In Brief
The complaint that reaches the front desk most often at the Inn of Cape May, New Jersey is about children — laughing in the halls past midnight, bouncing balls, calling each other by name. The register says no children are staying that week.
The Full Story
At the Inn of Cape May in Cape May, New Jersey, the complaint that comes down to the front desk most often is about children. Guests hear them in the hallways after midnight, calling each other by name, bouncing balls, running past closed doors, and they come down to ask the desk to quiet them. The desk pulls up the register and explains that no children are checked in that week. The next guests, the next week, come down with the same complaint.
That recurring report is the spine of the inn's reputation. One local telling adds that the children drowned nearby about a century ago, but no record backs it — in the better-sourced accounts they are only heard, never explained.
The building opened in 1894 as the Colonial Hotel, a Second Empire frame hotel with octagonal towers under tent roofs flanking the entrance. It sits in the Cape May Historic District, which a National Park Service historian once called "a kind of textbook of vernacular American building." It became the Inn of Cape May decades later, and it takes reservations today.
The rest of the accounts gather on the fifth floor, the old servants' level, reached by a single steep staircase at the top of the building. The Cape May medium Craig McManus was up there one night, running his equipment, when he saw a light glowing under a closed door. "I saw a light under one door and thought, 'Oh my god, these people are going to think I'm eavesdropping,'" he said. The front desk told him no one was up there. The room was empty when he reached it. On that same night, his audio caught a recording of several voices talking over each other.
McManus also tells the story of a photographer who stayed overnight. The man turned on his side to sleep and felt an arm reach across him, over the covers, "like it was trying to grab something." He got up, left the room, and spent the rest of the night in the lobby.
Staff and guests report the smaller things too — lights flickering in empty rooms, the sound of running footsteps when the building has gone quiet. Footsteps at a run, in the halls, at night. The same halls where the next week's guests will come down to ask the desk about the children they can hear and the desk will not have any children to explain.
