Shoes on the Stairs: Flemington’s Union Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 15, 2026 · How we verify

For most of two centuries the brick front at the center of Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey watched everything important happen across the road. The haunted Union Hotel owes its reputation less to any single tragedy than to its own geography: a building that housed the world’s press during the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, then spent decades with two entire floors sealed off above a working restaurant. Empty rooms invite stories, and this one collected plenty.

Quick orientation: the Union Hotel stood on Main Street in Flemington as a contributing property to the Flemington Historic District. It was first constructed by Neal Hart in 1814. The front facade visitors photographed for generations dated to 1878, not to the original build.

Neal Hart’s Stagecoach House and the 1878 Face

The hotel opened in 1814 and, through the nineteenth century, served as a gathering place for well-to-do stagecoach passengers and socialites, along with local characters and tourists passing through Hunterdon County. The ornate exterior most people associate with the building is a later addition; the front facade dates to 1878.

Inside, murals created by Carl Ritz with the assistance of Kurt Wiese adorned the hotel. Those were removed and preserved by the Hunterdon County Historical Society in 2011, which turned out to be a prudent decision.

1935: The Press Corps Across From the Courthouse

National notoriety arrived in the early months of 1935. The trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. was conducted directly across the street at the Hunterdon County Courthouse, and members of the national media covering the trial all stayed at the Union Hotel. For a few weeks the building was effectively the newsroom of the most sensational criminal case in the country. That association has done more for the hotel’s mythology than any ghost story attached to it.

The Sealed Upper Floors

Decades later the property was purchased by new owners, renovated, restored, and converted into the Union Hotel Restaurant. The second and third floors, which had once housed hotel patrons, were left empty and unoccupied. That detail matters: the rooms where guests had slept for over a century were closed off above a busy dining room, and the mythos around the Hunterdon County icon grew in direct proportion to how few people could get up there.

The restaurant years ended unhappily. In July 2008, managing partner John Blanos announced that the Union Hotel Restaurant would sell its liquor license but remain open. By August he said the restaurant would close instead, with the license going to Bensi, an Italian chain. At a special Flemington Borough Council meeting in September 2008 the transfer was rejected; Blanos closed the restaurant immediately anyway. He said the Union Hotel had been steadily losing money since he and his partners bought it in 1999.

What Union Hotel Employees Reported

The belief that the hotel was haunted was widespread locally, though almost nobody outside the staff ever saw the upper levels. Few members of the public were allowed above the dining hall, where management used a handful of rooms for business purposes. That makes the accounts here staff accounts, not tourist accounts, and none of them has ever been verified.

One employee reported seeing a pair of shoes walk up a staircase by themselves. Others told of hearing or seeing small children in rooms when there were no hotel guests in the building at all. A manager said she felt an unseen presence in her office late one night when she knew she was alone. Ghost sightings and poltergeist incidents were reported by employees over the years, but these are recollections passed along rather than documented events.

Lawsuits, Demolition, and the Building That Replaced It

The Union Hotel’s last chapter was a long municipal fight. In November 2012 the Flemington Borough Council selected Flemington Union Hotel LLC, whose principals Matt McPherson and Liam Burns proposed a 50 to 55-room hotel expanding into 78 Main Street, with a ballroom, steakhouse and pub. In June 2015 they were found in default of the redevelopment agreement and removed.

In February 2016 the council selected Jack Cust, whose plan called for demolishing the Union Hotel outright and replacing it with a hotel, restaurants, retail, underground parking, apartments and a college. The controversy that followed produced a string of lawsuits from the Friends of Historic Flemington, starting in September 2016 with claims under New Jersey’s Open Public Meetings Act and Open Public Records Act, and two more suits in March and April 2017. In May 2017 the demolition plan was scuttled in favor of preserving the facade of the hotel and the Deats Building. A revised plan in September 2020 lowered the building from 87 feet to 63 feet and cut the apartment count from 222 to 206.

Stabilization work on the old hotel began in November 2020. The last remaining lawsuit was settled in September 2021, and by April 2022 the demolition phase of the project had been completed.

Visiting Main Street in Flemington

Anyone traveling to Flemington expecting the old Union Hotel interior will not find it. The new hotel and its first restaurant, Jersey Prime Steakhouse, opened on September 15, 2026. The Hunterdon County Courthouse still stands directly across Main Street, which remains the single most atmospheric thing about the block: the room where Hauptmann was tried and the building where the reporters filed their copy face each other exactly as they did in 1935. The murals are not on site either; the Hunterdon County Historical Society took them in 2011.

Address: Main Street, Flemington, New Jersey

See Union Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• The Historic Union Hotel Restaurant in Flemington, New Jersey
• Campaign to save old Indian murals in Flemington's Union Hotel
• Courthouse Square Construction Update Provided Following Demolition of 82 Main Street on Monday
• Ghosts of the Union Hotel, Flemington – Weird NJ
• Wikipedia: Union Hotel (Flemington, New Jersey)

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