Emlen Physick Estate

Cape May's original haunted house. Aunt Emilie still feeds ghost dogs in the kitchen her sister Frances banned them from in 1879.

Aunt Emilie cooked dinner for the dogs in the kitchen. Her sister Frances Ralston, who ran the household at 1048 Washington Street, had banned the animals from the house. Emilie did it anyway. She's still doing it, depending on who you ask.

The Emlen Physick Estate is Cape May's original haunted house, and the women of the family are the reason. Dr. Emlen Physick was 21 when architect Frank Furness finished the 18-room Stick Style mansion in 1879. Physick moved in with his mother Frances, her two maiden sisters Emilie and Isabelle, and a pack of dogs. Isabelle, the invalid younger sister, didn't last long. She died in the house in 1883, four years after moving in. Emilie, the cheerful socialite who sneaked food to the dogs, never seems to have left either.

Psychic medium Craig McManus, who's written a book on Cape May's ghosts, describes Emilie as "a ghost who knows everything that's going on in her home." Staff at the estate say they never feel alone in the building. The activity isn't dramatic and it isn't rare. Footsteps in empty rooms. Victorian skirts rounding corners. Temperature dropping in hallways where the radiators are running fine. Visitors on the ghost tour report being touched, mostly on the arm or shoulder, always gently.

The dogs are the weird part. Guests and staff have seen them running through the downstairs rooms, the same rooms Frances banned them from in life. One audio recording made during a ghost tour captured a child's voice, which nobody in the family history accounts for. Whose child it is, nobody knows.

Dr. Physick died in 1916. The house fell apart for half a century afterward. No family stayed long, and locals blamed the ghosts. By 1970 the city was ready to demolish it, which is when a group of Cape May residents formed what's now Cape May MAC, took the building over, and restored it. They run the ghost tours today, and they've catalogued dozens of EVPs and photographs on the property over the decades.

It's a friendly haunting, as hauntings go. Emilie seems glad for the company. The dogs are finally allowed in the house. And Frances, the one who set the rules, is apparently outvoted.