Funkstown – The Bogeyman of Foggy Bottom

By Frank Leone

We are nearing Halloween, so let’s start with the scary stuff. Albert H. Fish (1870-1936) was perhaps the most notorious serial killer in American history, known as the original bogeyman. He was born in Washington, D.C.  In 1875, when he was five years old, his father, a ship captain, died, leaving his mother with too many children to care for.  She entrusted Albert to an orphanage until age nine. He later moved to New York. In 1917, his wife ran off with their boarder leaving him (and his five children) and potentially triggering his hideous crime spree. Over the next few years, he kidnapped and murdered four or 15 or 100 children. He was caught when police traced a letter he sent to the parents of 10-year-old Gracie Budd, describing how he had killed her, cut up body, and cooked and eaten it. He confessed to the crime but pled insanity.

Albert Fish’s mug shot for a larceny arrest in New York in 1903, when he was 33 years old (New York Daily News, 1928).

Fish claimed that he had experienced and witnessed horrific abuse at the orphanage, which led to his sado-masochistic actions. The jury concluded he was guilty and sane (knew right from wrong), or whether sane or not, he deserved to die. Fish was executed in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison in 1936.

What’s the Foggy Bottom connection to this fiend?  The orphanage where he spent what he claimed were his formative years was St. John’s Orphanage, located at 1922 F Street, across from the F Street House (currently the GWU President’s House). The orphanage opened in 1870 and operated at the F Street site from 1878 to 1956. The building then served the headquarters of the National Association of Life Underwriters (NALU) from 1959‐2000. Since then, the George Washington University (GWU) uses the building, sometimes known as “Old Main, to house administrative offices.

No doubt there was discipline at the orphanage, but Fish’s tales of abuse were probably exaggerated attempts to blame others for his crimes. In fact, contemporary accounts typically referred to the orphanage as “a home, not an institution,” and even “home-like and cheerful.”  The truth is probably somewhere in between.

St. John’s Orphanage prior to the 1914 reconstruction (St. John’s Community Services)

We do know that St. John's Orphanage was the principal charity of St. John's Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, opposite The White House. It was founded as St. John's Hospital for Children in a house on Pennsylvania Ave. on November 1, 1870. In December 1873, it moved to 1908 H Street NW (the site of the IMF and formerly that of Western Presbyterian Church), also in Foggy Bottom. “Sister Sarah” Williams Huntington (1837-1917), relying on her own resources, moved the 43 orphaned children into a vacant brick house at F Street in 1878. Sister Sarah, known as “the orphan’s friend,” ran the orphanage and helped fund it until her death in 1917. (She is interred in Rock Creek Cemetery.)  

The orphanage was non-sectarian, but did provide a Christian education to its wards. The orphanage held nearly 100 children, both boys and girls. Children arrived at ages of four or five; boys were kept until age 12 and girls until 16, when they were returned to their relatives. Fish’s experience in not being an actual “orphan” was common – many children in the orphanage were placed there by a parent who could not afford them or otherwise could not care for them. Indeed, by the 1950s, actual orphans had been placed with foster parents, and most children in the orphanage had at least one parent on the outside. They were returned to their parents on an average stay of two years. Sometimes, the children ran away from the orphanage to rejoin their parents. For example, in 1929, nine-year Freddy Abner walked miles in the snow from the orphanage along a railroad line to Alexandria, and his mother decided to keep him at home.

In 1914, part of the orphanage building was destroyed by fire and a new fire-proof building was built. It contained a chapel, infirmary, manual training trade school for boys, sewing room, library, playroom, school rooms, dining rooms, laundry, and playgrounds on the roof and in the back year. As of 1914, the school was under the supervision of GWU and teaching was done by members of the university’s teacher’s college, but by 1953, the children attended different local schools.

 GWU’s Old Main Building, the former orphanage building today, with its brick and limestone (F. Leone, April 2021).

St. John’s was one of 25 orphanages operating in D.C.in 1911 – the St. Ann’s Infant Asylum on Washington Circle was another, and the House of Mercy (a “home for fallen women”) was nearby. By the mid-1950s, children were housed in foster homes, residential treatment centers, and group homes and there was no longer a need for private charities to shelter orphans. The orphanage closed after 1956, and St. John’s launched a new school for intellectually disabled children.

In 1959, St. John’s sold to the NALU (now NAIFA, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors), which remodeled and enlarged the building, installing air conditioning and new elevators. When NALU moved to Falls Church in 1999, it sold the building to GWU.  GWU Folks - let us know if you've seen ghosts in the building!

For more frighting tales, check out our other Funkstown Halloween posts:  Foggy Bottom Ghosts and Graveyards; The Body Snatcher of Foggy Bottom; and Haunted Foggy Bottom.

Sources: Sarah Williams Huntington, "Sister Sarah." A tribute prepared by direction of trustees of Saint John's Church Orphanage of Washington, District of Columbia, 1918; Hastings H. Hart, “Child Welfare in the District of Columbia,” Russell Sage Foundation, 1924; Washington Post, Dec. 4, 1929; March 29, 1953;  “Old Main,” GWU Library, GWU Historic Walking Tour; Harold Schechter, Deranged: The Shocking True Store of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!, Pocket Books, 1990; Jerrod Brown, et al., “Psychology of Albert Fish,” Behavioral Health 1:1; Elise Widerlite, The Bogeyman: An American nightmare, a D.C. native, WTOP, April 10, 2013; FBA History Project.