The Chalfonte Hotel

Room 19 at Cape May's oldest hotel goes off at 3 a.m. Henry Sawyer built it in 1876 and the ghosts stayed.

Room 19 has a guest problem. Whoever checks in tends to call the front desk about banging on the brass bedposts, then a neighbor pounding on the wall from the next room, except the next room is empty. That happens so often at the Chalfonte that the staff has stopped being surprised by it. Three in the morning is the busy hour.

The Chalfonte Hotel opened in 1876 on Howard Street in Cape May, a couple of blocks from the beach, and it's the oldest operating hotel in town. The National Park Service calls it the oldest and most ornate large hotel in Cape May, which sounds dry until you stand on the porch and look at the brackets and balustrades. Civil War cavalry officer Henry Sawyer, the man nearly executed in retaliation during the war, built it after he came home and went into hospitality.

In 1878 the Great Cape May Fire tore through the center of town and leveled most of the grand Victorian hotels. Sawyer spotted the fire from the Chalfonte's roof and raised the alarm, saving his own building and probably several lives. Guests now say they feel watched from the street below the hotel, like someone up in the cupola is doing his job.

Staff know the basement ghost by name: Mr. Johnson, a former custodian. He turns up in passing, the way you'd see a coworker rounding a corner.

Then there's the kid footsteps. Guests describe children running up and down the upstairs halls at hours when no children are checked in. Furniture in empty rooms gets rearranged. Doors click shut. It's the low, granular stuff that older hotels breed, and the Chalfonte has close to 150 years of it.

The floors creak in the same spots they creaked for Sawyer's dinner guests. In the Magnolia Room, servers still carry Southern fried chicken and spoonbread out on silver platters, the way the kitchen did when Sawyer sat at one of the tables.