When reclusive millionaire Morgan Carlisle opened the Paragon Hotel in 1901 he made international headlines. The hotel was a magnificent structure--the exterior foreshadowed the beauties of art deco architecture and the interior beckoned back to the refinements of the Victorian era. Set on the beach in the glamorous resort town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, the Paragon attracted guests from around the world.

Carlisle stunned guests with air conditioning, a whirl pool spa, elevators, and the finest furnishings that money could buy. The Paragon was so decadent that it never earned a dime--Carlisle kept the prices competitive in order to keep it booked. Afflicted with agoraphobia which was likely the result of his struggles with hemophilia, the Paragon was his entire world and he only left it once in seventy years. He worked hard to keep that world full of glamorous personalities like movie stars, writers, politicians, and even the notorious gangster Carmine Danata. Danata frequented the Paragon so often that Carlisle built him a custom suite.

When hard times hit Asbury Park in the 1960's, the Paragon was among the last to close its doors. A struggling economy and the controversial war turned the beach resort into a ghost town. The Paragon stopped accepting guests in 1968 and Carlisle had it completely boarded up with metal shutters after race riots devastated Asbury Park in 1970. In the winter of 1971, his body was found on the beach outside of the hotel in an apparent suicide. The one time in seventy years of living inside the Paragon, it seemed that he only left its walls to take his own life.

Like all hotels, the Paragon did host tragedy amidst its glamorous facade. Several suicides occurred within its walls as well as a particularly gruesome murder when a young boy beat his father to death with a baseball bat. Not every crime was reported—the Paragon was filled with secrets. Several guests reported strange occurrences—noises in the walls they could not account for, movements in paintings, the sudden appearance of Carlisle from seemingly no where. Many suspected that the Paragon had secret halls that allowed Carlisle to travel from one end to the other without having to pass his guests but there is no evidence to support this.

Urban explorers infiltrated the Paragon at least once before it was destroyed by a mysterious fire but their method of entry is not known. The metal shutters preserved it to a much higher degree than the other hotels in the area so it is easy to imagine that stepping into the abandoned hotel would have been like stepping into the past. Perhaps they stumbled across some of its secrets?