farm. The day trip was fun, but we discovered that the farm had been torn down long ago to make way for the Fort AP Hill (now called Fort Walker) military base. A historical sign on Route 301 shares details and mentions that the old farm was near to where the sign stands. Though this mission, 45 years in the making, was anticlimactic, perhaps it’s a fitting acknowledgment for someone who could commit such a beastly act.