Arlington Hotel (Hot Springs)

Hot Springs, Arkansas, grew around thermal springs that the federal government set aside in 1832, and by the late 19th century it was one of the country’s great resort towns. The first Arlington Hotel opened in 1875, financed by Samuel W. Fordyce and two partners, as the area’s first luxury hotel. It was replaced in 1892–93 by a four-story, 300-room red-brick building in a Spanish Renaissance style that an 1892 guidebook called the most elegant and complete hotel in America. That second Arlington burned to the ground on 5 April 1923; a fireman died and roughly 305 guests escaped.

The present Arlington was designed by the architects Mann and Stern and opened in 1924 at the point where Central Avenue and Fountain Street meet, at the head of the main vista of Bathhouse Row. It is a Spanish Colonial Revival landmark of some 480 rooms and a contributing building in the Hot Springs Central Avenue Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. Its guest lists read like a catalog of 20th-century celebrity, from presidents to ballplayers, and local tradition adds Al Capone, who is said to have rented a fourth-floor suite for himself and his entourage.

Capone is part of a real and colorful history. After Prohibition ended in 1933, Mayor Leo P. McLaughlin made Hot Springs a main center of illegal gambling in the United States; at the peak, more than a hundred gambling houses operated in town, and criminals such as Owney Madden relocated there. Lucky Luciano was arrested in the park in 1936. Regional ghost writers have woven that underworld past into the hotel’s reputation, saying that the spirits of mobsters still roam the property.

The stories that circulate are brief and mostly come from listicles, podcasts and tourism pieces rather than first-hand accounts. They place unexplained happenings in Room 824 and in the Capone suite on the fourth floor, and speak of ghostly figures and strange occurrences without naming individuals. No investigation of the Arlington has produced evidence, and there is little in the written record to confirm that Capone’s presence at the hotel is more than an enduring local legend. The hotel’s ghosts are therefore best treated as part of Hot Springs’ self-image as a town that celebrates its seedy past rather than as a documented haunting.

Reports of apparitions and odd happenings in Room 824 and in the fourth-floor suite associated with Al Capone, and a general belief that mobsters of the 1920s and 1930s still roam the hotel.

Room 824, the fourth-floor Capone suite and the corridors of the 1924 building at the head of Bathhouse Row.

The Arlington features on Hot Springs ghost and gangster tours and in a podcast series on the town’s haunted tales. The nearby Gangster Museum of America tells the real story of Capone, Madden and the gambling era.