In Brief
Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City was the world's first legal casino outside Nevada. Before that it was a WWII amputee hospital — and valets and tour guides say a 1940s nurse still crosses the parking lot pushing a wheelchair, visible only from the waist up.
The Full Story
At Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, the figure people keep describing isn't a gangster. It's a nurse in a white 1940s uniform, crossing the valet lot with a wheelchair, visible only from the waist up. Valets and ghost-tour guides tell it the same way: she's there until a car passes, and then she's gone. Others describe nurses pushing children in wheelchairs near the front entrance, the children looking dazed before they fade out in pale light.
The hotel knows why she'd be wearing that uniform. The Boardwalk wing that's now the Ocean Tower opened in 1927 as Haddon Hall, 11 stories of guest rooms above the sand. During World War II the U.S. Army took the hotel over and ran it from 1943 to 1946 as the Thomas M. England General Hospital, named for an Army doctor who'd researched yellow fever alongside Walter Reed in Cuba in 1900.
It became the largest amputee hospital in the world. Roughly 61,000 wounded servicemen passed through its wards, and in a single month of 1945 the place held 1,626 amputee patients learning to walk again — on the same terrazzo floors where, a few years earlier, hotel guests had played deck tennis. The hospital ran on a bed capacity of 3,650, and when a hurricane bore down in September 1944, the Army moved roughly 1,000 patients out to New York in nine hours.
Resorts opened its casino on May 26, 1978, the first legal one in America outside Nevada, with the governor cutting the ribbon. But the guests upstairs in the Ocean Tower report the hospital, not the ribbon. Footsteps that follow down the corridor and stop the moment you turn. Doors shaking, doorknobs turning on their own, knocks and bumps against a guest-room door with an empty hallway behind it. Housekeepers have refused to work certain floors alone, staff say, put off by a presence they read as hostile. Guides and guests single out Room 646 on the sixth floor, where one couple felt the door shake and heard a crowd in the hall, then opened it to nothing. Ghosts of hospitalized airmen turn up in the hallways and around the registration desk, the way people tell it.
In October 2025, a study that counted spooky keywords across thousands of traveler reviews ranked Resorts the fifth most haunted casino in the world. The other four are Las Vegas gaming halls that were always casinos. This one spent three years as the place men came to learn how to live without the legs they'd lost, and that is the chapter the building keeps replaying.
