The Crescent Hotel Hauntings
Could immense loss and unnecessary tragedy be the cause of one of the most haunted locations in Arkansas? The Crescent Hotel is known for housing many ghosts.
From guests to staff members, it is not uncommon for folks to witness an unexplainable entity appear in windows and around corners.
When you look at the history and the fact that a man purchased the hotel and turned it into a fraudulent hospital for cancer patients, it’s not hard to imagine that the Crescent Hotel may very well be haunted.
So, what exactly have people experienced? Listen now!
Crescent Hotel Hauntings
Have you ever stayed in a hotel and felt like you were being watched?
Would you intentionally leave traps for a ghost?
How comfortable would you feel knowing bodies were once torn apart beneath the floor?
What is up, Bizarros?! This week, we dive into one of America’s most haunted hotels, the Crescent Hotel & Spa.
Source:
Historic Hotels of America, The New Yorker, Encyclopedia of Arkansas, America’s most haunted hotels
What Is the History Of The Crescent Hotel?
The Crescent Hotel is located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. There has been a long history of death and disparity in the Crescent Hotel.
In the early 1880s, the framework for hotels had just been finished. Hearsay says that an Irishman fell to his death at that time from room 218.
This room, 218, is said to be the most paranormally active room in the hotel. Television crews have even been attacked in it.
Guests in the hotel at large through the years have seen bodiless hands coming down the stairs and men falling from the ceiling.
The dining hall is said the be a very haunted location as well. There are many reports from staff about this location.
Quote from haunted hotels about the activity in the dining hall
“One holiday season, while the dining room was closed, the grand Christmas tree and packages underneath moved from one end of the room to the other. The next morning, employees found the tree and packages moved with chairs circling and facing the newly placed holiday symbol.
Another time, employees returned in the morning to find the dining room in perfect order, except for menus scattered throughout the room.
Yet another time, a waitress looked into the huge mirror between the doors from the dining room to the kitchen and saw a man and woman in Victorian garb facing each other as in a wedding.
The groom turned and made eye contact with the waitress, and then the couple faded away. The waitress quit her position shortly after this incident.
Another commonly reported paranormal activity is a man in Victorian clothing sitting at a table near the windows saying, “I saw the most beautiful woman here last night, and I am waiting for her to return.”
Many have recounted seeing apparitions in Victorian ball attire dancing around the room during the wee hours of the morning while the room was closed and dark.”
This is also very strange, but some of this activity could come from the fact that In 1930, the hotel was bought by Dr. Baker. According to the New Yorker, “Baker wasn’t a doctor. He was, among other things, a radio broadcaster and a former vaudeville magician who had become rich selling a musical instrument called the Air Calliaphon.”
The fraudster opened the previously known hotel as a cancer hospital. Instead of working on a cure for cancer or improving the medical advances of cancer research, Dr Baker took a more holistic approach. However, this is not to slander holistic medicine, but Baker was not even doing that kind of medicine.
From the New Yorker about his practices
“a purported miracle medicine containing extracts from watermelon seeds, corn silk, and clover”
In Eureka Springs, the water hot springs are also said to have healing properties hence part of Dr. Baker’s interest in the area.
Dr Baker’s ghost is said to be seen in the hotel.
“Dr. Baker” has been seen in the hotel lobby. He is described as a man in a purple shirt and white linen suit matching photographs of the infamous entrepreneur.”
There have also been ghost sightings in the basement.
“A nurse pushing a gurney” residing in Dr. Baker’s old morgue area is known to squeak and rattle down the halls of the hotel. A hotel maintenance man witnessed all the washers and dryers mysteriously turn on in the middle of the night. The laundry room is located next to Dr. Baker’s old morgue, which still contains his autopsy table and walk-in freezer.”
There was talk that Dr Baker found his corpses in a less innocent way. There were even haunts of the hotel being haunted while Dr. Baker was still there.
“Housekeepers report meeting “Theodora” in room 419. She introduces herself as a cancer patient of Dr. Baker’s and vanishes after courtesies are verbally exchanged. Steve Garrison, a cook at the hotel, swears he doesn’t drink on the job. In fact, he doesn’t drink, period.
However, Garrison may have been tempted by two strange encounters in the kitchen of the haunted hotel’s Crystal Dining Room. One morning, while slicing and dicing vegetables, he looked up and saw a little boy with “pop-bottle” glasses, dressed in old-fashioned clothing and knickers, skipping around the kitchen. Another morning, Garrison flipped on the lights to begin the day’s preparations when “some or all of the pots and pans came flying off their hooks.” The Crescent Hotel has so many ghostly tales to tell that tours of this historic place in the Ozarks are held throughout the year.
The hospital closed in 1940 when Baker was convicted of mail fraud.
The Crescent was then purchased again 6 years later, but it wasn’t opened again as a hotel until 1973.
It was then sold again in the 90s and had several updates and renovations to rework it. It’s still a functional hotel to this day.
Ghost Stories From The Staff Of The Crescent Hotel
There have many occasions where staff recount stories they have witnessed or guests have to them they witnessed the unexplained phenomena.
Here is a story from one of the guides.
“The guides themselves have countless paranormal stories from their time at the hotel, too! One such guide revealed that she had met a couple that was staying on the first floor near the Governor’s Suite. The couple subsequently told the guide that on their second night in the building, they had slept with just a sheet covering the two of them.
The husband then awoke in a deep sweat, realizing that someone—or something—had tucked them in with a comforter. Apparently, they had been tucked in on three more times that night.
Another guide recounted an incident where two guests checked into Room 221 one early spring afternoon.
Upon leaving the elevator for the second floor, they immediately encountered a man wearing an “all-black Victorian-style outfit.” With a smile, he asked the guests whether or not they required help finding their guestroom. Believing the person to be a hotel employee, they agreed.
