The Hawke Inn

Staff named the kitchen ghost Cinnamon. Jake works the basement, a Victorian woman haunts rooms 6 and 7 at this Lambertville inn.

The kitchen ghost at the old Inn of the Hawke had a party trick. Pots and pans would lift off their hooks and crash to the floor while the line was working. Staff named her Cinnamon. For almost three decades, she was the steadiest thing about the place, more reliable than the dinner rush.

The building went up in the 1800s at 74 South Union Street in Lambertville and has been an inn under different names for generations. It closed as the Inn of the Hawke in March 2022 after a 29-year run, then reopened as The Hawke Inn with the rooms and kitchen mostly unchanged.

The ghost roster goes beyond Cinnamon. Jake is the basement handyman, described by a former manager as friendly unless he thinks a visitor means harm. A woman in a dark high-necked dress with a lace collar and a brooch keeps to the third floor, drifting between rooms 6 and 7. Guests and investigators have also described a small boy in the basement, cheeky smile, missing teeth, who giggles and disappears. A border collie has been seen standing in a doorway long enough for a witness to notice it before it's gone.

On March 13, 2011, City Lights Paranormal Society ran a full investigation of the building, stationing teams across all three floors with digital cameras, EMF detectors, EVP recorders, infrared cameras, and thermo guns. Over six hours they logged 68 hours of cumulative evidence. The basement team heard a male voice on the third floor while they were asking for a sign. A second-floor team caught another male voice and had a door open on them. In the first-floor group session, everyone in the circle watched a flashlight turn on in response to their yes-or-no questions, caught on camera.

That flashlight is still the piece people remember. It turns on, it turns off, it answers twice when nobody is touching it. Taken by itself, a flashlight doesn't prove anything. Taken together with a century and a half of guests reporting footsteps on an empty upper floor and pans hitting the kitchen tile, it's harder to shrug off.

Under the new name, the kitchen is the same kitchen. Cinnamon was a word specific to the old staff, and the new staff may never inherit it, but the hooks are still above the stove and the pans are still hanging on them.