In Brief
The Jekyll Island Club Resort in Jekyll Island, Georgia was the Gilded Age's most exclusive winter retreat. Guests in Samuel Spencer's old suite report his coffee sipped and his paper folded while they're out — the railroad king's morning routine, still running.
The Full Story
At the Jekyll Island Club Resort in Jekyll Island, Georgia, guests who book Samuel Spencer's old suite in the Annex come back to find their coffee disturbed and their newspaper moved. Spencer was the first president of the Southern Railway, and he kept that apartment as a winter regular. Staff say the cup gets sipped and the paper gets folded or shifted while the room sits empty — a guest steps out for a shower, comes back, and finds someone has been at the breakfast.
It matches the man's own habit. In life, Spencer had the paper brought to his room with his morning coffee and read it the same way every day.
He died in 1906, on Thanksgiving morning, when his private rail car was stranded on the track and a following train crushed it in the pre-dawn dark, in Virginia near Lynchburg. He was 59.
The building Spencer wintered in opened in 1888 as the Jekyll Island Club — a retreat so exclusive that its members were Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Pulitzers. In November 1910, a few of the richest men in America boarded a private rail car under a duck-hunting cover story, used first names only so the porters wouldn't recognize them, and came here to draft what became the Federal Reserve. The four names every account agrees on are Nelson Aldrich, Paul Warburg, Frank Vanderlip, and Henry Davison, with other top financiers along. They didn't admit the meeting had happened until the 1930s.
The club closed in 1942. It reopened as a hotel decades later, open now to anyone.
On the second floor, a soft knock at the door announces a delivery that never arrives — a bellman in a 1920s cap and suit, by the telling, still working his shift. And in Room 3101 of the Annex, the resident spirit has a name — Charlotte Maurice — and a strange job. She's said to be benevolent, encouraging guests to enjoy their lives.
None of it has been investigated. It's lore, passed along by staff and the after-dark tour. But the people who book Spencer's old room keep finding the coffee touched.
