Unshuttering the Past

Decatur House Museum on Lafayette Park has cast off its shutters, revealing six false windows -- along with six real ones -- on its north wall. The change sheds a bit of light on an old ghost story.

In a legend oft told by tour guides, the ghost of Commodore Stephen Decatur, mortally wounded in an 1820 duel 14 months after moving into the new mansion, appeared one night in the window of the ground-floor room where he died. As the story goes, the window was ordered bricked up to prevent future apparitions.

Truth, it seems, is more mundane. According to an 1817 drawing, master architect Benjamin Latrobe, who also designed the south wing of the Capitol and made alterations to the White House burned by the British, deliberately included six bricked-in, window-sized recesses on the building's H Street wall to preserve symmetry while concealing seven fireplace flues.

Latrobe's design for the 14-room mansion did not include extensive use of shutters. But by 1944, a Colonial Revival-style renovation added shutters to all windows -- real and faux. When the National Trust for Historic Preservation acquired the property in the 1960s, it acknowledged Latrobe's neoclassical intentions by removing shutters on the facade; a dozen pair of them on the north wall, however, were left in place.

Last month, rather than restore or replace the remaining 50-year-old shutters, at an estimated cost of $800 a window, the Trust decided to take them off, revealing the blank recesses. The ghost story may be in for revision too.

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