HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
An 1879 Jackson Street hotel that opened as the Ebbitt House the year after Cape May's great fire, on a block ghost-tour operators call the town's most haunted.
25 Jackson St, Cape May, NJ 08204
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Boutique hotel; room rates vary seasonally. The Ebbitt Room restaurant is open to the public for dinner. See caperesorts.com for rates and reservations.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Restored Victorian hotel with adjacent cottages; some stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1879 · Opened 1879 as the Ebbitt House, a year after the 1878 Cape May fire · Part of the Cape May Historic District (National Historic Landmark) · Restored as a boutique hotel; the Ebbitt Room keeps the building's original name
The Virginia Hotel stands at 25 Jackson Street in Cape May, on a short block running toward the beach that is among the oldest in the resort town. The building opened in 1879 as the Ebbitt House, constructed the year after the fire of November 1878 that burned through a large section of Cape May and reshaped the streetscape that survives today.
Local histories record Alexander McConnell as the early owner associated with the Ebbitt House and the McConnell name on Jackson Street. Over the following century the hotel passed through changes of use common to Cape May's Victorian lodging stock, which swung between fashionable resort hotels and decline before the town's late-20th-century preservation revival.
The property was restored and reopened as the Virginia Hotel, a boutique hotel operated today by Cape Resorts. Its restaurant carries the building's original name, the Ebbitt Room, and is open to the public as well as to hotel guests. Jackson Street, where the Virginia sits among a dense row of Victorian houses and inns, is a fixture of Cape May's heritage district and its ghost-tour circuit. The hotel is a contributing part of the Cape May Historic District, the National Historic Landmark district that covers the town's concentration of preserved Victorian architecture.
Sources
Cape May markets itself as one of the most haunted small towns in the country, and Jackson Street is at the center of that reputation. Local features and ghost-tour operators consistently list the Virginia Hotel among the town's haunted hotels, alongside neighbors on the same block such as the Windward House, Saltwood House, the Merry Widow and the Inn at 22 Jackson.
The accounts attached to Jackson Street as a whole describe apparitions of former owners and residents and the general sense, repeated in tour narration, that 'nearly every home on Jackson Street comes with its own story.' For the Virginia specifically, the published record is thinner than for some of its neighbors: it is named as reputedly haunted rather than tied to a single well-documented figure or event.
HauntBound presents the Virginia's reputation as established local lore rather than verified phenomena. What is solid is the building's age and setting — an 1879 hotel rebuilt after a town-leveling fire, on a Victorian block that anchors Cape May's ghost-tour trade. Guests drawn by the reputation should know the activity here is ambient, not programmed; the hotel runs as a working boutique property and does not advertise paranormal events.
Stay in the restored 1879 Jackson Street hotel that began life as the Ebbitt House. The block is the centerpiece of Cape May ghost-tour routes, with the Virginia named repeatedly among the town's haunted hotels. Dinner at the on-site Ebbitt Room is open to non-guests.
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.
Cape May, NJ
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.