Jonathan Pitney House

A guest in Caroline's Room woke pinned to the bed, threw three punches backward, and looked up at a white cat-like face with cat eyes.

A guest named David Perez was asleep in Caroline's Room at the Jonathan Pitney House when he felt something pressing hard against his back. He couldn't move. He threw three punches backward and grabbed at what he said felt like hair. When he finally turned around, he saw a white cat-looking face with cat-like eyes watching him, and the room went cold. The owner later confirmed the presence in Caroline's Room was the ghost of Caroline Pitney, Dr. Pitney's wife.

That's one of three categories of account the Pitney House collects. A woman named Lorraine described watching a child glide between rooms in the house when she was fourteen, and then again when she was twenty-two. Her cousin, independently, described seeing the same child at around age thirteen. Different years, different ages, same glide, same rooms. None of them connected the stories until decades later.

The poltergeist category has its own roster. A guest named Chez reported an air freshener that flew across a first-floor room and shattered against the wall, a toothbrush that jumped out of its holder and clattered into the sink, and window shades that shot up on their own in the middle of the night, loudly enough to wake her. The activity stopped after she lit a candle and said out loud that if anyone was there she meant them no harm. The room went quiet.

Pitney is the reason Atlantic City exists. Born in 1797, he settled in Absecon in 1820 and spent most of the next three decades lobbying the state and the railroads to build a line out to the empty barrier island across the marsh. He got his contract in September 1852. The first train arrived on July 4, 1854, and Atlantic City went from salt marsh to resort town within a decade. When a packet ship called the Powhatan sank that same year and killed around 311 people, Pitney pivoted to lobbying Congress for a lighthouse. He got the $35,000 appropriation in 1857, and the Absecon Lighthouse is still operational. Historians call him the father of Atlantic City.

His house operates now as a bed and breakfast. Room 2 is named for Caroline. The rooms of the private cottage at the rear of the property are where guests report hearing soft flute music at night, slow and low, somewhere in the walls with no source the owners can trace. Others describe blurry male voices coming through the house's interior speaker system in rooms where the microphones are confirmed off. Guests who hear it usually think at first that someone left a television on.

Taken together, the activity has a kind of domestic quality. Nothing chases anyone out. Nothing tries to hurt anyone beyond the one pinning incident in Caroline's Room, and even that stopped when Perez pushed back. When Chez lit the candle and spoke, the room quieted. When guests ask the owners directly, they answer directly.

A wife waits. A child keeps walking between the rooms. Someone talks through the speakers. The candle is still the thing that worked.