The Flanders Hotel

Emily, the barefoot Lady in White, haunts the Flanders Hotel's upper floors. Prohibition-era catacombs hold darker company.

Emily is barefoot. That's one of the first things guests mention. She wanders the Flanders Hotel in a long white gown with her brown hair loose, opens doors she has no business opening, unscrews light bulbs, and shows up humming in the hallway. In her mid-twenties, cheerful, mischievous, a little theatrical. There's a painting of her on the second floor by artist Tony Troy, done from descriptions compiled from dozens of guests and staff who've seen her. She's leaning against a piano in the portrait, no shoes.

The Flanders opened July 23, 1923 at a cost of $1.5 million, the largest construction project Ocean City had ever seen. Architect Vivian B. Smith designed the Spanish Mission Revival hotel with steel girders, concrete, and tile roofing and marketed it as fireproof. The name honored the Allied dead at the Battle of Flanders, and the ballroom ceilings were painted with poppies. Four years later, the 1927 boardwalk fire burned through roughly 500 guest rooms in surrounding buildings. The Flanders didn't lose a brick.

Most of Emily's activity clusters on the second and fourth floors. Guests report her singing in empty hallways. Staff see the train of her white dress vanishing around corners. Doors rattle. Lights flicker. She appears in mirrors and is gone before you can turn around. Nobody agrees on who she was. One theory says she was engaged to a soldier killed in the trenches and is still waiting for him at the hotel named after the battle that took him. Another says she was a bride-to-be who lost her wedding ring in the hotel's pools and has been searching ever since. Both stories are probably half-true, which is how ghost stories work.

The catacombs are the other half of the hotel. Seven or eight big underground rooms sit below sea level, connected by tunnels the staff used for pools, laundry, and during Prohibition, for hiding things. Speakeasies, gaming rooms, and mafia meetings ran down there in the twenties and thirties. Staff describe a different kind of presence in the basement from Emily's: heavier, colder, hostile in spots. Psychic Joseph Tittel investigated the hotel and reported sensing the spirits of two men killed during its gangster years, one hanged and one killed by a combination of stabbing and strangulation.

A little girl named Sarah died of hypothermia down in the catacombs after being carried through the tunnels from the beach. A second ghost, a brown-haired woman staff believe is Sarah's mother, has been reported moving through the basement passages searching. Employees avoid certain sections when they can. Emil Landbach, a local who died in a car accident during the 1927 boardwalk fire while rushing home to check on his property, is sometimes mentioned as a third basement spirit.

The Flanders went on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. Today it operates as a combined hotel and condominium, Emily still works the halls upstairs, the mafia victims still brood in the catacombs, and Sarah's mother is still looking.