Angel of the Sea B&B

One of Cape May's most-photographed buildings, with the gingerbread trim and wraparound porch to match. It's as Victorian as it gets, and guests say it feels like that era never quite ended.

The Angel of the Sea is one of Cape May's best-known haunted buildings, a grand Victorian structure built circa 1850 for William Weightman Sr., the Philadelphia chemist known as the "Quinine King" who made his fortune supplying the anti-malarial drug during the Civil War. The house has survived two dramatic relocations -- first in 1881 when farmers literally cut it in half to move it across town by horse and log, and again in 1962 when Reverend Carl McIntire saved it from demolition after the devastating Ash Wednesday Storm by moving it on flatbed trucks to its current Trenton Avenue location.

Staff report at least four distinct spirits. The most tragic is Sarah Brown, an Irish exchange student who worked at the nearby Christian Admiral Hotel in the late 1960s. One day, Sarah returned to her room in the second building to change for mandatory church services but discovered she'd left her keys at work. Rather than risk being late and violating Reverend McIntire's strict Bible conference rules, she crawled out a hallway window and tried to shimmy along a narrow ledge to reach her own room. When she pried at the window screen, it broke free, struck her in the forehead, and sent her falling to the ground below. She may have lain there for hours before a gardener found her body.

Sarah's playful spirit has a thing for electronics -- lamps, radios, and televisions turn on and off throughout the inn. Guests frequently return to their rooms to find items moved from tables to floors or shifted from one spot to another. Objects slide across nightstands and fall from dressers as if knocked by invisible hands. In the second building where she died, footsteps echo through empty hallways and lights flicker on their own.

A second spirit is thought to be a woman whose mother served as caretaker and whose father was a sea captain. She can still be seen gazing out windows toward the ocean, forever waiting for her father's ship to return. A third entity -- a transient who died of tuberculosis within these walls -- gets blamed for the beds that vibrate and shake on their own, along with the sound of phantom coughing echoing through the rooms.

Former manager Chet Sherel experienced the haunting firsthand. While working the night shift, he entered a room to turn off a light and was shocked to find a ghostly figure sitting silently in a chair. Multiple guests have reported sensing a presence less than five feet tall in their rooms at night. One couple distinctly heard something slide across their nightstand and the bathroom lock jingle repeatedly. Another pair woke to find their laptop had somehow moved from a table to the floor while they slept.

The Angel of the Sea underwent a $3.5 million restoration in 1989-1991 that earned it the Historic Preservation Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It now operates as a celebrated bed and breakfast, with complimentary self-guided tours of its public areas. The Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts conducts ghost trolley tours through Cape May's haunted district. Guests who stay in the second building, particularly on the upper floors, report the most activity -- though the staff tactfully declines to identify exactly which room was Sarah Brown's.