Lafayette Square townhouse where Philip Barton Key II died in 1859 after Congressman Daniel Sickles shot him in the square below.
21 Madison Place NW, Washington, DC 20005
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
No public interior access; the building is part of the federal courts complex on Madison Place. Lafayette Square out front is a free, open public park.
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Wheelchair OK
Paved city sidewalks around Lafayette Square.
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Est. 1828 · Death site of Philip Barton Key II, son of Francis Scott Key · Connected to the 1859 Sickles murder trial and the first U.S. temporary-insanity acquittal · Contributing building in the Lafayette Square Historic District
The Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House stands at 21 Madison Place NW, on the east side of Lafayette Square one block from the White House. It was built in 1828 for Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, a member of the Tayloe family that also owned the nearby Octagon House. For much of the 19th century the address was part of a fashionable row of private residences facing the square.
The house entered Washington lore on February 27, 1859. Philip Barton Key II, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and a son of Francis Scott Key, had been carrying on an affair with Teresa Sickles, the wife of New York Congressman Daniel Sickles. After learning of the relationship, Sickles confronted Key in Lafayette Square and shot him. The mortally wounded Key was carried into a nearby house on Madison Place, identified in accounts as the Tayloe House, where he died.
Sickles was tried for murder and acquitted in a case that produced the first successful use of a temporary-insanity defense in the United States. The trial, the affair, and the public killing made the block one of the most notorious addresses in mid-19th-century Washington.
In later decades the house passed through several owners, served at one point as a private club, and was eventually absorbed into the federal courts complex that now occupies the east side of Madison Place. The building survives as a contributing structure within the Lafayette Square Historic District, though its interior is not open to the public.
Sources
The 1859 shooting is the anchor for one of the oldest ghost stories attached to Lafayette Square. According to DC folklore collected by the White House Historical Association and repeated in regional haunted-history coverage, the figure of Philip Barton Key II is said to appear on the square after dark, near the place where he fell. Some retellings describe the apparition as pacing or searching, tying the lore to the suddenness of his death.
The Tayloe House itself enters the story as the building where Key was carried and died, and it appears on published lists of reportedly haunted locations in Washington for that reason. The accounts are folkloric rather than the product of formal paranormal investigation, and the more substantial record here is the documented history: a public homicide on the square, a celebrated trial, and a defense argument that changed American criminal law. Visitors today see the house only from the exterior, from the public sidewalk along Madison Place.
Notable Entities
View the Madison Place row of historic houses, including the Tayloe House, from the east side of Lafayette Square. Interpretive markers around the square cover its history; the building interior is not open to the public.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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