Phyllis Hall Oral History

I first met Phyllis Hall through her niece, who had recently visited the Museum on a middle school field trip in 2010. Ms. Hall had never given an interview about her memories of the Kennedy assassination, and it was a great pleasure to record her story for the first time on camera. She enjoyed the experience more than she anticipated and was soon willing to return to the Museum to participate in educational programming. Between February 2011 and June 2013, she was a frequent guest, recording a total of six Living History conversations. A March 2012 program may be viewed here: Living History with Phyllis Hall - YouTube. Beyond the Museum, Ms. Hall found that she also enjoyed giving solo presentations and often made herself available for speaking engagements, including a special program in September 2013 for the Crawford County Historical Society in her hometown of Oblong, Illinois.

In revisiting her memories on a regular basis, she began to share additional details from Trauma Room One that were not mentioned in this original 2010 oral history. Some of her new claims, including a memory of seeing of an intact bullet "lodged between the president's earlobe and the top of the shoulder, on Kennedy's right side," proved very controversial and generated interest among assassination researchers. Ms. Hall gave a number of media interviews at the 50th anniversary of the assassination in 2013, including a cover story in the National Enquirer. -- Stephen Fagin, Curator