In Brief
The Emlen Physick Estate in Cape May, New Jersey is called the town's original haunted house. Staff report a pack of ghost dogs running the rooms, and an aunt who fed them in life still watching over a household argument that never ended.
The Full Story
The Emlen Physick Estate in Cape May, New Jersey is an 18-room Victorian mansion that staff call the town's original haunted house. What they report running through it isn't a person. It's dogs.
Dr. Emlen Physick Jr. kept a large pack of them — one account puts it at fourteen — and his widowed mother, Frances Ralston, who ran the household, disliked them. Her sister Emilie cooked the dogs' meals and snuck them inside anyway, until Frances put them out. More than a century later, the people who run the house say the standoff is still going. They report ghost dogs throughout the mansion and its grounds, in rooms the animals were once kept out of.
Physick was a strange figure to leave a haunting behind. He earned a medical degree to satisfy his dying father, then retired on his inheritance and never practiced a day of medicine. He served as president of the Cape May SPCA instead, and filled the house with the dogs.
The mansion went up in 1879, designed by the Philadelphia architect Frank Furness — the only home of his open to the public — and it is one of the country's best surviving examples of Victorian Stick Style, with oversized upside-down chimneys and hooded dormers. Physick lived here with Frances and her two unmarried sisters, Emilie and Isabelle. Isabelle, an invalid, died in the house in 1883, only a few years after the family moved in, and her presence is still said to be felt inside. Physick himself died in 1916. The estate passed through many hands and fell into disrepair, and a center formed in 1970 to stop its demolition. The city of Cape May bought it; it has been a Victorian house museum ever since.
The named ghost the staff describe most is Aunt Emilie, the sister who fed the dogs. Medium Craig McManus calls her a presence with "great energy and a vibrant smile," and "a ghost who knows everything that is going on in her home." She is said to have stayed to watch the house through its decades of neglect.
Frances has a place too. Her former second-floor bedroom is described as "the paranormal hot spot of the home," where her presence is felt most strongly. Staff report phantom footsteps from the upper floors, strange voices, and the touch of something unseen. On one of the estate's tours, the museum plays back EVP audio its own staff have captured inside the house over the past decade.
The house has held the quarrel a long time. The woman who disliked the dogs is upstairs in the room they say is the most active. The sister who let them in is everywhere. And the dogs run where they please.
