Congress Hall

Benjamin Harrison ran the country from Congress Hall in summer 1891 while the White House got its first wiring. He's not the only one who stayed.

In the summer of 1891, while electricians were running the White House's first wiring, President Benjamin Harrison moved the federal government to a ground-floor suite at Congress Hall in Cape May. Staff called the hotel the Summer White House, and that's where the term started. No sitting president has worked out of Congress Hall since.

Some guests smell pipe tobacco in the parlor where nobody has been allowed to smoke for thirty years. A pianist hired to play the lobby in the early 2000s quit after she claimed someone kept sitting down next to her on the bench when she turned to get her sheet music.

Congress Hall opened in 1816 as a wooden boardinghouse for the new seaside resort, burned to the ground in the Great Cape May Fire of 1878, and was rebuilt in brick within a year. The current L-shaped building still sits a block from the beach on Beach Avenue, yellow-painted and wrapped in a long porch lined with white rockers. Four presidents used it as a retreat. Franklin Pierce stayed here. So did James Buchanan and Ulysses Grant. A lot of the Civil War generation wound down on this porch.

The 1878 fire is the unfortunate engine of most of the rest of the haunting. The blaze tore through downtown Cape May and leveled the original Congress Hall in a matter of hours. Staff today describe a watery spirit, which Cape May MAC tour guides tie to the heavy Cape May surf drownings of the 19th century. Housekeeping has reported doors unlocking themselves at the end of the east wing, lamps turning on in empty rooms, and the occasional figure in Victorian dress in the ballroom mirror.

US Ghost Adventures and Cape May MAC both stop here on their tours, which means the stories get repeated and refined every summer. Some of that is tour polish. But the bones, an 1878 fire in the basement of the building's history and a former presidential residence upstairs, are harder to wave away.

A 210-year-old beach hotel has survived a fire, a Civil War, four presidents, and a hurricane with its haunting intact. Most places would have turned into condos by now.

The rocking chairs on the long yellow porch stay in motion when no one is sitting in them.