In Brief
For three decades the kitchen at the Inn of the Hawke in Lambertville, New Jersey had a ghost the staff named Cinnamon. She pulled pots off their hooks above the stove and threw pictures off the walls while the line was cooking.
The Full Story
The kitchen ghost at the old Inn of the Hawke in Lambertville, New Jersey had a routine. Pots and pans would lift off their hooks above the stove and crash to the floor while the line was working dinner, and pictures came down off the walls. The staff named her Cinnamon, and guests were told her name after their stay.
The building goes back to the early 1860s. It was the home of a man named William McCreedy before it became an inn and tavern in the early 1900s, and for 29 years it ran as the Inn of the Hawke, a restaurant and bar with guest rooms upstairs. Cinnamon was never the only one. Down in the basement there was Jake, said to be a former handyman who died and stayed on to guard the place, and a story among the staff that he kept watch over the beer.
In March 2011, the City Lights Paranormal Society brought cameras, EMF meters, and recorders through the building. The founder, Joe Iannetta, led the team, and the owner, Doreen, walked them through the hot spots room by room. What they came back with is on the record. The female investigators were on the second floor when they caught a male voice, while every man on the team was down in the basement. A door opened on its own beside them. Up on the third floor, Joe and another investigator heard a man speak. And during the group session on the first floor, they asked yes-or-no questions of a flashlight sitting on the table, and the flashlight turned itself on, on camera, in answer.
The third floor had its own reputation before the investigators ever got there. Guests had reported a woman who kept to the upper rooms, though no source ties her to any name or any death the building can account for. None of the ghosts can be. There is no record explaining who Cinnamon was, or Jake, or the woman on the stairs. The names came from the staff, not from any grave.
City Lights logged 68 hours of evidence and brought it back to Doreen two weeks later, on March 29. Their conclusion was that something was there, both the kind that replays on a loop and the kind that answers back, and that it meant no harm.
The Inn of the Hawke closed on March 16, 2022, after 29 years. New owners reopened the restaurant next door as a steakhouse, The Hawke, and the lodging as The Hawke Inn. Same building. Same kitchen. The same hooks above the same stove.
