The Octagon in Washington, D.C., acquired a haunting reputation through stories of household bells ringing without anyone summoning a servant. The surviving early accounts offer more than one explanation and more than one version of the people involved. Mary Clemmer Ames printed an extraordinary tale of a dinner guest lifted from the floor; Mary Smith Lockwood associated the sound with people enslaved by the household; Marian Gouverneur later named an army officer who supposedly tried to stop it. These are records of a developing tradition, rather than three independently documented demonstrations of a supernatural bell.
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The house behind the stories
The setting is a real Washington residence at the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street. The National Park Service’s teaching history identifies it as the Tayloe family’s winter home, completed in 1801, and explains its place in the development of the new capital. James and Dolley Madison occupied it after the burning of the White House in 1814. That documented presidential association helps explain the house’s lasting visibility, but does not authenticate the later haunting accounts.
A house could have a well-established historical identity and an uncertain supernatural reputation at the same time. The bells belonged to the domestic world of meals, servants and household authority. Their apparent operation without a human caller disrupted an ordinary system of communication. In the stories, the puzzle was not simply that a noise occurred: people believed a familiar apparatus was doing something its usual users could not explain.
Ames’s 1874 account: a powerful guest and competing explanations
In Ten Years in Washington, published in 1874, Ames placed the Octagon among the capital’s old homes and haunts. Her account appears on printed pages 558–559, after descriptions of Tayloe’s wealth, his Mount Airy estate and the labour of the people he enslaved. She described the building as then used by the Navy Department. The passage is a historical tour of Washington, not a report written at the scene of a bell disturbance.
Ames introduced the haunting as an established reputation and reproduced a story in which all the bells rang together at the same hour each night. A physically strong, sceptical dinner guest seized the wires, only to be lifted from the floor without stopping the sound. She did not name that guest in the passage, identify a particular evening, or supply a statement signed by him. Her confident presentation therefore needs to be distinguished from the evidence she actually made available to a reader.
The same paragraph preserves disagreement. In one explanation, rats had been responsible. In another, nobody discovered the cause and the family eventually took down the bells and rehung them differently. A priest’s attempted exorcism was also said to have failed. It is misleading to keep the levitation story while dropping these alternatives: Ames’s printed record contains both a supernatural marvel and an ordinary proposed cause.
Nor does the paragraph document how the rat explanation was tested or why a changed arrangement of the bells helped. It gives no inspection notes, measurements or description of a controlled trial. The passage establishes that this cluster of stories was in print by 1874. It does not establish that either the remarkable lifting episode or the competing mechanical explanation happened exactly as recounted.
Lockwood’s 1889 interpretation: slavery and the meaning of the sound
Mary Smith Lockwood offered a different emphasis in Historic Homes in Washington in 1889. Her short Octagon section, on printed pages 32–33, moves from Tayloe’s wealth and hospitality to the violence underlying that prosperity. She contrasts elegant social life with the exploitation of enslaved men, women and children. The haunting becomes part of that moral contrast.
Lockwood then records a story that the spirits of enslaved people returned to the home and announced themselves through bells. She presents it as a story and closes by acknowledging the house’s haunted reputation. She does not identify an individual spirit, name a bell witness, or give a dated occasion when she personally heard an inexplicable sound. Her passage is valuable evidence of the meaning a nineteenth-century writer attached to the legend, rather than testimony from the people she describes.
That distinction matters particularly here. Lockwood’s prose cannot stand in for the voices of enslaved residents, and her architectural and historical assertions require their own checks. The bell paragraph supplies no separate documentary basis for identifying who supposedly returned. What it does show is that a haunting could be interpreted through the house’s social history, rather than solely as an amusing puzzle for a dinner guest.
Gouverneur’s 1911 memoir: Ramsay and the bell rope
Marian Gouverneur’s As I Remember, published in 1911, supplies names and a different chain of transmission. On printed pages 235–236 she recalls the Octagon as closed during her early residence in Washington and feared by superstitious people. She then says that General George D. Ramsay’s daughters told her about an episode involving their father. Gouverneur does not claim to have been present at it.
In this version Colonel John Tayloe asked Ramsay to remain at the house overnight while Tayloe was away, as protection for his daughters Anne and Virginia. The bells began ringing violently during the evening meal. Ramsay rose to investigate but could not explain them. An alarmed butler attributed the disturbance to an unseen hand. Ramsay held the controlling rope, yet the bells were said to continue.
The particular family relationships make this more traceable than an entirely anonymous legend, but they do not turn a late memoir into a contemporary incident report. The account passes from an alleged episode involving Ramsay, through his daughters, to Gouverneur and then to publication. Her wording itself retains reported-speech uncertainty. No original Ramsay diary entry or technical inspection accompanies this paragraph.
Where the versions agree, and where they diverge
Ames and Gouverneur share a recognisable sequence: a meal, ringing bells, a sceptical or investigating man, and a failed attempt to restrain the mechanism. They differ in a crucial detail. Gouverneur does not say that Ramsay was lifted off the floor. Assigning Ames’s unnamed guest’s feat to Ramsay would merge two texts and create a stronger, more specific claim than either author provides.
The accounts also place Tayloe differently. Ames’s guest is dining with him; Gouverneur’s Ramsay is there because he is absent. These could be separate stories, variants of a circulating incident, or recollections reshaped in transmission. The reviewed passages do not decide between those possibilities. Their resemblance alone cannot establish independent corroboration.
Lockwood adds an explanation of the supposed agency, but no dated observation that resolves the conflict. Reading the three together reveals what endured: bells, household unease and an apparent failure of normal human control. The identity of the agent, the physical feat and the circumstances are less stable.
What can be dated and located
No reliable incident year is assigned here. The dates 1874, 1889 and 1911 belong to the books, not automatically to the alleged ringing. The older domestic setting is clear, but converting a publication date or the completion of the house into a haunting date would manufacture precision. The case remains an undated bell tradition with a documented publication history.
The map pin is an approximate Washington city reference from the United States Census gazetteer. It identifies the wider locality in the District of Columbia, not the exact Octagon building, a bell position or a place where a visitor should expect a phenomenon. This historical case entry does not establish current opening arrangements or advertise a ghost-hunting event.
Sources and further reading
Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington (1874), printed pages 558–559: the guest, bell wires, rats and rehanging alternatives. The original digitised text was read for this account.
Mary Smith Lockwood, Historic Homes in Washington (1889), printed pages 32–33: the household history and spirit-bell interpretation.
Marian Gouverneur, As I Remember (1911), printed pages 235–236: the story she heard from Ramsay’s daughters.
National Park Service, The Octagon of Washington, D.C.: The House that Helped Build a Capital, for the historical setting; 2025 Census national places gazetteer, for the broad Washington reference. Sources checked 10 November 2026.