The Addy Sea stands at the corner of Ocean View Parkway and Atlantic Avenue, a cedar-shingled Victorian a short walk from the beach. It is still a bed-and-breakfast. The address is 99 Ocean View Parkway, Bethany Beach, DE 19930. The ghost file is thinner than the house history, and the two should not be mixed.
John M. Addy of Pittsburgh built it in 1901 as a summer house for his family, one of five houses he put up in Bethany and the fourth of the five. A town marker calls it his masterpiece and counts the Addys among the “Six First Families.” Addy was a plumber. The house was among the first in the area with indoor plumbing and gaslights, and it still has restored tin ceilings and fireplaces. John and Jennie Addy used it as a retreat from Pittsburgh. Their children turned it into a boarding house around the start of the Great Depression. The marker dates that change to 1935.
Storms moved the building. After a 1927 coastal storm, the family shifted it one block west onto another lot they owned, using manpower, mules, and logs. A smaller cottage, Addy No. 3, was sold to the Perry family and later donated. In 1998 it was moved to Route 26 and became Bethany Beach’s nature center. The Ash Wednesday storm of March 1962 washed out the lower part of the house. It did not collapse. The same storm uncovered the foundation of the pre-1927 site on the shoreline.
In 1974 the third generation of Addys sold the house to Leroy T. Gravatte III, who already owned the place next door. His family had been coming to Bethany for three generations. He kept renovating it. It now runs as an oceanfront inn, 21 and older, with rooms in the old house and a newer guest house.
The haunting claims are the usual inn set, repeated on ghost sites and not backed by a named investigation. Room 1 is said to have a bathtub that shakes. No one has published a plumbing check, or said whether the tub was filling when it moved. Room 6 is tied to organ music in a house with no organ. Room 11 is assigned to a former handyman, named Paul Dulaney or Paul Delaney depending on the retelling, who is said to sit on the bed or stand beside it. Those write-ups say he died on a construction site, not in the inn. A separate tale puts a Kurty Addy on the roof after a fall. A guest comment on a haunt listing mentions footsteps on the roof and a smell of flowers outside, and repeats the fall story. None of those deaths is confirmed in the sources above. The inn’s own history pages do not mention them.
What is documented is a 1901 plumber’s summer house, moved in 1927, flooded in 1962, sold in 1974, and still taking guests. The shaking tub and the organ are the stories attached to three room numbers.
The inn at dusk, cedar shingles and the Addy Sea sign on the porch, a block back from the beach it was moved away from in 1927.
Relevant links
- Addy Sea: about the house — 1901, the 1927 move, the 1962 storm, the 1974 sale
- Addy Sea historical marker — fourth of five Addy houses, boarding house by 1935
- Coastal Point: cottage tour — the move, the storm, and the Gravatte purchase
- Haunted Places: Addy Sea Inn — rooms 1, 6, and 11, with the note that the claims are unverified