The man in the Victorian attire then led the two to Room 221, unlocking the door and pushing it open. As the couple entered, the man stayed outside the door smiling and tilted his head from side to side.
One of the two realized they had not tipped the man, and when they spun around with some cash, he had seemingly disappeared. Perplexed, the two guests just relaxed in their guestrooms for the rest of the day. When they tried to reenter Room 221 later that evening, the door would not budge.
The couple then descended down to the Front Desk, where they asked what was wrong with the key. The staff member stated that they had somehow received the key to Room 321. The two described the man who had originally let them into Room 221, and the staff member reported that no such person presently worked at the hotel…”
A local news channel interviewed a ghost tour guide, Sarah, and she had her own stories.
“Most of them are mischievous at best; they just want to be noticed, I think,” said Sarah of the ghosts. “So they make loud noises, or they do things like shut doors, but they’re only doing what their energy makes them capable of doing.
They just have to use the resources that they have.”
And the spookiest part of the tour?
An easy answer: The morgue, which is not for the faint of heart.
Upon entry to the morgue’s “ice box,” I was physically afflicted with lightheadedness, chills, and an uneasy stomach.
I captured a glowing white orb on video as Sarah talked about previous experiences.
And, of course, I had to ask Sarah about the craziest haunted experience she’s had at the hotel, and her answer sent shivers down my spine.
“The craziest thing that ever happened to me was the very first time I took a tour here. Immediately, what I saw was I blew up a picture of a mirror on the third floor, and it was of my youngest kid. In this picture— the reflection in the mirror— I can see my son standing there, and there are three ladies standing beside him and my husband talking to him in his ear..
I showed it to my husband like, ‘Haha, what was he doing in this one,’ and my husband’s like, ‘Please don’t laugh, that’s not me.'”
“At the end of the day, we did not have one photograph of that guy on the tour. What’s more interesting is the photograph I had taken directly after that one,”
Sarah explained, referencing the next photo she took, except the man was no longer there. “There’s my son, same expression on his face; the three ladies are standing in the exact same spot…
the only person that’s not there is the man.”
A story about Theodora
“Room 419 is the room said to still be inhabited by the spirit of Theodora, a prim and proper woman. She is believed to have been a live-in member of Norman Baker’s “Cancer Curable Hospital” staff during the late 1930s, and Room 419 was her room. Records show that Room 419 is the Crescent Hotel’s second most requested room because of Theodora’s rumored “housekeeping service”,
tidying up after guests who stay in that room but only if she enjoys their company. I have been told by guests staying in Room 419 that they conduct experiments in that room, purposely leaving messes in hopes that Theodora will make her presence known by folding their clothes, organizing their closets, and/or attractively arranging personal items that had been scattered around the room.
All told me that, evidently, Theodora must not have given them the ghostly nod of approval. Then, just recently, a couple told me they had purposefully scattered their loose change around the room on tabletops, nightstands, etc., shortly before leaving for dinner downstairs in the Crystal Dining Room.
Upon their return, they were overjoyed to find their coins neatly reorganized in stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, all placed together atop their dresser. No one knows how Theodora determines whom she favors, but this couple, it appears, had managed to make a good impression, which they said was “quite cents-able”!
Ghosts of the Crescent Hotel (Eureka Springs, Arkansas)
The Crescent Hotel has been called “America’s Most Haunted Hotel” and is said to be haunted by at least eight spirits.
These include a young woman who attended college there in the 1920s or 30s, who is either said to have died by jumping from the roof or being pushed; a nurse who worked in the building when it was a hospital; a man in a hat and tails, believed to be the ghost of Dr. John Freemont Ellis, a frequent visitor to the resort during its glory days in the late 1800s;
Michael, a 17-year-old Irish stonemason, lost his footing while building the hotel and slipped off the roof to his death;
Theadora, a cancer victim, came to Norman Baker’s resort for treatment.
A ghostly bearded gentleman wearing Victorian clothing and a top hat;
Brecky, a boy who often came to the resort in its glory days and died of complications with appendicitis, and Norman G. Baker himself.
Paranormal Encounters At The Hotel
Minor experience at the Crescent Hotel and Spa
So I was probably around 8 or so, and my parents and I were in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where we stayed at what has been labeled the most haunted hotel in America, the Crescent Hotel.
The hotel has a very long and disturbing history full of death and conspiracy, being used as a girls’ school and hospital before becoming the hotel it is today.
During my stay there, we stayed in one of the corner penthouse rooms. The way it was set up, when you’re in the hall and open the door to the room, you have to walk up a flight of stairs before entering the living room/kitchen area.
Up a spiral staircase, you get to a small landing where the king-size bed is. When we got to the room, my mother and I sat down on the small couch in the living room and immediately heard what sounded like footsteps coming from the landing upstairs.
Needless to say, my 8-year-old self was terrified when my parents asked me to go look.
Of course, nothing was there. We couldn’t think of anything that could’ve made the noises as the room was basically its own section in a short tower-like structure at the corner of the hotel on the top floor, and the noises were obviously coming from the flat and not the roof.
I don’t see it being our imagination, as we all heard the same thing originating from the same location. Not a major experience, but it was the first real paranormal experience I ever had. For the rest of our trip, we went on the tour, where we took pictures with orbs in them. Again, this wasn’t very interesting, but I thought I’d share my first experience with the paranormal (that I remember, at least).
Is The Crescent Hotel The Most Haunted Hotel In America?
What do you think, Bizarros? Does the Crescent Hotel have more undead guests than human guests?
Why do you think there are so many ghosts at this Crescent Hotel & Spa?
Let us know in the comments!