On February 9, 1956, 96-year-old Samuel J. Seymour appeared as a mystery guest on the game show I’ve Got a Secret . Seymour’s secret, which the panel was tasked with guessing, was that he’d seen John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Based on Seymour’s age, panelist Bill Cullen quickly figured out that the answer had something to do with the Civil War, and Jayne Meadows (sister of Audrey Meadows from The Honeymooners ) then connected what Seymour had witnessed to Lincoln. “Was this a pleasant thing?” Meadows asked, to which Seymour replied, “Not very pleasant, I don’t think.”

Once the cat was out of the bag, host Garry Moore went on to explain that Seymour was just five years old when he was taken to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., where Lincoln was assassinated. What Moore found especially interesting about Seymour’s story was that he wasn’t focused on the president because he didn’t realize he’d been shot.…