Shore folklore · Surf City
Published ghost story · Real hotel and wreck · Accusations unverified
A vanished Long Beach Island hotel became the setting for a woman-and-child apparition in a 1904 collection. The story borrows from a real 1854 shipwreck, then changes its date and adds an unsupported tale of stolen valuables.
“The Old Mansion” is an unsigned story in W. Bob Holland’s public-domain Twenty-Five Ghost Stories (1904), pp. 202–209. Its narrator meets a bayman called Captain Jim, who recalls the Mansion of Health, the wreck of the immigrant ship Powhatan, and rumors that the hotel was haunted. Jim claims that, while staying there with other men around 1861, he saw “a woman looking out over the sea” with a child in her arms at an ocean-facing window. The hotel later burned. Read the complete 1904 story.
The tale also says the wreckmaster took money from victims after the disaster and describes opened money belts found on the beach. It offers no named witness, record of an inquiry, or other support for that accusation. We do not treat it as evidence that a real person stole from the dead. “Captain Jim” appears only as the story’s narrator within a ghost anthology, not as an independently identified interviewee.
The Mansion of Health was real. A New Jersey historic context study puts its construction in 1822 at the Great Swamp site that became Surf City and describes a 120-foot hotel. A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study puts it in 1821, says small boats landed at a cove at the bay end of South First Street, and says the hotel had been abandoned by the late 1850s. The one-year construction discrepancy has not been resolved here; both studies support an early-1820s hotel.
The Powhatan was also real, but the ghost story says it wrecked in a September storm. The National Archives dates the wreck to April 16, 1854. The story’s date error is a reason to check its dramatic details against records, especially its allegation about the wreckmaster. Our Powhatan entry follows the documented disaster and burial evidence separately.
The marker points to the Mansion Cove area at South First Street, where the Army Corps study places the old landing. It is an orientation point, not the footprint of the hotel, the ghost’s window, a shipwreck site, or a burial place. Shoreline and street changes make a modern parcel claim unsafe without a period map or deed. Use public rights of way where access is permitted; the marker does not direct visitors onto private lots.
The story’s original author, “Captain Jim’s” identity, the hotel’s exact parcel, and any independent account of the claimed apparition or money belts remain unverified.