Bones' Seeley Booth Is Related To One Of The Most Famous Assassins In American History

Learning that you are a direct descendant of a national villain is probably among the worst possible discoveries one could make as an FBI agent. Such was the case for Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) in "Bones" — he's a direct descendant of none other than John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 1865. It took the show some time to connect Booth to, well, Booth, at least from the audiences' perspective.

The first time viewers were clued into the secret came in Season 5's "The Proof in the Pudding," where Booth and Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) exchange verbal rounds over presidential assassinations. "You promised you would never mention that," Booth notes after Bones brings up his ancestor. A few episodes later, in "The Parts in the Sum of the Whole," we get a flashback to Booth and Brennan's first case together where Bones deduces the truth based simply on his bone structure.

Booth's ancestry haunts him throughout the show's 12-season run. In Season 8's "The Fact in the Fiction," he expresses his desire to time travel and save Lincoln, and in Season 11's "The Secret in the Service," he's actually excluded from a case following a background check because of what his "nutcase relative did 100-plus years ago," as he puts it. Of course, the strangest revelation about Booth's familial link to the actor-turned-assassin didn't come from "Bones" at all, but rather the vaguely-related Fox series "Sleepy Hollow."

It's easy to forget now, but it actually took three seasons for Fox to consider "Bones" a hit. The same cannot be said for the network's supernatural drama series "Sleepy Hollow," which flew out of the traps with a record-breaking premiere in 2013, becoming Fox's highest-rated fall drama debut since 2006. In 2015, "Bones" and "Sleepy Hollow" crossed over in a two-part Halloween event that changed our entire perspective on the world Brennan and Booth inhabit, opening the door for a major Booth reveal. While Seeley Booth's links to John Wilkes Booth didn't factor into the crossover episodes, a later "Sleepy Hollow" installment dropped a major bomb about the FBI agent's killer relative, one that would have no doubt left him in shock and dismay.

In the "Sleepy Hollow" Season 4 premiere "Columbia," Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) learns that John Wilkes Booth (Adrian Bond) not only killed President Lincoln but was an occultist who tried using demonic power to help the Confederacy win the American Civil War. In fact, Booth himself became demonically possessed before killing the president, only to be sealed away beneath the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. — at least until he returned in the 21st century. It would likely be a tough pill to swallow for Seeley Booth that his notorious ancestor was not just an assassin but also a black magic practitioner who willingly let a demon inhabit his body — Booth is a practicing Catholic, after all, and once called out Bones for likening Jesus to a zombie.