Crescent Hotel

History

The Crescent Hotel opened on May 1, 1886, on the highest point of West Mountain, above Eureka Springs. The town had been named only seven years before, and news of its springs had spread fast, with claims that they could cure everything “from baldness, female trouble, and hay fever to cancer.” A company led by Powell Clayton, a former governor of Arkansas, built the hotel for $294,000. A crew of Irish workers cut its limestone blocks, each 18 inches thick, at a quarry near Beaver, and the stones were fitted so closely that no mortar was needed. The Crescent had electricity and elevators, and for years, it drew the elite. Then business fell off, and by the 1900s, it opened only in summer. From 1908 to 1924, the hotel spent the rest of each year as Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women, an elite boarding school for girls. In 1933, during the Depression, it closed.

In 1937, Norman Baker bought the empty hotel. Baker was a former vaudeville performer from Muscatine, Iowa, who had made his name on his own radio station, selling a cure for cancer. He had no medical training at all, and his cure, says the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, was “nothing more than clover, corn silk, watermelon seed, and water.” At the Crescent, he painted nearly everything lavender or purple. On the roof, he put a Calliaphone, a portable organ of his own invention that could be heard a quarter of a mile away. In 1938, he opened the Baker Hospital. His mailings promised a place “Where Sick Folks Get Well,” and they brought him patients, then postal inspectors.

In September 1939, Baker and two of his staff were indicted for using the mails to defraud. Baker kept as little money in the bank as he could, the Arkansas Supreme Court later found. The cash went into safes in the hospital, some of them hidden. After the indictment, fearing a search, Baker had $572,000 in currency carried to his trusted assistant in Laredo, Texas. At the trial, the prosecutor quoted Baker as saying he could “reap one million dollars out of the suckers in the state.” Baker was convicted in 1940 and spent more than three years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. The hospital closed. The Crescent fell into disrepair until 1946, when new owners bought it, restored it, and reopened it on July 4.

Hauntings & Lore

The Crescent bills itself as America’s Most Haunted Hotel, and it runs its own ghost tours every night. The stories are younger than the building. According to the hotel’s National Register nomination, which its general manager helped write in 2015, the first reports of anything supernatural came in the 1970s, while new owners were restoring the hotel. Many of the ghosts its guides talk about go back further, to the building of the Crescent and to Baker’s hospital.

Michael, Room 218

The Crescent’s most famous ghost is Michael. His room, 218, is the hotel’s most requested. The hotel says he was an Irish stonemason who fell to his death while the Crescent was being built. KATV, a Little Rock TV station, told the rest of the story in 2020. Michael was 17 and working on the roof in 1885, when a young woman walked into the garden and caught his eye. He was trying to get her attention, as the folklore goes, when he fell and hit a beam where Room 218 is now.

He’s been known to move curtains, appear in bathroom mirrors, open shower curtains, trip men, and even wrap his arms around women, the station reported. Michael still has an eye for women, guides told the business weekly Arkansas Business in 2018, and some female guests say their curtains were pulled back while they showered. The room is highly requested, the paper found, especially by groups of women “who want to see if they can entice a reaction from Michael.”

A Night in Room 218

In October 2020, one of the station’s reporters spent the night in Room 218. It’s a small room, with space for a dresser, a queen bed, and a small bathroom. Across it, old French doors open onto a patio that looks over the hotel’s garden and the Ozarks. At 9:54 p.m., the reporter heard a thud behind the headboard. The tour guide had said that hundreds of guests had heard the same thud before. Some take it for the sound of Michael falling to his death. Just after midnight, the reporter woke up to “a random chunk of my hair pulled over my eyes, tickling my eyelashes. I never went back to sleep.”

Jack Moyer, the hotel’s general manager, told the station he didn’t believe the ghost stories when he moved to Eureka Springs in 1997. In 2005, he was with the Ghost Hunters team when, as the station put it, they filmed a full-body apparition. He believes it was Michael. When Ghost Adventures investigated in 2019, the crew reported a curtain moving on its own and contact with Michael, according to Wikipedia’s episode list.

Theodora, Room 419

Room 419 belongs to Theodora. The hotel calls it “one of our most popular active rooms.” In the hotel’s ghost stories, Theodora was a cancer patient, and she has been seen outside the room, fumbling for her keys. The hotel’s rooms page calls her Nurse Theodora. She is very opinionated, one tour guide says. If she likes her guests, she folds and hangs their clothes and sorts their spare change on the dresser by denomination. If she doesn’t, she packs their bags and stacks them by the door.

Bill Ott, the hotel’s director of marketing, passed on some advice in 2018 for guests who don’t want anything to happen: say hello. “You have a better chance if you talk to Theodora when you walk into the room,” he told Arkansas Business. The paper’s own reporter spent a night in Room 419 for that story and “experienced nothing spooky.”

Book Michael’s Room, Room 218, which the hotel lists by name on its guest rooms page. Theodora’s Room, 419, is listed too.

The Morgue and the Nurse

The hotel’s ghost tours end in the morgue. Its ghost pages put the morgue in the basement, but it is on the ground floor of the servants’ wing added in 1901, the nomination says. Baker installed the morgue in 1937, by the nomination’s account, and the building “saw upwards of 150 dead bodies” while it was a hospital. The hotel’s own history describes a “morgue” with “an autopsy table and cadaver walk-in cooler from the Baker era.”

Jeff MacGregor, writing for Smithsonian magazine in 2020, saw it differently. The counter and sink against one wall are commercial kitchen fittings, he wrote, “which some people mistake for an autopsy table.” The morgue “was probably a pantry,” but for the few years of Baker’s hospital, “the dead were brought down here to wait for the hearse from the local funeral home.”

On the tour, MacGregor heard about “the Nurse, pushing a gurney through eternity on the third floor.” The website Legends of America says she is seen only after 11 p.m., “when they used to move the deceased out of the cancer hospital.” She vanishes, it says, when she reaches the end of the hallway.

Norman Baker

Baker has a ghost of his own. The hotel says he has been spotted in the lobby and the morgue in his trademark white linen suit. Legends of America puts him at the foot of the first-floor stairway, in a purple shirt and white linen suit, “looking somewhat confused.” The clothes, at least, are on the record. Baker was a showman “with his white suits and lavender ties,” says the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

In February 2019, digging to expand a parking area turned up hundreds of glass bottles at the edge of the woods behind the hotel, many of them from Baker’s “cures.” The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality found that the jars held mostly alcohol and tissue samples. Keith Scales, who ran the hotel’s ghost tours in 2020 and played Baker in a one-man show, had his own guess. “I think they’re pig parts,” he told Smithsonian. In 2021, the manager of the nightly ghost tours told the hotel’s blog that activity in the morgue had picked up since the find. “I think we have stirred things up a bit with the discovery of the remains,” she said.