Angel of the Sea B&B

Irish exchange student Sarah Brown fell from a ledge at Cape May's Angel of the Sea in the late 1960s. Guests say she still plays with electronics.

In the late 1960s, Sarah Brown locked herself out of her room at what's now the Angel of the Sea. She was an Irish exchange student working at the Christian Admiral Hotel next door, and she was running late for a mandatory church service. Reverend Carl McIntire, who ran the property, did not tolerate tardiness. So Sarah climbed out a hallway window and tried to shimmy along a narrow ledge back to her own room. When she pried at the screen to get in, it broke free and hit her in the forehead. She fell. A gardener found her hours later.

Sarah is the ghost guests talk about most at this Cape May bed and breakfast. Her signature is electronics. Lamps switch off. Televisions flip channels. Radios start up overnight on empty floors. Objects migrate. A couple in the second building woke to find the laptop they'd left on a table sitting neatly on the floor. Another guest reported a distinct sliding sound across their nightstand at 3 a.m., followed by the bathroom lock rattling on its own. Sarah is not a spooky ghost. Her presence scans as a bored teenager wandering the halls at 3 a.m.

The building itself has lived three lives. It was built around 1850 in a different part of Cape May for William Weightman Sr., the Philadelphia chemist who cornered the quinine market during the Civil War and earned the nickname the Quinine King. In 1881, the family decided they wanted it somewhere else, so they hired local farmers to literally cut the house in half and haul it across town using horses and logs. Photographs of the move still exist. In 1962, after the Ash Wednesday Storm tore Cape May apart, Rev. McIntire saved it from demolition by moving it again, this time on flatbed trucks, to the current lot on Trenton Avenue.

Sarah isn't the only resident. Staff name at least three more. A young woman whose mother worked as caretaker and whose father was a sea captain still stands at an upstairs window looking out toward the Atlantic, waiting on a ship that never came back. A man who died of tuberculosis in one of the bedrooms is blamed for beds that shake and for phantom coughing from empty rooms. A shorter figure, under five feet, has been sensed in guest rooms at night by couples who describe the same height independently.

Former manager Chet Sherel got one of the better direct encounters. He was working a night shift and went into a guest room to switch off a light that had been left on. A figure was already sitting silently in the chair. He got a clear look before it wasn't there.

The Angel underwent a $3.5 million restoration between 1989 and 1991 and won a Historic Preservation Award from the National Trust. Twenty-seven rooms, ocean views, wraparound porches, gingerbread trim. It looks like a Victorian where nothing bad could happen, which is part of the charm and part of the reason Sarah's story lands as hard as it does.

The staff will not tell you which room was hers. They will mention that the upper floors of the second building see the most activity, and leave it at that.