APEP BAR UNEXPLAINED | October 14, 2026 — Washington, D.C., is home to monuments, archives, museum collections and, apparently, a few stories that refuse to stay quietly in the past. A new October 9 report from Axios has brought a particularly eerie Smithsonian Castle encounter back into public view: a distressed wail from a locked restroom that reportedly turned out to be empty.
The locked door and the voice no one could find
Smithsonian historic preservation director Carly Bond told Axios about an experience she says occurred in September 2023. Working in a nearly deserted Castle, Bond found the stalls in a second-floor women’s restroom locked. She then tried the men’s restroom and heard what sounded like someone in distress.
Concerned an intruder might be inside, she sought a security guard. The guard unlocked the windowless room. According to Bond’s account, nobody was there.
The incident is a firsthand recollection reported in 2026 of an event that happened three years earlier. That timeline matters: this is new coverage of an earlier account, not a newly documented haunting or evidence that a spirit was present.
A museum with a long memory
Smithsonian buildings have accumulated ghost legends for generations. The same Axios report recounts stories of a woman in white on a staircase, strange activity attributed to long-ago night watchmen, and reports from the early 1900s involving the building now known as the Arts and Industries Building.
There is also a decidedly Victorian twist across town at the Heurich House Museum: a century-old doll named Michael, reportedly brought to dinner when the family needed a fourteenth guest to avoid the superstition surrounding thirteen at a table. The museum does not claim Michael is haunted.
At the center of many of these stories is the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fascination with Spiritualism, when some Americans believed they could communicate with those who had died. That history is real. Whether any particular knock, cry or figure represented something supernatural is another question altogether.
What would count as evidence?
A witness’s sincere experience deserves accurate reporting, not automatic ridicule. But locked doors can have mechanical explanations, sounds can carry in unexpected ways, and memories can become more mysterious as an experience is retold. No recording, independent measurement or repeatable supernatural observation is established by the account cited here.
Bond’s reported encounter is especially hard to revisit: the Castle has been closed for renovations, and the bathrooms involved have been demolished, according to Axios.
What is documented: Bond publicly described hearing a wail and finding an empty locked room; the Smithsonian’s history includes longstanding ghost lore. What remains unverified: any ghostly cause.
Was it an ordinary sound behaving in an extraordinary way—or another chapter in a building that seems determined to keep its secrets?
Sources: Axios D.C., Anna Spiegel, October 9, 2026; Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Featured image is an illustrative gothic interior photo by Annie Spratt / Unsplash, not an image of the Smithsonian Castle or of the reported event.
