In Brief
The Southern Mansion in Cape May, New Jersey is a luxury inn now, but the staff say its old hostess never left. Wine glasses turn up with red lipstick on the rims, in a shade nobody working there wears. Esther Mercur died in 1946. The parties, the story goes, did not.
The Full Story
At the Southern Mansion in Cape May, New Jersey, glasses keep showing up where no one set them. Wine and champagne glasses, scattered around the house, some with red lipstick pressed onto the rims in a shade nobody on staff wears. A few of them shatter for no reason anyone can find.
The staff blame Esther.
Esther Mercur inherited this Italianate villa from her great-uncle, the Philadelphia industrialist George Allen, who built it in 1863 as a summer seaside house. The architect was Samuel Sloan, and the place still wears his work: a cupola, wraparound verandas, big rooms built for company. By every account, that is exactly what Esther filled them with. She loved a party, and she threw them here until she died in 1946. Her husband Ulysses then sold the house furnished, down to the last chair, for 8,000 dollars.
After that it came down in the world. The mansion became a boarding house, the earth-tone exterior was painted over white, and the grand rooms were partitioned into cramped ones until the license was pulled in the 1980s. A Philadelphia family bought the wreck in 1994 and spent eighteen months hauling out 25 dumpster loads of garbage and sliding new I-beams under the rotting frame. It reopened as a luxury inn in 1996, taking its name from an old Sloan lithograph of the house that hangs in the entrance hall.
Esther, the story goes, never accepted that the parties were over.
Guests report a woman dancing through the parlor, and a woman's laughter in rooms where no one is standing. They catch perfume in empty halls, and the swish of a Victorian petticoat going up the stairs. A tour guide describes her as "a joyful spirit who dances around the home." Her specialty, the lore says, is the kitchen, where she's been seen looking over the cooks' shoulders, as if checking the canapes for a dinner that ended decades ago.
In 2010, SyFy's Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here called "Touched by Evil," billing it as an inn "that has a few guests that aren't checking in at the front desk." On the staircase the team heard footsteps, voices, and groaning. Investigator Dave Tango, who brought his own father along after the man's earlier visit to the house, afterward called the Southern Mansion the most active place he ever set foot in.
The house is somebody's pleasant overnight stay now. And somebody keeps setting out the glasses.
