In Brief
The most famous ghost at the Hotel Macomber in Cape May, New Jersey is a paying guest who never stopped checking in. Irene Wright stayed in Room 10 with an enormous steamer trunk, and a medium who sleeps there now caught her voice on tape.
The Full Story
The most famous ghost at the Hotel Macomber in Cape May, New Jersey is a guest who paid for her room. Her name was Irene Wright, and people who stay in Room 10 call her the Trunk Lady. She came back every summer when she was alive, a woman who arrived dragging an enormous steamer trunk, wore too much perfume, and talked to anyone who would listen.
She died sometime in the middle of the last century. After that, guests in Room 10 started hearing the trunk again, scraping across the floor at night, a knock at a door with an empty hallway behind it, furniture moved while they were out to dinner.
A Cape May psychic medium named Craig McManus stays in that same room when he visits, and he's written for years about the ghosts of this hotel. One night he left a recorder running. When he played it back, he says, there was a woman's voice on the tape. "I'm still here," it said.
She isn't the only one. The Macomber opened in 1916 as the New Stockton Villa, a five-story shingle hotel facing the ocean at 727 Beach Avenue. Its first owner was Sarah Davis. The hotel's ghost story holds that she lost a young daughter, Cannel, to encephalitis in the 1920s and never recovered, and that she took her own life in the building in 1934. Guests report children talking and laughing in the warm months, when the lore says the girl comes back to play.
Down in the basement is a spirit the staff call the Growler, a grumpy man who groans, knocks things around, and sounds like he's mid-project, resentful of the living in his space. In the Union Park dining room there's said to be a waitress who choked to death on a chicken bone during the Depression and never clocked out; the tour lore has her flickering the chandelier and shifting the glassware. During World War II the Army and Navy leased the hotel for soldiers, and the room under the front steps served as a drunk tank for servicemen too rowdy after leave.
Al Rauber, who founded the Haunted Cape May tour, recorded his own tape inside the hotel once. On it: marbles dropping onto a hardwood floor, and then a child's voice.
"These are mine!" it said.
The Macomber is family-run now, freshly renovated, with the restaurant and shops still open on the main floor. Of all the spirits people count here, the one they keep meeting is the one who paid her bill, kept her trunk by the bed, and came back every summer the way she always had.
