Arkansas

Crescent Hotel

Eureka Springs, Arkansas

On May 20, 1886, the rich and the famous flocked to the grand opening of the Crescent Hotel designed by the architect, Isaac L. Taylor. Over four hundred, finely dressed ladies and gentlemen attended its full orchestra ball and banquet dinner. They walked the gardens, winding boardwalks and gazebos. There was no place filled with the opulence of this hotel at the time. The Crescent used liveried footmen to pick up guests from the Frisco depot and then transported them to the inn. Here they bathed in the healing waters of the spa, rode horses around the grounds and attended tea dances in the afternoon and elaborate parties every evening.

This life of the hotel was short-lived for when the healing waters of the spa were not healing, people stopped coming to the Crescent but not everyone left for sighting of apparition of people in fine garb were talked about during the period the hotel became a school. It appears that each phase of the hotel’s life leaves its ghosts, accounting for the vast number of spirit that reside in the old Gothic hotel.

The Conservatory for Young Women took over the building from 1908 to 1924 during the school years and continues as a resort in the summer. This was not enough however to support the building and the Woman’s college closed. After sitting abandoned for the next six years it briefly reopened as a junior college from 1930 to 1934.

For three years the building sat abandoned until Norman Baker bought the aging hotel in 1937. His intention was to open a cancer hospital and health resort. He advertised non-surgery and non-painful, expensive test and alleged the patients would leave the hospital “cancer free.”

It was a scam for Baker was not a doctor and convicted in Iowa for practicing medicine without a license. In 1939 Baker was arrest for mail fraud for making $500,000 per year, selling his “cancer curing elixirs” by mail. They sentenced him to a four-year sentence in Levenworth. Not a bad exchange for he had suckered $4,000,000 and although, on record, had not killed anyone, probably hastened the death of those who looked to him for a cure.

This was only one version of the story for some paint him with a much darker and sinister brush. They paint him as a mad scientist who experimented grotesquely with both the living and the dead. To cure brin tumors, he would cut open the skull and pour is spring water mixed with fruit seeds, using whatever fruit that was in season. Many deaths went unreported and the bodies hidden in the walls until he could safely incinerate them and the remaining ashes and bits of bone, thrown to the winds, accounting for many of the ghosts in the area. About a dozen skeletons and containers of body parts were found when they remodeled the hotel.

Talk of spirits that roamed the hospital was an every day subject, for the patients of the hospital saw men and women, dressed in their finest and listened to the sound of a full orchestra as they dozed off to sleep at night. Again the hotel sat empty except for its ghosts which continued to party from 1940 to 1946 until four Chicago businessmen came to its rescue, with plans to restore the elegant hotel. They restored life to the grand hotel but in 1967, a fire on the fourth floor destroyed most of the South wing.

The hotel changed hands again and again, from 1967 till 1997. Little by little they attempted restorations but the hotel never restored to its original beauty. That was until 1997 when Marty and Elise Roenigk bought the hotel and promised to bring her back to her full, original glory. After five million dollars in renovations, they restored the grand hotel to its original stately glory. Beside the ghosts, the formal lobby, Crystal Dining Room, Dr. Baker's Lounge and Recovery Deck, and of course the New Moon Spa and Salon are just a few of attractions.

Michael O’Leary was an Irish stonemason who was working on the construction when he tripped and fell to his death from the roof of the hotel. Room 218 is his favorite room in the hotel for this is where guest and staff see him. He loves to play with the residents and banks on the wall and turns the lights and the television on an off. The ghost likes to shake some guests awake. On occasion he shows himself and described as being fair-haired, broad shouldered and wearing a wide black leather belt. Many believe Room 218 is where he landed when he fell through the roof.

Occupants of Room 424 have seen apparitions, both male and female who move quickly then go into the wall where they disappear and an occupant of Room 202 once photographed a ghost when taking a picture of her room to show her family where she stayed. The photo contains a misty figure slouching in the closet of the room. The room was empty except for the photographer at the time.

A story of the hotel has it that the wife of one of the hotel’s past owners stayed in the room. At one point in the middle of the night, she ran screaming from the room, claiming that she had seen blood spattered all over the walls. Several staff members ran up to take a look but found no blood and nothing else out of the ordinary. What was it that this woman saw and did it have to do with Dr. Baker?

Outside of the recreation room, the ghost of Dr. Norman Baker often appears, looking a bit confused. A nurse, dressed in a white uniform, appears on the third floor of the Crescent Hotel.
The rooms are not the only place ghosts show up for a tall, thin, mustached man dressed in fine garb shows up in the lobby and the bar area. He sits quietly, distinguishable by his dated clothing. He doesn’t answer when spoken to and then disappears.

The most familiar story about this ghost is the one told by two auditors who saw him in the bar. He didn’t speak when spoken to so the auditors went back to work. Moments later they looked out and his bar stool was empty. They went out looking for him, one of the men going to the staircase that goes up from the lobby. The man he was looking for was standing on the second floor landing looking down at him. The auditor went up the stars and as he got to the second floor land, someone pushed him down a few stairs although no one was there; the man he saw was gone.

In 1987, a guest claimed that she saw a nurse pushing a gurney down the hallway in the middle of the night. The nurse reached the wall and then vanished.

A group of teens getting ready to take a ghost tour of the Crescent Hotel recently reported seeing a man carrying a tray of butter and dressed in a uniform similar to the waiter's uniforms. He followed them out of an elevator and towards their third floor room, where he seemed to disappear. A third girl at the room opened the door and saw him staring directly at all of them.

The Crystal Dining Room of the Crescent Hotel is particularly active, and many spirits in Victorian garb are at the tables or seen in the mirrors. Once, at Christmastime, the staff reported leaving a Christmas tree and presents at one end of the locked and empty Crystal Dining Room. Upon their return, the staff found the tree and presents moved to the other end of the room, and chairs facing the tree in a semi-circle.

Sometime ago the antique switchboard from the early days of the hospital would ring from the basement recreation room which was empty and unused. When they checked, the phone was off the hook when they unlocked the recreation room door with the key kept at the front desk. Everyone in the room reported the feeling that they were not alone in the room although there was not a living person there. They left the room, locked it up and by the time they got upstairs to the main desk, the switchboard indicated another call from coming from the locked room.

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