Ghost Tour: A New Look (Over Your Shoulder) at Downtown Sites

How scary is ?

Let's just say I was so anxious to get home afterwards, I got pulled over by a city police officer for driving 50 in a 35-mph zone.

If you like sitting-around-the-campfire-scary stories -- we're not talking fake dressed-up zombies jumping out at you, but old-fashioned spine-tingling yarns -- you'll love this walking tour.

Tour company owner Eileen Reeser says each story is researched by her and her husband, Tim, author of "Ghost Stories of Ocean City NJ" (http://www.ghostlore.com/).

"We hear a lot of reports of ghost stories. We find the fun part is looking back into the history," Reeser says. "It's like a puzzle."

A black-cape-clad guide leads the tour, stopping along the way to explain sightings and eerie happenings that have occurred in numerous locations -- apparently believing this stuff so fervently, that even the most doubting tourgoer will, too -- at least a little.

Ghost Tour Ocean City (http://www.ghosttour.com/oceancity.html), which runs April through November on select nights, will have you seeing downtown's cute Victorian-style houses in a whole different -- and spooky -- light. And looking over your shoulder warily.

"If anybody jumps out at you, he's not with us. It's for real," guide Lisa Longo warns members of a group of about 30 before beginning the tour on a breezy Saturday night. 

Downtown is eerily quiet as Longo explains that she gives the warning because, just a couple of years ago, a gun-toting man happened to run into her group after robbing a downtown store. She claims she was called to court to testify against the suspect.

"Who wants to go for Chinese food, instead?" Longo cheerfully jokes as the group passes a restaurant after setting out from the steps of City Hall to begin a two-hour trek with frequent stops.

Leading the group around the corner to a particularly dark spot on Wesley Avenue, Longo describes the haunted goings-on at the Flanders Hotel, a few blocks away at 14th Street, where many an employee and wedding-goer has claimed to see a female ghost named Emily.

"Everyone who ever sees her says she is looking for something, maybe a wedding ring," Longo says. "She is notorious for haunting weddings and receptions."

Around the corner on Eighth Street, across from a flat-roofed building housing a Latin grocery store, Longo explains that people who have lived on the second floor heard footsteps. Psychics said they strongly felt the presence of a man, possibly dancing.

Come to find out, there used to be a dance hall for locals here, Longo says, a theory later backed up by a lady on her tour who became emotional when Longo described the theory. Almost unbelievably, the woman related that her own father, beset by dementia in his latest years, recalled that he had danced there with her mother.

"She wondered if this was the place her father had danced in his youth, maybe where he dances in his death," Longo says before striding off, cape billowing, for the next site.

At Central Avenue and Seventh Street, Longo stops across from a white house with black shutters and a leafless tree out front -- that practically screams "haunted" -- especially on this night, when a waning full moon rises over the ocean a couple blocks away.

As Longo tells it, the house used to be owned by a descendant of Betsy Ross, famous U.S. flag-maker. The man had a penchant for collecting weird things related to the dead, including a skeleton he supposedly purchased from a man before he died. The Ross descendant left the house to his nephew. Over the years, tenants have complained of objects moving unexplainedly and seeing a dark shape with a face like the original owner's.

"The owner still leases out the house and explains to everyone it's a friendly ghost," Longo says.

When the ghost tour group stops to hear a story on the Ocean City Tabernacle grounds, a freaky thing happens. A woman walking a large poodle-mix dog skulks around the group's perimeter, asking repeatedly, "Is she a medium?" about Longo.

When told that Longo is a ghost storyteller, the lady replies, "I knew it, I felt the energy. I have to tell her about where I live at Sixth and Wesley. There's ghosts."

Longo says, yes, she knows of this place, which used to be the site of a school. A fire killed some children, she said. A nearby bed-and-breakfast inn used to be the city hospital.

"When I have psychics on the tour, they always say there are 13 to 25 spirits they sense on the tour," Longo says. In the old hospital building, people have reported seeing the face of an old man in the window and hearing the sound of babies crying.

"To me, it's the voices of stillborn children trying to get affection from their mothers," Longo says. Freaked out yet?

Longo, who speaks with an accent from her native Essex, England, laces her tales with humor, and group members provide more. Like when a sea gull flies overhead.

"They say sea gulls are the souls of sailors who have been lost at sea coming back to shore," Longo says. 

