By Kathy Murray
Surrounded by gardens and gazebos, this five-story hotel is also noted for its unusual architecture. The many towers of the hotel give the place a mysterious look. But the real mystery is on the inside.
THE ACCIDENT
The Crescent Hotel, located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, was built in the 1880s and became haunted even before its construction had concluded. The first reported ghost was that of a construction worker who fell off the roof and into what is now room 218. His spirit plays with the room’s electricity and bangs on the walls, perhaps in an effort to finish the work from which death so suddenly took him. He also shakes guests awake and runs away, his footsteps audible, before guests can realize what has just happened. Blood has also been seen to drip from the walls. The haunting doesn’t stop with the unfortunate worker though: there are dozens of ghosts roaming the halls of the Crescent Hotel.
THE DOCTOR WHO WASN’T
The hotel was converted to a woman’s college in 1908, but changed hands in the ‘30s when a man named Norman Baker leased the property. An eccentric and paranoid millionaire, Baker fancied himself a doctor, although he had no real experience or training. He opened the building as a “hospital and health retreat” and people came from all around the country for his “miracle cures”, including his most famous one – a cure for cancer. But once they registered as his “patients”, he inflicted extremely painful and often deadly experiments on them, including performing crude brain surgeries. Those who didn’t die under his watch were left in rooms under the guise of being mental patients. This way, no one would question the real cause of their deaths, which was in fact the cancer that Baker couldn’t cure.
SKELETONS
The remains of many of these patients, some in jars, were found in the walls after Baker had been arrested for mail fraud, of all things. His ghost can be seen outside of the Recreation Room of what is once again a hotel. One of the nurses that worked for him roams the halls of the third floor, pushing a patient on a gurney. And one of his other “patients” sticks to Room 419 where she informs guests that she is a cancer patient before she disappears into thin air.
OTHER GHOULS
For a time, calls to the front desk would come from the locked basement. There was only one way in and out, and only one key which was kept at the front. Upon investigating, the staff found that the phone in the basement had been taken off the hook by something – or someone unknown. Many pictures have also been taken of spirits who weren’t visible in the rooms at the time. Orbs are the most common, but phantom faces, and small children, as well as a figure crouched in a closet, are just some of the others that have been captured.
ROOMS WITH A GHOSTLY VIEW
There are many more ghosts at the Crescent Hotel, including a man who hangs around the bar, and a party of deceased people who can be seen in the mirror, sitting at a table in the dining room. It’s fair to say that ghosts at the Crescent Hotel check in, but they don’t check out.