In Brief
The haunting at Congress Hall in Cape May, New Jersey lives on the third floor. Staff hear a radio playing and voices behind a door, knock, and get no answer — the room is empty. Children run a hallway that's deserted when you look.
The Full Story
The strangest thing about Congress Hall, the grand yellow hotel on Beach Avenue in Cape May, New Jersey, happens on the third floor. A housekeeper walks past a guest room and hears a radio or a television playing inside, and people talking. She knocks. No one answers. She opens the door, and the room is empty.
It keeps happening, and the staff have stopped explaining it. Guests get woken at night by children running and laughing in the corridor, and find the hallway deserted. Cleaning crews say they've been chased off the floor by TVs and radios that switch themselves on. One ghost-tour account puts it plainly: the cleaning staff get scared off by sets that turn on by themselves, and guests hear a knock at the door in the middle of the night, or children playing, but find nobody there.
There is one figure people describe the same way. A man in a Victorian suit walks the third-floor hall, then steps through a wall or a closed door and is gone. Other guests on that floor report footsteps echoing late at night, lights that flicker, whispered voices, and faint music carrying up from the ballroom.
Local lore ties the children's voices to a boy, about 10 years old, who drowned in the surf directly in front of the hotel in 1876, one of many who went into that water and didn't come back. The ocean is right there, a block off the porch. The same staff who shrug at the radios will tell you that one without much prompting.
The building is older than almost any of its ghosts. Thomas Hughes put it up in 1816, so large that locals were sure it would fail and nicknamed it "Tommy's Folly." When Hughes was elected to Congress in 1828, the place took the name it still carries. It burned to the ground in Cape May's Great Fire of 1878 and was rebuilt in brick within a year, which the owners advertised as fireproof to coax nervous vacationers back. Four presidents stayed here. Benjamin Harrison ran the country from a ground-floor suite in the summer of 1891, while the real White House was being wired for electricity. A 27-year-old John Philip Sousa brought the Marine Band to the lawn in 1882 and wrote a "Congress Hall March" for the place.
The Stockton, the Columbia, the Windsor, the Mount Vernon — every grand Cape May hotel of that era is gone, their names surviving only as streets. Congress Hall is still here. It outlasted four presidents and a fire that took 38 acres of seafront. The one thing it can't seem to clear out is whoever keeps answering on the third floor when no one has knocked.
