In Brief
The Shoreham Hotel has stood on the Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk since 1923, and its basement holds the meanest spirit in town. A visiting ghost hunter shut himself in alone to test it, then begged to be let back out.
The Full Story
The Shoreham Hotel sits on the Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk at 4th Street, where it's gone up every summer since 1923. Down in its basement, the staff say, is something they won't go near. Boxes come off the shelves. Lights switch on and off with no fault in the wiring. Cold air moves through the room with the doors shut.
A paranormal team from Pittsburgh came to test it. The team leader had himself locked in the basement alone, the way you'd go about proving there was nothing to be afraid of. It didn't go the way he planned. "He ended up panicking, screaming and begging to be let out," ghost-tour founder Mindie Burgoyne told the Baltimore Sun. "Doors slam and stuff flies off the shelves," she said of the room. "Employees are terrified to go down there."
The basement wasn't always storage. From 1969 it ran as a bar — the Sazarac Pub, nicknamed the Dungeon, then Surf & Suds, then Mugsy's Speakeasy, then McGee's, and finally Shenanigan's Irish Pub, which is still on the premises today. Somewhere in the late 1970s, the way the tour tells it, a man was killed down there during a fight. No newspaper or court record was ever found to pin the story down, and the SEAL the lore names as his killer is just that, lore. But the death is what the basement is said to keep.
It isn't the only one. Burgoyne's tours call the Shoreham the haunted trifecta — "a murder, a suicide and an accidental death." The clearest of the three is Betsey, who jumped from a third-floor window in the summer of 1983. She's tied to Seasonal Room 6, and the room behaves strangely once she's named. Guests there say the air conditioner, the lights, and the television all cycle on and off on their own, though management checks the wiring after them and finds nothing wrong with it. Stranger still, housekeeping reports the room barely needs cleaning. Guests check out and leave it almost untouched, as though no one stayed in it at all.
The third death the tour counts has no name and no date. The story says he was a writer who took his own life somewhere in the 1930s, and that is all anyone can tell you about him. The man left no record. The records that might have explained him, the tour says, are gone.
