In Brief
The Jonathan Pitney House in Absecon, New Jersey keeps a ghost named Caroline in Room No. 2. Her husband, the doctor who built Atlantic City, told her she'd live there forever — and the story is that she never left, even after she died.
The Full Story
One night in November 2018, a guest named David Perez woke up in Room No. 2 of the Jonathan Pitney House in Absecon, New Jersey, unable to move. Pinned to the bed, he threw three punches backward and grabbed at what felt like a fistful of hair. When he turned, he saw "a white cat looking face with cat like eyes," and then the room went cold. He told the owner he'd had a fight in his room. Tracy Walsh wrote back: "I guess u met caroline."
Room No. 2 is named Caroline's Room. It sits on the second floor, and it is the most active room in the house. It is also the room where Dr. Jonathan Pitney died in 1869.
Caroline was his wife. The story the house tells is that Pitney promised her she would live there forever, and that she is said never to have left, even after she died. No one has reported a woman's apparition. What guests report is everything around her. One stayed in Caroline's Room and watched two ghostly men stroll through and disappear into a wall. Another woke to a man in a long dark coat standing by the fireplace, the same fireplace in the room where Pitney took his last breath, and the figure vanished the moment she focused on it.
Pitney earned that house. He moved to Absecon in 1820 and built a medical practice on the idea that the sea air could heal people. He championed a railroad to the barrier island, won the contract in 1852, and on July 4, 1854, the first train ran to a town that incorporated that same year as Atlantic City. They call him its father. After a packet ship wrecked off Long Beach Island in 1854, he lobbied Congress for a lighthouse; the $35,000 came that year, and the Absecon Lighthouse was first lit in January 1857. It still shines every night.
The activity isn't confined to Caroline. At a pre-Halloween gathering, more than 50 guests heard bells ringing through the house, though there are no bells in it. Guests in the cottage out back hear soft flute music at night with no source. Voices come through the interior speakers, blamed on Pitney himself. A staffer cleaning to the radio heard one tell her to stop singing.
The man who built Atlantic City made his wife a promise about one room. The house keeps insisting he kept it.
