On February 9, 1956, 96-year-old Samuel J. Seymour appeared as a mystery guest on the game show I’ve Got a Secret. Seymour’s secret, which the panel was tasked with guessing, was that he’d seen John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Based on Seymour’s age, panelist Bill Cullen quickly figured out that the answer had something to do with the Civil War, and Jayne Meadows (sister of Audrey Meadows from The Honeymooners) then connected what Seymour had witnessed to Lincoln. “Was this a pleasant thing?” Meadows asked, to which Seymour replied, “Not very pleasant, I don’t think.”
Once the cat was out of the bag, host Garry Moore went on to explain that Seymour was just five years old when he was taken to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where Lincoln was assassinated. What Moore found especially interesting about Seymour’s story was that he wasn’t concerned with the president because he didn’t realize he’d been shot. Instead, when Seymour saw Booth jump from the presidential box onto the stage, his only concern was for the man he thought had fallen out of the balcony.
“I was shot 50 times, at least in my dreams”
In a 1954 article referenced by Moore during the show, Seymour went into further detail regarding his experience at Ford’s Theater. According to him, his godmother lifted him up at the beginning of the play so that he could see the president’s arrival from across the theater. “He was a stern-looking man,” Seymour recalled. “I guess I just thought he looked stern because of his whiskers, because he was smiling and waving to the crowd,” he continued.
Eventually, a shot rang out, and Seymour noticed that Lincoln was slumped forward in his chair. “Hurry, hurry, let’s go help the poor man who fell down,” Seymour begged, after seeing Booth try to make his escape. “[My godmother] swept me into her arms and held me close and somehow we got outside the theater,” Seymour remembered. “That night I was shot 50 times, at least in my dreams—and I sometimes still relive the horror of Lincoln’s assassination, dozing in my rocker as an old codger like me is bound to do,” he concluded.
Seymour appeared on I’ve Got a Secret just a couple of months prior to his death. By the time he shared his story publicly, he was believed to be the last living witness to Lincoln’s murder.
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