In Brief
Guests at the Surf City Hotel on Long Beach Island, New Jersey keep seeing a woman holding a small child at an upper window, gazing out to sea. The beach below is where hundreds of German emigrants washed ashore from a shipwreck in 1854 — and the man in charge of the dead robbed them.
The Full Story
At the Surf City Hotel on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, guests keep seeing a woman at an upper window. She holds a small child, and she stares out to sea. People have reported her in that same posture for over a century, and the story of why she's watching the water begins with a shipwreck.
On April 15, 1854, the packet ship *Powhattan*, carrying German emigrants from Le Havre toward New York, grounded on the shoals off the island. It broke apart the next day. Everyone aboard died — somewhere between roughly 250 and 350 people. Their bodies washed up on the sand in front of a hotel called the Mansion of Health, a three-story building put up in 1822, with a balcony running the full length of its top floor.
The man who managed that hotel was Edward Jennings. He was also the state-appointed wreckmaster, legally responsible for the bodies and the salvage. When the coroner examined the dead, something was wrong. Emigrants traveled with money-belts holding their life savings, and not one body had any money on it.
Months later, another storm eroded the soil near a cedar tree on the property. Buried under the stump were dozens of leather money-belts. Every one of them had been cut open and emptied.
Jennings fled in disgrace and, the story goes, died in a barroom brawl in San Francisco. The dead, meanwhile, were scattered across the mainland in mass graves — about 140 in the Baptist cemetery at Manahawkin, 54 at Smithville, 45 at Absecon. The wreck was so bad that it became the reason the Absecon Lighthouse was built; in the decade before, that stretch of water had swallowed 64 ships and earned the name Graveyard Inlet.
Back at the hotel, guests started reporting sobs in the night and figures walking the balcony. The Mansion of Health never reopened. It burned in 1874, and the Surf City Hotel was later built on the same ground.
In 1861, before the fire, five young men dared each other to sleep on the third floor. One of them watched a woman holding a small child appear on the balcony, gazing seaward, the moonlight passing through her before both figures vanished. Guests describe the same woman today, holding the same child at the upper windows over the water. One man said he heard a woman speaking German, close enough that she sounded like she was right there in the room with him. A hotel employee of fifteen years put it plainly: "was a skeptic until I started working here."
The hotel's current owners have gone looking for her, and say they've found nothing.
