The Lincoln Memorial is one of Washington, D.C.’s top tourist attractions. The monument, erected to honor the 16th President of the United States, is a painstaking work of architecture and sculpture. It features a 19-foot high sculpture of Abraham Lincoln himself, seen above, and the attention to detail is breathtaking. The medium of the entire building makes these details even more impressive. Like many other monuments, the Memorial is crafted out of marble — and that’s not an accident. It’s designed to be resilient, solid, and made to last. And also, hard to change.

Which would have been OK except for a teensy problem.

That smudge under the “F” isn’t a problem with your screen or, for that matter, with the camera that took the picture. (Don’t take my word for it — here’s a larger version of the three-column picture if you want to zoom in on the “Future”.) It’s a problem with the F, or, more accurately, with the E that the F originally was, but was never supposed to be. That’s right: the Lincoln Memorial has a typo. As originally sculpted, it says “EUTURE” instead of “FUTURE.”

The National Park Service (NPS), on a web page addressing some myths associated with the Memorial, acknowledges the existence of the typo and its correction. In an audio file on that web page, a park ranger named Mark Reagan complains that “too often people ask about the mis-carved word,” but asserts that “there is none,” despite images like the ones above. Reagan’s explanation? “When it was carved, a letter ‘E’ was inadvertently carved instead of the intended letter ‘F’. Almost immediately, this error was corrected, yielded an ‘F’, removing any misspelled word forever.” Well, at least until you take a close-up picture of the word.

The NPS, asserting that the problem has been fixed, therefore only credits the rumors of there being a typo as “partially true.” But fixing an error carved out of marble, unlike other typographical errors, is a hard one to fix entirely. You can’t just edit it like a Word document or erase it like a pencil mark. So despite efforts to patch up the problem — and despite the protestations of the National Park Service — the ghost of the accidental E remains to this day, and probably will for the foreseeable euture.