Emlen Physick Estate

The Emlen Physick Estate is the grandest survivor of Cape May’s Victorian seaside boom, an eighteen-room mansion designed by the Philadelphia architect Frank Furness in the Stick style and completed around 1879. It was built for Dr. Emlen Physick Jr. (1855–1916), the son of a well-known Philadelphia family, who lived there with his widowed mother, Frances Ralston, and his maiden aunt Emilie Parmentier. One account says the doctor led an animal-cruelty prevention society. His mother died in 1915 and he followed on 21 March 1916; Aunt Emilie survived him until 20 May 1935 and left the estate to a neighbour.

The house passed through other hands. Dr. Harry Sidney Newcomer, who bought it in the 1940s, and his wife are the best-known owners in ghost lore: according to accounts repeated by the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and by Cape May writers, they heard footsteps and noises at night that no search could explain, and they eventually moved to a downtown apartment. By the late 1960s the estate was falling into disrepair and faced demolition. The Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and Humanities (Cape May MAC) was formed in 1970 to save it, the city purchased the property, and the group has since restored the house and run it as a Victorian museum.

Today’s ghost stories come mostly from the museum’s guides, volunteers and visitors. The reported figures are the Physick women – Emilie is often described as a welcoming presence in her bedroom, while Frances’s room is sometimes said to feel oppressive – and, more unusually, ghost dogs, which visitors and mediums say they have felt or seen in the main house. A medium writing for CapeMay.com said she sensed a gentle woman and an unhappy one, and the younger aunt Isabella, who died in 1883, has been named as a candidate for the second. Tour guests have reported being touched on the shoulder, a woman’s reflection in a mirror and cold, heavy air in the second-floor hallway.

The estate’s reputation is promoted by the museum, which runs evening ghost tours, and has been featured in a 2023 ABC7 segment and in an episode of the series Haunted Towns. The Cape May MAC’s tour operations manager, Rosemary Rombado, has described an upright photograph page that fell as she began to speak and staff who have heard footsteps or seen figures pass through rooms. Skeptical readers will note how much of the lore is secondhand, and how the ghost dogs sit awkwardly with a household in which, according to one account, the doctor’s mother banned dogs indoors.

Reports include phantom footsteps, doors opening on their own, cold spots, a woman’s reflection in a mirror, being touched by invisible hands, the presence of an aunt in her bedroom, and the sight or sense of ghost dogs in the main house.

Aunt Emilie’s and Frances Ralston’s bedrooms, the second-floor hallway and the main rooms of the house; reports are almost all from inside the mansion.

The house appears in ghost-tour literature for Cape May, in a 2023 ABC7 Localish feature and in Haunted Towns. It was also a location for the 1981 slasher film The Prowler.