HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
Built as a pharmacy in 1876, the upper floors later housed a gambling den and brothel — guests in the 'Plum Room' still report furniture moving on its own and the smell of perfume from an unseen presence.
601 Columbia Ave, Cape May, NJ 08204
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Boutique bed and breakfast; room rates vary seasonally. See queenshotel.com for current pricing.
Access
Limited Access
Victorian building with multiple floors; historic structure with stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
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 pharmacy serving the resort community. The upper floors, however, were organized differently.
Historical accounts recorded by local researchers and paranormal investigators indicate that the building's upper floors housed a gambling den on the second floor and a brothel on the third. The women who worked on the third floor lived in the building, and it is their presence that local lore associates with the Queen's Hotel's reported haunting.
Cape May's Victorian resort economy was complicated — the town attracted wealthy families from Philadelphia and Baltimore seeking respectable summer retreats, but also sustained the underground economy that resort towns have historically required. The pharmacy-and-brothel combination under one roof was not unusual for late Victorian commercial buildings in resort communities.
The building is now a boutique bed and breakfast operating within Cape May's National Historic Landmark district. Grunge's independent reporting on Cape May's paranormal history documents the gambling den and brothel history alongside the current haunting accounts.
Sources
The paranormal activity at the Queen's Hotel is concentrated on the third floor — specifically in the room called the Plum Room, which local tradition identifies as a former sex worker's space during the brothel era of the late nineteenth century.
Guests in the Plum Room 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 Queen's Hotel attributes the haunting to the women who lived on the third floor during the brothel 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 Queen's Hotel gambling den and brothel history independently, placing the paranormal accounts in the context of the building's layered social history rather than treating them as isolated ghost stories.
Stay in a Victorian-era bed and breakfast with a documented history as a pharmacy, gambling den, and brothel on Columbia Avenue in Cape May's historic district. The Plum Room — believed to be a former sex worker's space on the third floor — is where paranormal activity is most reported: furniture moving, impression of an unseen presence on beds, and the smell of perfume.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Cape May, NJ
William Weightman Sr., managing partner of Powers & Weightman and the man who introduced quinine to the American market as an anti-malarial, built a summer cottage at the corner of Franklin and Washington Streets in Cape May around 1850. In 1881 he had it moved to an ocean-view lot, but the farmers he hired discovered the structure was too large to move intact. They cut it in half, moved the sections separately, and found they could not reconnect them. The two buildings were enclosed separately, creating the two adjoining structures that now house the B&B.
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Charles Page built the home at 308 Stockton Avenue in 1883 as a family vacation property while also maintaining a Philadelphia business. He was shot and killed in Philadelphia that same summer while his family vacationed in Cape May without him. The house was eventually converted to the B&B now operating as the Bedford Inn.
Cape May, NJ
Congress Hall opened in 1816 as a boarding house on the Cape May beachfront, becoming one of the earliest seaside resorts in the United States. The original wooden structure burned in the Great Fire of 1878 and was rebuilt in brick the following year. Four sitting presidents — Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Benjamin Harrison — vacationed here, with Harrison using it as an informal summer White House in 1890 and 1891.