Carey Lives Here

On April 3, 1956, according to news reports, a Mrs. Julia Chase of Hagerstown, Maryland, while on a tour of the White House, slipped away from her tour group and vanished into the heart of the building. For four and a half hours, Mrs. Chase, who was described later as “disheveled, vague and not quite lucid,” wandered through the White House, setting small fires - five in all. That’s how tight security was in those days: a not-quite-lucid woman was able to roam unnoticed through the executive mansion for more than half a working day. You can imagine the response if anyone tried anything like that now: the instantaneous alarms, the scrambled Air Force jets, the SWAT teams dropping from panels in the ceiling, the tanks rolling across the lawns, the ninety minutes of sustained gunfire pouring into the target area, the lavish awarding of medals of bravery afterward, including posthumously to the seventy-six people in Virginia and eastern Maryland killed by friendly fire. In 1956, Mrs. Chase, when found, was taken to the staff kitchen, given a cup of tea, and released into the custody of her family, and no one ever heard from her again.