Overview
The Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House stands on Madison Place on the east side of Lafayette Square, built in 1828 for Tayloe — diplomat, collector and host whose drawing rooms gathered presidents and envoys through the capital's antebellum decades; the square around it accumulated more history and more ghost stories than any few acres in America, and the Tayloe house holds its thread. After private and club years the mansion passed, like its neighbour the Cutts–Madison House, into the federal court complex, so it is seen today from the square rather than entered. Its telling, printed in Washington ghost collections since the 19th century, describes Benjamin Ogle Tayloe himself lingering by his drawing-room mantel, footsteps on the stair, and — in the square's darker weave — echoes of the 1859 Sickles shooting nearby, which the house's windows overlooked. All of it is old, layered capital folklore rather than record. The account should present the house as part of Lafayette Square's storied fabric, exterior-only, its legends told lightly and historically.