Yes. I dug more broadly this time, including **White House records, the Hermitage's records of enslaved people, Andrew Jackson material, and combinations involving hanging, girls, magnolias, and trees**. I still cannot find documentation of a young enslaved girl being hanged from the White House magnolia—or, importantly, a documented story that closely resembles it. What I *did* find gives us a useful boundary around the story. The White House Historical Association documents that Jackson brought enslaved people to Washington. The **1830 census records 14 enslaved people in Jackson's White House household—eight women and six men**. It also documents severe physical punishment: Jackson instructed an overseer that an enslaved woman named Betty should receive **50 lashes** for future misconduct. But there's no hanging associated with her or the White House grounds. [WHHA (en-US)](https://www.whitehousehistory.org/slavery-in-the-andrew-jackson-white-house?utm_source=chatgpt.com) I then went into the Hermitage material because that's the other obvious place where such a story might originate. The Andrew Jackson Foundation says it has reconstructed the names of **more than 500 enslaved people and descendants** from letters, plantation records, census records and archaeology. [The Hermitage](https://thehermitage.com/enslaved-community?utm_source=chatgpt.com) And here's where it gets particularly interesting: the Hermitage has identified **26 enslaved people who died there between 1816 and 1849** and who may be buried in its enslaved cemetery. That list includes several children and young people—Hannah, about seven years old when she died in 1834; Anaca, about sixteen in 1833; Elick, about ten in 1830; Joe, about fourteen in 1830; and several infants. **None is described as having been hanged.** [The Hermitage](https://thehermitage.com/enslaved-cemetery?utm_source=chatgpt.com) There *is* one documented violent death. An enslaved man named **Gilbert** was killed in 1827 after a confrontation with Jackson's overseer, who stabbed him several times. Jackson requested a coroner's inquest; a grand jury ultimately did not indict the overseer. That's a documented event rather than folklore, but again, **no hanging and no magnolia tree**. [The Hermitage](https://thehermitage.com/enslaved-stories?utm_source=chatgpt.com) There's also an important limitation. Records concerning enslaved people at the Hermitage are incomplete. Archaeological researchers explicitly describe the documentary record of enslaved life there as sparse. [DAACS](https://www.daacs.org/sites/field-quarter-stps/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) So we can't establish that *nothing like this ever happened*. We can say something narrower and much more defensible: > **I can find no surviving documentation supporting the story that a young enslaved girl was hanged from the Jackson Magnolia, either at the White House or in the corresponding Hermitage records.** For your **Radio Apocalypse / recurring-imagery** idea, that's actually interesting in its own right. If the image of the girl in the tree arose independently for you, I wouldn't retrofit history to make it factual. I'd preserve it explicitly as **dream imagery**: *a girl appears in the magnolia, although history provides no record that she was ever there.* That distinction could make the piece considerably more haunting—the image isn't claiming to be a recovered historical event; it's asking why *that symbol* appeared.
