Angel of the Sea B&B

This stunning Victorian B&B features gingerbread trim, towering turrets, and a wraparound porch that gives it a storybook appearance. The beautifully restored building is one of Cape May's most photographed properties.

The Angel of the Sea stands as one of Cape May's most storied haunted landmarks, a magnificent Victorian structure built circa 1850 for William Weightman Sr., the Philadelphia chemist known as the "Quinine King" who made his fortune supplying the anti-malarial drug during the Civil War. The house has survived two dramatic relocations - first in 1881 when farmers literally cut it in half to move it across town by horse and log, and again in 1962 when Reverend Carl McIntire saved it from demolition after the devastating Ash Wednesday Storm by moving it on flatbed trucks to its current Trenton Avenue location.

Staff report at least four distinct spirits haunt these halls. The most tragic is Sarah Brown, an Irish exchange student who worked at the nearby Christian Admiral Hotel in the late 1960s. One fateful day, Sarah returned to her room in the second building to change for mandatory church services but discovered she had left her keys at work. Rather than risk being late and violating Reverend McIntire's strict Bible conference rules, she crawled out a hallway window and attempted to shimmy along a narrow ledge to reach her own room. When she tried to pry off the window screen, it suddenly broke free, striking her in the forehead and sending her plummeting to the ground below. According to accounts, she may have lain in agony for hours before a gardener discovered her lifeless body.

Sarah's playful spirit now manifests through an affinity for electronics - lamps, radios, and televisions turn on and off spontaneously throughout the inn. Guests frequently return to their rooms to find items mysteriously moved from tables to floors or from one spot to another. Objects slide across nightstands and fall from dressers as if knocked by unseen hands. In the second building where she died, footsteps echo through empty hallways and lights flicker without explanation.

A second spirit is believed to be a woman whose mother served as caretaker and whose father was a sea captain. She can still be seen gazing out windows toward the ocean, eternally waiting for her father's ship to return. A third entity - a transient who succumbed to tuberculosis within these walls - is blamed for the beds that vibrate and shake on their own, accompanied by the sound of phantom coughing echoing through the rooms.

Former manager Chet Sherel experienced the haunting firsthand. While working the night shift, he entered a room to turn off a light and was shocked to discover a ghostly figure sitting silently in a chair before his eyes. Multiple guests have reported sensing a presence less than five feet tall in their rooms at night. One couple distinctly heard something slide across their nightstand and the bathroom lock jingle repeatedly during the night. Another pair woke to find their laptop had somehow moved from a table to the floor while they slept.

Today, the Angel of the Sea operates as a celebrated bed and breakfast, having undergone a .5 million restoration in 1989-1991 that earned it the Historic Preservation Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The inn offers complimentary self-guided tours of its public areas, while the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts conducts ghost trolley tours through Cape May's haunted district. Guests who stay in the second building, particularly on the upper floors, report the highest concentration of paranormal activity - though the staff tactfully declines to identify exactly which room was Sarah Brown's.