Boris Karloff - The White House

An anthology series presenting tales of suspense and the supernatural, often featuring the host in chilling narratives.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Missus Boris Karloff's speaking. I am here with a story
for you from the files of the Reader's Digest. This
is the story of a house. Fourteen brides have been
married in it, two silver weddings have been celebrated there.
Twenty babies were born in the upstairs rooms. The address

(00:21):
well sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, d C. For more
than a hundred and fifty years, it has been the
seat not only of this country's executive power, but of
an ideal of American family life. When it was built,
a coat of white paint was laid over the gray
Virginia sandstone of its walls, and from that day the

(00:44):
people of the nation have called it the White House.
The plan for the White House was drawn by Captain
James Hoban, an Irishman by birth and a resident of Charleston,
South Carolina, who won a five hundred dollar prize offered
by Congress for the best design, and time has proved
it to be a noble one. Fourteen decades of whimsical

(01:07):
fashion have passed through the interior, affecting furniture and draperies,
but the house itself, though the oldest public building in
Washington has never gone out of style. The corner stone
was laid on October thirteenth, seventeen ninety two. George Washington,
though didn't live to occupy the house. Labor troubles, congressional slowness,

(01:30):
and national poverty combined to delay the work so that
it was still not finished when in eighteen hundred the
Adamses threw open its doors at its first reception. Only
fourteen years later, this fine new first House of the
Nation was burned during the War of eighteen twelve. Fortunately,

(01:51):
mister Hoban was still alive to guide the reconstruction after
the war, and by the time the fashionable Monrose entered it,
a finer wie house opened its doors. From then on
it has gone through much the same evolution as other
old American homes. First, it was lit by candlelight till
Fillmore's day in eighteen fifty one, when gas came in, then,

(02:14):
during the administration of Benjamin Harrison, the new spark of
the electricity. There have almost always been children in the
White House. Tyler used to play forfeits with them in
the Red room. Jackson never tired of giving parties to
the friends of his seven grandchildren and young Willie Lincoln

(02:35):
drove his pet goats through the front door. Gaiety and
sadness in the white and gold East room of the
White House of Lane in state the bodies of Presidents William, Henry, Harrison, Taylor,
and Harding, who sickened and died in office, and of Lincoln,
Garfield and McKinley, victims of assassination. And at such times

(02:58):
the whole room has been draped in black, even to
the chandeliers. There's been much debate on the subject of
is the White House haunted by all these voices from
the past. In the daytime, one isn't likely to think so.
But late at night sometimes that does seem to be
a feeling of the presence of other lives. And the

(03:21):
American people feel the presence in the White House of
those lives, so many of them faithful and strong, some
few immortally great. We all say amen to a prayer
written for that house by its first occupant, James Adams.
Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and

(03:42):
on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. The story of
the White House, which I found in the Reader's Digest
back files, is in a way, the story of life
in these United States through the years since its beginning
is a nation. But for a more contemporary view of
life in these wages United States, you might refer to
the current issue of the magazine with a whole department

(04:06):
of amusing revealing anecdotes illustrating life in the United States
to day. I'll be sharing more of the stories with
you transcribed in the near future, but until next time,
this is Boris Karloff saying good bye.