Southern Mansion

Wine glasses keep turning up with red lipstick at the Southern Mansion. Esther Mercur died in 1946 but staff say her parties never ended.

The wine glasses keep turning up with red lipstick on the rims. Nobody at the Southern Mansion is wearing that shade. The staff's best guess is Esther Mercur, who inherited this Cape May villa from her great-uncle George Allen, threw parties in it until her death in 1946, and apparently never accepted that the parties were over.

George Allen built the place in 1863. He'd made his Civil War fortune selling uniforms to both the Union and the Confederacy, and he wanted a seaside house to match. He hired Samuel Sloan, an architect who had just abandoned his unfinished masterpiece Longwood in Mississippi when the war came for it, and got back an Italianate villa built for entertaining. The guest list over the years included the Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the boxer Gene Tunney, and Will Rogers. During Prohibition, liquor came up from Cape May Point beaches in the dark.

When Esther died, her husband Ulysses sold the whole house, furniture included, for $8,000. The new owners cut it into a boarding house. The Italianate villa spent the next fifty years painted white and chopped into cramped apartments. Barbara Bray Wilde bought and restored it between 1994 and 1997, which, in the way these things usually go, is roughly when the hauntings started getting reported in earnest.

Tour guide Terrie Rosania describes Esther as "a joyful spirit who dances around the home," which sounds dismissible until you hear the specifics. Guests see a woman gliding through the parlor. They smell perfume in empty halls. They hear the rustle of Victorian petticoats walking past them on stairs. Staff keep finding Esther in the kitchen, as if she's checking on canapes for a 1920s dinner that technically ended decades ago. The wine glasses, again, do not explain themselves.

Mary Curly, who ran the boarding house during the lean decades, is the other reported regular. Her specialty is small pranks: sheets tugged to one side of the bed, toes tickled under the blanket. She's calmer than Esther and less theatrical about it.

In March 2010, SyFy's Ghost Hunters filmed an episode at the Southern Mansion called "Touched by Evil." Bruce Tango, father of investigator Dave Tango, joined the crew after an earlier solo visit to the house left him wanting backup. The team recorded footsteps walking across empty rooms upstairs. Dave Tango later called the Southern Mansion the most active location he'd ever investigated, and TAPS alumni still host paranormal weekends there.

It's tempting to read all this as a haunted house that got loud because a renovation disturbed it. The more interesting read is that the mansion was specifically built to be a stage. Allen designed it for guests. Esther was the one who kept filling it. When she died and the next owner sold her belongings for the price of a used car, the house spent half a century without a host. Barbara Wilde's restoration didn't summon anyone. It just reopened the room.

The Southern Mansion now runs as a luxury bed and breakfast on Washington Street. The lipstick rims are usually cleared off before the next seating.