Crescent Hotel

The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs is real hotel and you can stay here ... if you're brave enough. They don't really hype the ghosts as much as they do their architecture and history, but you can take a ghost tour of their hotel and learn all about the spirits who haunt it.

The hotel was designed by the architect Isaac L. Taylor in 1886.It was used as a hotel for several years before it could no longer sustain itself financially.

In 1908, the hotel was opened as the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women. It closed in 1924 and then reopened from 1930 to 1934 as a junior college.

The Crescent was leased as a summer hotel after the school closed. In 1937, it got a new owner. Norman Baker turned the place into a hospital and health resort. Baker was an inventor and had made millions of dollars by 1934. Baker wasn't happy just inventing things because he thought of himself as a doctor (even though he had no medical training). He claimed to have discovered a number of "cures" for various ailments, including Cancer. He was sure that organized medicine was conspiring against him; and had recently been ran out of Iowa for practicing medicine without a license.

Baker moved his cancer patients to Arkansas and advertised the health resort. The "cure" was basically drinking the natural spring water. No one was harmed by this, but it wasn't really the advertised "miracle cure". Federal charges were filed against him for mail fraud and he spent four years in prison. The Crescent Hotel was left ownerless.

The hotel stayed closed until 1946 when new investors took it over and began trying to restore this odd and historical piece of Ozark history.

Now, staff members receive frequent reports from overnight guests of strange goings-on in their rooms and in the hallways. Room 424 has had several visitations and Room 202 has had a ghost photographed in it. The most famous haunted spot is Room 218. Several guests and employees have encountered strange sounds and sensations in that room. Doors have slammed shut and some people have been shaken awake at night.

Room 218 was the location of a bizarre death, when a workman fell from the roof during the hotel's construction and landed in the spot room 218 was to be built. He was killed instantly.

Just because you don't get a haunted room doesn't mean you won't see a ghost! People report seeing a middle aged man with a mustache, beard and formal clothing in the lobby and bar area. He never responds when talked to, but sits quietly and then vanishes. 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. Others have reported seeing similar things. Even crazy old Norman Baker has been seen!

Why is the area so haunted? Many people that the spring water that flows underneath the hotel is high in energy and it attracts ghostly apparitions.