Booth's visit to the Surratt Boarding House after the assassination

[Laurie Verge]

If Booth wore the more proper top hat to the theater (as was customary), could he have planned ahead and taken the slouch hat somehow because it would have been less conspicuous to the guards at the bridge and also much easier and safer to wear while riding hard and also avoiding tree branches? No one has answered my previous question as to whether or not a hat could be hidden under his waistband at the small of his back...

Weichmann testified that Mary Surratt did something strange that night by shooing the ladies of the house upstairs about 10 pm and then turning off the lights. Would this have significance? A signal to Booth? A way of obscuring his entry? Would Booth have dismounted and climbed that rather long flight of stairs to the door? Wouldn't wimpy Weichmann have reported something like this?

I'm sorry. I can accept Booth making three visits to the boardinghouse that night - the third being a pre-theater visit around 9 or 9:30. I still can't wrap my head around a post-assassination visit, especially just to retrieve a hat. I also think that it would have been easier to retrieve weapons farther out of the city -- Surrattsville, T.B., or Mudd's would be the logical places to me.

But, as Bill is prone to say about just being a dumb cowboy, "What do I know, I'm just a dumb ex-teacher/museum madam." Sorry, Bill, I just had to mimic you...