"Yeah, for French fries," pipes up a tourgoer wearing leather and sporting tattoos. The crowd gives a welcome laugh, lightening the mood.

One of the eeriest spots on the tour is, weirdly, also the cheeriest looking -- a yellow building with green trim, a quaint "witch's hat" tower and roofline outlined in tiny lights at Seventh Street and Asbury Avenue. Despite its sunny appearance, Longo says numerous people with psychic abilities have said they sensed evil spirits inhabiting the building -- perhaps a poltergeist, or inhuman type of ghost that exhibits raw emotion.

"It's sheer rage if you ask me," Longo says. "They can do things even humans can't do."

Longo even warns tourgoers to be careful -- and for women to hold on to their long hair -- as they pass alongside the building (now home to a real estate office) to a small, dark park behind it, where they crunch on leaves underfoot.

Over the decades, the building has been plagued by fires, including one that killed a dairy farmer, Longo says. Subsequent occupants of the building --among others, the Catholic church, a bait and tackle shop and cafe -- have reported weird goings-on, including keys that were continually lost and found in odd places -- like in an electric socket.

Longo says a tourgoer in a group she was leading experienced something terrifying before Longo had even mentioned the poltergeist: Walking by the building, she felt something pulling her long blond hair and let out a blood-curdling scream.

"Everything in my body just shut down for a minute, and the girl was down on the ground holding her hair," Longo said. "If it was fake, she did a really good job of it."

Shiver.

Which brings us to an alleyway running parallel to Asbury behind City Hall, linking Ninth and Eighth streets.

"This is called the alley of death. Welcome," Longo says, incongruously. "Seventy-five percent of all murders and suicides in Ocean City have happened here. Of course, that statistic is misleading because not a lot of that happens here. When they do, they seem to happen in this alley."

Not only that, but the deaths seem to happen chronologically, Longo says, moving from north to south beginning in the 1930s, when a robber shot a shopkeeper on Eighth Street, then ran down the alley and shot a postal worker before shooting himself.

Longo says those deaths were followed by this morbid rundown: A hanging suicide of a lonely man who was not missed and was found only because someone noticed a smell; two men falling from a window in the seven-story bank building at Eighth and Asbury; a teller shot in the shoulder in a bank robbery and died; an electrician who was electrocuted while repairing a pole; a domestic incident in which a huband stabbed his wife to death in their kitchen before shooting himself in the alley; and finally, a politician who died on his last day in office in City Hall, either murdered or by his own hand.

"It's still under investigation," Longo says, tantalizingly.

Longo claims to have suffered her own close call in the alley. She said she was leading a tour and felt someone -- or something -- push her from behind, causing her to fall on the lantern she used to carry. The candle burnt her and a piece of glass went in her belly, she said.

"So that is my story about the alley of death," she says, explaining she believes she survived the incident because she was not further down the alley, where no deaths have yet occurred. But she no longer carries a lantern, like other guides do.

"I do know our final story is this way and so who's up for a walk?" Longo asks, leading the group to the end of the alley -- right through the area where the next death might occur, if the pattern continues.

Whew, it's a relief to be back on the steps of City Hall, under nice bright street lamps. Longo winds up the tour by telling the tale of the Jersey Devil, whose origins are in the Pinelands to Ocean City's north.

Most group members scatter, heading back to their cars, but Jill Fernanders of Mays Landing, lingers to talk a little more to Longo.

"I used to live in a haunted house in Egg Harbor City," Fernanders says. "(Ghosts) didn't want us to get out, they were just playful. We would hear the sound of kids playing upstairs and they would open and shut cupboard doors."

After touring Ocean City, Fernanders was hoping to experience more ghostly stuff -- like maybe seeing some apparitional eyes in her rearview mirror on her way out of town. Yikes.

As for me, it was lights of an Ocean City Police Department cruiser I saw in my rearview. But when I explained to the officer I had just come from the ghost tour, which spooked me quite a bit, and was in a hurry to get home, he was kind enough to let me off with just a warning. My nerves thank you, officer.

Some tips if you go on the tour:

• Wear comfortable shoes and layers of clothing, as it can be breezy in Ocean City.
• Don't bring a large cup of coffee with you, as I did not see any restrooms along the route.
• The stories generally are family-friendly, but the tour probably is best for children 10 and over, as it requires some ability to pay attention.