The Haunted Peter Shields Inn, Cape May

The Peter Shields Inn stands apart from Cape May’s gingerbread Victorians. It is a big white Georgian Revival house at the east end of Beach Avenue, built in 1907 as the summer home of Peter Shields, the businessman who set out to build a whole new resort on the marshes of East Cape May. Today it is a nine-room inn above one of the town’s best-known oceanfront restaurants.

Its ghost story is a sad one. In the summer the house was finished, the Shields’ fifteen-year-old son Earle died after a hunting accident on the water, and within a few years the family had left Cape May for good. Earlier owners and staff talked about a young man on the grand staircase they called “Ernest”. Cape May medium and ghost writer Craig McManus, who has spent time in the house, believes the name was simply Earle, worn down by years of retelling. The inn itself does not market the story, so treat what follows as local lore from a well-known Cape May source.

The ghost of the Peter Shields Inn

Earle Shields, the boy who went hunting

The story behind the haunting comes from Craig McManus, who wrote about the inn for CapeMay.com in 2011. In 1907, he writes, fifteen-year-old Earle Shields went out hunting marsh hens in the sounds behind Cape May with a friend, Frank Edwards Jr., even though his father had told him not to. The boys hired a yacht and a smaller boat and came back empty-handed.

At about 6:30 in the evening, Earle stepped from one boat to the other using his loaded gun as a crutch. It went off. He was taken to the Cape May Yacht Club, where doctors worked on him for hours, and he died there at about 10:30 that night. His father, who had been away on business, got back in time to be with him. Earle was taken home to the family’s main house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

"Ernest" on the grand staircase

Long before McManus pieced the story together, the inn’s own people had a name for its ghost. A hostess told him that earlier owners and staff spoke of “Ernest”, a young man seen on the stairs, although there had been no recent sightings. McManus had already felt a young man’s presence on the grand staircase years earlier, and at the time a staff member suggested it might be Peter Shields himself.

When he learned about Earle, McManus concluded that Ernest and Earle were the same boy. In his telling, Earle stays out of guilt for disobeying his parents, and because he misses his family and friends. That is a medium’s interpretation, not a historical record, so read it as one.

The third floor and the attic

The third floor is where the activity is said to gather. During a session McManus held in a guest’s third-floor room, he says the closed bedroom door opened slowly three times with no draft to explain it. Up there is a cedar-lined room and a small wooden ladder that leads to a larger attic, the kind of space a teenage boy would have claimed for himself. McManus says Earle told him the attic was “mine”.

On a later visit in 2011, McManus asked Earle for a sign over dinner. Nothing happened in the dining room, but a fire alarm went off outside, and staff said the alarm rarely if ever sounded and the cause was never found. On his way out, he says, he glimpsed a young boy’s face at a third-floor window.

Sadness in the old basement bar

The inn’s restrooms are in the old cellar, which in the 1940s and 1950s was the Tuna and Marlin Club, an after-hours bar. McManus and friends who were with him felt a heavy sadness there, and one of them was sure someone had drowned. Local resident Bob Fite told him that nobody died in the house during the 1944 hurricane floods, but a family story did tell of a son who died in the water in front of the house. If you are at the restaurant, it is the one place in the building every diner visits.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The third floor: Earle’s floor in the stories, where a bedroom door is said to have opened by itself three times. Ask for a third-floor room.
• The cedar room and attic ladder: The cedar-lined room and the small wooden ladder to the attic, which McManus says Earle calls his own.
• The grand staircase: Where earlier owners and staff described a young man they called Ernest.
• The old basement: Once the Tuna and Marlin Club after-hours bar, now the restrooms, where visitors have described a sudden heavy sadness.
• The third-floor windows: Look up from the Beach Avenue side after dark: McManus says he saw a boy’s face at one of them.

History of Peter Shields Inn & Restaurant

In the early 1900s the eastern end of Cape May was mostly marsh. In 1903 Peter Shields, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, and a group of investors formed the Cape May Real Estate Company to dredge the harbor and use the spoil to fill the marshes, creating East Cape May. Their plans were grand: in 1905 the company began building the New Cape May Hotel, a huge resort hotel that opened in 1908.

Shields built his own family’s summer home on newly firm ground at the end of Beach Avenue between 1906 and 1907. Philadelphia architect Lloyd Titus designed it, and Cape May Magazine describes the white house as a mix of Colonial Revival and Beaux Arts ideas, with a look closer to a state capitol than a seaside cottage. The inn itself calls it a Georgian Revival mansion.

The family’s luck did not hold. Earle’s death in 1907 was followed by trouble at the New Cape May Hotel, which closed for repairs months after opening and slid toward bankruptcy. Shields resigned as president of the company and left Cape May in 1912. The hotel, renamed several times over the decades, was demolished in 1996.

The mansion survived. In the 1940s and 1950s its cellar was the Tuna and Marlin Club, an after-hours bar, and in the 1980s the house was converted into a bed and breakfast. It reopened after a major renovation under new owners in 2011, gained a side addition around 2013, and Cape May Magazine notes it otherwise remains largely as Titus designed it.

Today it runs as the Peter Shields Inn, with nine guest rooms upstairs and a restaurant on the ground floor facing the ocean. It is a short walk along the promenade from Cape May’s Victorian historic district, but noticeably quieter than the busy blocks around Congress Hall.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for the third floor. No room number is linked to Earle, but every story places him on the third floor and in the attic above it.
• Book dinner even if you stay elsewhere. The restaurant is open to non-guests, and the old basement bar is part of the visit.
• Look up from the beach side after dark. The third-floor windows face Beach Avenue and the ocean.
• Leave pets at home. The inn does not take them, so check pet policies before you book if you travel with a dog.
• Make a ghost weekend of it. Cape May has walking and trolley ghost tours most of the year, and Hotel Macomber, with its famous Room 10, is a few minutes along Beach Avenue.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Hotel Macomber, Cape May: Room 10 and the Trunk Lady, a short walk along Beach Avenue
• Congress Hall, Cape May: Cape May’s oldest hotel, with voices on the third floor
• The Southern Mansion, Cape May: Ester Mercur and Room 14
• Angel of the Sea, Cape May: the twin-towered Victorian with a ghost from its college days
• Haunted hotels in New Jersey
• Haunted hotels in Cape May

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• CapeMay.com (Craig McManus): The Ghost of the Peter Shields Inn, 2011
• CapeMay.com: Oceanfront and Center, 2013
• Cape May Magazine: The Peter Shields Inn, 1301 Beach Avenue
• Peter Shields Inn (official site)
• Peter Shields Inn & Restaurant (restaurant site)
• Expedia: Peter Shields Inn & Restaurant (rooms and pet policy)

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