The History Channel has been pumping this show about a grave robbing of Abe Lincoln’s grave for a few weeks now, and it was on last night.

Anyway, it explained why Lincoln took to being a ghost. He didn’t exactly rest in peace.

The show is worth a watch. I certainly won’t do the whole saga justice here. But here are the fun fact bullets:

• After Lincoln was assassinated, he had several funerals across the nation. In New York, the funeral procession went in front of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandfather’s house. Young Teddy watched the procession from the window.
• Lincoln’s coffin was placed in a tomb in a cemetery about 3 miles outside of Springfield, Illinois. Eventually the coffin was placed in a marble sarcophagus. Well, a coffin was anyway. No one bothered to measure the real coffin to see if it would fit before they built the sarcophagus. So they got a new—smaller—coffin and crammed Lincoln in it.
• During the Civil War, the first US paper currency was introduced. After paper money came counterfeiters and then the Secret Service to combat counterfeiters.
• The best counterfeiter in Chicago was caught by the Secret Service and went to jail.
• The business partners of the counterfeiter came up with a scheme to steal Lincoln’s remains, hide them, and then ransom them back to the government in exchange for a pardon for the counterfeiter.
• While they were in the bar loudly discussing their plan an undercover Secret Service agent overheard them, and pretended he was the “Body Snatching King of Chicago.” He joined their crew.
• Body Snatching was a misdemeanor crime at the time. There were no real penalties. The penalties for damaging the coffins and/or stealing and personal items on the bodies (watches, rings, etc.) were much more severe.
• The Secret Service, along with some Pinkerton detectives, planned a sting operation. Things went horribly wrong (a pistol misfired, a gun battle in the dark between all the good guys but none of the bad guys ensued) and the perpetrators escaped. The bad guys did not get the coffin out of the tomb, though. It was crammed in too tight—recall the sarcophagus.
• The bad guys went back to the original bar where they planned the heist. The Secret Service arrested them there.
• After the attempted heist, the caretaker of the tomb formed a secret society of Lincoln body protectors and moved the coffin to the basement of the tomb, where they buried it.
• The tomb, which was built on swampy marsh land, was structurally unsound, and eventually had to be rebuilt.
• Eventually, the coffin was dug up again and moved to its final resting place inside the new tomb.

There are far more details, and the back story is quite fascinating and rather funny. So you really should try to catch the show.

Source: History Channel