As soon as I heard that Mary Stauder, 78 years old, claimed to have seen Abraham Lincoln, I had to meet her. Not that she says Lincoln was alive when she saw him. She didn’t speak with him or anything. She says she saw his body in its casket.

She realizes it is a far-fetched story, but swears it is true. Still, I was feeling skeptical when I pulled up in front of Alice’s restaurant in Nokomis, where we had agreed to meet.

In the early 1930s, Mary attended a country school in Montgomery County. Her teacher (and everyone else’s) was Letitia Betty Kilton. Mrs. Kilton’s husband, Darrel, was a bigwig in those parts. He had some connections at the state and arranged for his wife’s students to come to Lincoln’s Tomb to view the body.

“They said they were going to move Lincoln,” Mary says. “They had to move him for some maintenance. There was no publicity, because they didn’t want to draw a crowd.”

Gov. Louis Emmerson had appropriated $175,000 for renovation of the tomb, and the work was completed in 1931. President Herbert Hoover came for the rededication.

So, Mary says, the students went to the tomb and a guard let them in. There, in his casket, was Lincoln. This is how Mary describes it:

“I remember the top half of the casket was some kind of glass, and we could see the top half of Lincoln. What floored me was that his hair was white and down to here (she gestures to the tops of her shoulders). It was white as snow. But I could tell it was him. Other than his white hair, he looked just like he should have. We only got to stay for about five minutes.”

The memory is very clear for her, but she stopped telling the story when nobody believed her.

“I called your paper about 10 years ago,” she says, “and told them I saw Lincoln. The woman who answered the phone asked if I had some mental problems.”

She doesn’t. Mary and her husband, Marvin, have been married for 56 years. He says she waited until after they were married to tell him about seeing Lincoln. Not taking any chances, apparently.

Marvin believes her story, and he is not alone.

“We were having a roundtable discussion at the restaurant a few months ago,” Marvin says, “and we came to the conclusion that it was possible.”

Enter Tom Schwartz, state historian. Tom says Mary did see something on display at the tomb, because he has heard virtually the same story from others. But, he says, there is no way it was Abe.

Tom explains that, in 1901, Lincoln was disinterred and his body observed for what was to be the final time to confirm that the body was actually there and had not been stolen.

In the 1950s, Henry McVeigh was interviewed in the Illinois State Journal. McVeigh worked on the re-burial crew in 1901 and claimed to have been the last living person to have seen Lincoln’s face. He and two other workmen poured the concrete over the casket.

Abe’s son, Robert Todd, was consulted as to how he wanted his father re-buried. Robert’s instructions were to pour concrete atop the vault and reinforce it with steel so that nobody could ever steal or otherwise disturb his father’s body.

So, Tom says, in the 1930s someone would have had to drill through about 10 feet of concrete to get to Lincoln. Anything like that would have been documented. No documentation exists.

Tom thinks Mary and the others saw a wax figure representing what Lincoln’s body might have looked like as an elderly man. Hence the white hair and beard.

However, witnesses who saw Lincoln’s body in 1901 did report that a white mold had grown over Lincoln’s head.

“When I first arrived here in 1985,” Tom says, “I kept hearing from people who said they remembered seeing Lincoln in a casket when they were kids. I think it might have been a wax figure that toured the country. I have seen ads of such things back then. Perhaps, being young, they confused that with Lincoln’s real remains.”

I called the Stauders to let them know what Tom said. I told Marvin, Marvin told Mary and Mary told Marvin to tell me that no matter what any historian says, she thinks she saw Lincoln’s body and not a wax replica.

In her favor - her memory, the 1930s renovation project, the white mold on Lincoln’s head. Against her - the generally accepted history that Lincoln’s body has not been unearthed since 1901, no documentation otherwise, and no portion of the coffin was glass.

Take your choice and place your bets.

http://www.sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/115596.asp