Est. 1876 · Cape May Historic District · Victorian Commercial Architecture · Resort-Era Social History
The structure at 601 Columbia Avenue was built in 1876, the same period that produced much of Cape May's surviving Victorian building stock in the years after the 1878 fire. Its original ground-floor function was commercial: a general store selling stationery, sundries, and patent medicines, which some have called "Ware's Drug Store." The upper floors, however, were organized differently.
The operator's own history describes the second floor, with its high 11-foot ceilings and 9-foot doors, as a gentlemen's gambling club with a large common room and several smaller private gambling parlors, and the third floor, with 9-foot ceilings, as a series of bedrooms probably for the ladies who entertained the gamblers. Local lore associates the women who may have lived in those third-floor rooms with the building's reported haunting.
The building is now House of Royals, part of The Queen Victoria, operating as a bed and breakfast within Cape May's National Historic Landmark district. Grunge's independent reporting on Cape May's paranormal history documents the gambling-club history and the rooms probably used by the women who entertained the gamblers, alongside the current haunting accounts.
Sources
- https://www.grunge.com/1174338/the-hauntings-of-cape-may-americas-first-seaside-resort/
- https://www.hauntworld.com/haunted-hotel-in-cape-may-new-jersey-queen-s-hotel-in-cape-may-new-jersey
- https://thishauntedplace.com/queens-hotel/
Furniture moving without causeImpression of unseen presence on beds (third-floor rooms)Smell of perfume without sourceThird-floor corridor activity
The paranormal activity at House of Royals is concentrated on the third floor, in rooms that local tradition associates with the women who worked there during the building's gambling-club era in the late nineteenth century.
Guests in those third-floor rooms have reported furniture moving without apparent cause. A more distinctive phenomenon is the sensation of something striking or sitting on the bed — the impression of an unseen presence exerting physical weight or force, which differs from standard auditory or visual reports. The smell of perfume, with no identifiable source, is reported in the same room and in the third-floor corridor.
Hauntworld's documentation of the property attributes the haunting to the women who may have lived on the third floor during the gambling-club period — not to violence or tragedy but to occupancy: women who spent significant portions of their lives in that space leaving something behind. The framing is consistent across multiple sources.
Grunge's 2022 article on Cape May's haunted locations reports the property's gambling-club history independently, placing the paranormal accounts in the context of the building's layered social history rather than treating them as isolated ghost stories.
Where this legend is told
