Haunted Congress Hall, Cape May: The Third Floor, the Lady in the Hallway and 200 Years of History

Congress Hall fills a whole block of Beach Avenue in Cape May, a long yellow brick building with a white colonnade and a lawn that faces the Atlantic. It first opened in 1816 as a wooden boarding house, burned in the Great Fire of 1878, came back in brick a year later and has hosted four sitting presidents. Today it is the flagship of Cape Resorts, with guest rooms, suites, the Blue Pig Tavern, the Brown Room bar, the Boiler Room downstairs and a spa.

It is also one of the stops on almost every Cape May ghost walk. The stories here are quieter than at some of its neighbors: voices and televisions behind doors where nobody is staying, footsteps on empty upper floors, a woman in old-fashioned dress who turns a corner and is gone. The hotel itself does not market a ghost, so treat what follows as what guests, staff and local tour guides have reported. For the other haunted stays in town, see our guide to the haunted hotels in New Jersey.

The ghosts of Congress Hall

The third-floor hallway

The story told most often is about the third floor. The Southern Mansion, a Cape May inn that has written up the town’s ghost stories, says cleaning staff have heard a radio or television playing and people talking inside a room, knocked, and had no answer. The room, the story goes, was empty.

Ghost City Tours, which runs walks past the hotel, describes the same pattern more widely: footsteps, furniture scraping and voices from behind closed doors of unoccupied rooms, doors found open after being shut and a cleaned room found changed. Guests have phoned the front desk to complain about people moving around upstairs when the floor above was empty.

The woman in old-fashioned dress

Guests describe a woman in old-fashioned clothing walking away from them down an upstairs corridor. She turns a corner and, when they follow, the hallway is empty. Nobody has put a name to her.

Some people like to connect her to Annie Knight, who owned and ran the hotel from 1904 until 1931 and is still played by a costumed historian on the hotel’s history tours. That link is a modern guess, not part of any recorded sighting, so we mention it only because you will hear it in town.

Children playing, and the boy from 1876

Staff and guests also report the sound of children playing in the hallways when no children are staying. Local tellings connect this to a ten-year-old boy who drowned in the ocean in front of the hotel in 1876.

Treat that connection as legend. The Southern Mansion’s write-up says the children’s voices are ‘backed by’ the drowning, but it gives no source, and no record we found ties the boy to the building or to any sighting inside it.

Guests who were never registered

Tour guides collect smaller stories too: a figure in clothes a little wrong for the year seen at the end of a corridor, a friendly older man on the porch whom staff could not identify, lights and an elevator acting on their own late at night. These are the kind of accounts that build up around any 200-year-old hotel, and they are best enjoyed in that spirit.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Third-floor rooms: The floor named in almost every story. You cannot book a specific haunted room, but you can ask for the third floor when you reserve.
• Ocean-view rooms and suites: Presidents Pierce, Buchanan, Grant and Harrison stayed in the hotel’s ocean-view suites. Rooms facing the beach give you the colonnade and the lawn below.
• The Brown Room: The hotel’s dark, wood-paneled bar, a good place for a late drink before walking the upstairs hallways.
• The Boiler Room: The basement bar and pizza spot. Not part of the ghost lore, but it is the oldest-feeling space in the building.

History of Congress Hall

Thomas H. Hughes opened the first building in 1816, a wooden boarding house for the new seaside resort. He called it The Big House; locals, thinking it far too large for Cape May, called it Tommy’s Folly. When Hughes was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the late 1820s he renamed it Congress Hall. Cape May Magazine’s history notes that the first building burned within two years, and the larger hotel that replaced it stood for about 60 years.

The Great Fire of 1878 destroyed much of central Cape May, Congress Hall included. The owners rebuilt within a year, this time in brick, and left the brick unpainted at first to show guests it was fireproof. In 1882 John Philip Sousa brought the U.S. Marine Band for a week of concerts and wrote the Congress Hall March, which he conducted on the lawn.

Presidents Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Harrison all stayed here. Harrison made it his Summer White House, running the government from the hotel for weeks at a time in the early 1890s.

The 20th century was harder. Cape May’s beachfront fell out of fashion, and in the late 1960s (Wikipedia gives 1968; Cape May Magazine says 1967) the radio preacher Rev. Carl McIntire bought the hotel for his Cape May Bible Conference. His ownership kept it standing while other Victorian beach hotels were demolished, but it closed as a hotel in 1992. His grandson Curtis Bashaw led a restoration, begun in 1995 and costing more than $20 million, that reopened Congress Hall in 2002, and a further renovation marked the bicentennial in 2016.

Congress Hall is a contributing building in the Cape May Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Bashaw has told Cape May Magazine he believes it may be the oldest working hotel in the country, while admitting that is hard to prove. In 2026 the hotel marked 210 years with a summer concert on the lawn, and Annie Knight’s tours still bring its owners’ history to life.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for a third-floor room when you book, and say why; staff have heard the stories too.
• Take the hotel’s history tour with Annie Knight if it is running during your stay. It is the best way to learn who owned the building and when.
• Join one of the evening ghost walks that start in Cape May’s center. Most pass Congress Hall, and you can walk back to your room afterward.
• Book a weeknight in spring or fall. The hotel is busiest in July and August and quietest in the shoulder seasons.
• Pair your stay with dinner or a drink at the Hotel Macomber or Southern Mansion, both a short walk away and both with famous ghosts of their own.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Hotel Macomber, Cape May: Room 10 and the Trunk Lady, a few blocks along Beach Avenue
• The Southern Mansion, Cape May: an 1863 mansion where staff talk openly about Ester Mercur
• Angel of the Sea, Cape May: a Victorian bed and breakfast with a young woman who fell from a window
• Haunted hotels in New Jersey

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.

• Wikipedia: Congress Hall (Cape May hotel)
• Cape May Magazine: The Ghosts of Congress Hall
• Ghost City Tours: The Ghosts of Congress Hall Hotel
• The Southern Mansion: 5 most haunted places in Cape May
• Cape Resorts: Congress Hall
• CBS Philadelphia: Congress Hall marks 210 years

Booking links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.