Séances and Mediums were more prominent in the Lincoln administration than during any other presidency.
Dr. J. Ridgeley Martin signed an affidavit that he personally knew a medium Lincoln used to visit, whose last name was Thorp. “Mr. Lincoln received messages from his mother and Ann Rutledge.” It was known that Lincoln and his wife had Spiritualist friends while living in Springfield, Illinois.[1]
[1] Hamilton, Michelle L. "I would Still be Drowned in Tears": Spiritualism in Abraham Lincoln's White House. La Mesa, CA: Vanderblümen Publications, 2013. p. 39.
In July 1867, William H. Herndon gave a reporter a tour of the late president‘s law office [in Springfield, Illinois]. On his bookshelves, along with his law books, were two Spiritualist books. They were Robert Dale Owens’s Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World and Andrew Jackson Davis’s, The Great Harmonia: Being a Philosophical Revelation of the Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial Universe. Both of these book explained the beliefs of Spiritualists.
On March 12, 1861, the Wisconsin Waukesha Freeman, which according to its masthead was “A Weekly Newspaper—Devoted to Republican Politics, Literature, and the News of the day,” published the starting details under the headline, “The President Elect a Spiritualist.” The article published the account of the trance medium J. B. Conklin. According to the revelations of Conklin, Abraham Lincoln, before the election, had attended at least two spirit circles conducted by him [in New York City].
The author of an undocumented newspaper article provides details of Lincoln’s early in interest in Spiritualism and mediumship. The article states: “When Lincoln lost the only woman he ever loved, Ann Rutledge, he almost lost his reason. He told friends that he contemplated taking his own life. But Lincoln maintained that the spirit of Ann Rutledge warned him against taking such a step. He became deeply interested in the circulated news of the Rochester rappings, and stories by the orthodox that the Fox sisters made the raps by cracking their big toes angered him.
SEANCES AT HOME
In the early 1850's Lincoln began to have seances in his home at Springfield, and before his election to the presidency he often went to the seances of trance medium J. B. Conklin in New York.”