A few years ago, I took a “ghost tour” of downtown Washington, D.C. There were some fun stories about a haunted floor of the Hay-Adams Hotel and people seeing Dolley Madison’s ghost on the porch of her old house (now part of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit), plus a statue in front of the court that supposedly attracts spirits of the dead.

But the ghost story that really stuck with me involved 19th century legal luminaries—and it’s a reminder that scandal is nothing new in Washington.