Basin Park Hotel

Eureka Springs grew up around its healing springs in the 1880s, and its steep, stacked streets hold some of the most photographed Victorian architecture in the Ozarks. The Basin Park Hotel stands beside Basin Spring Park, the heart of the old resort district. The site was first occupied by the Perry House, built in 1881 by Captain Joe Perry and described in an 1884 visitors’ guide as the best house in the city, four stories high with a hundred rooms. It was a wooden building in a town that burned repeatedly, and it was lost to fire around 1890.

The replacement opened on 1 July 1905. A local newspaper of the time called it a fireproof structure that had cost $150,000, and it was built of limestone quarried nearby, with an elevator, a roof garden and a ballroom. Because the town clings to a bluff, the hotel is entered at street level on one side but drops many floors on another, so that a building that looks modest from Spring Street is much taller from below. The hotel’s own history records the Barefoot Ball that Joe Parkhill began there on 26 June 1948, inspired by a radio quiz show, in which newlyweds had to stay barefoot for their stay, and notes that Marty and Elise Roenigk bought and restored it in 1997.

The ghost stories are a more recent growth, and they are told mostly by tour companies and guests rather than recorded in the historical record. According to one ghost-tour company’s write-up, a tall, silent man in cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed hat is seen on the third and fourth floors; a playful little girl is heard giggling in stairwells and glimpsed running along hallways; and the top-floor ballroom brings cold spots, flickering lights and phantom music, with one bride reportedly seeing a woman in Victorian dress who vanished at the edge of the dance floor. The same account describes whispers and shadow figures in the lower levels cut into the bluff, which now house shops and a spa. Prohibition-era gambling and bootlegging legends – secret rooms behind false walls – fill out the picture.

None of these figures has been tied to a named person in any document, and the accounts do not say who the little girl or the cowboy might have been. That is typical of this kind of lore: the details vary from teller to teller and grow with the number of guided tours. What the hotel does offer is a layered building with narrow corridors, concealed spaces and a real history of fires and spring-water tourism that makes a fitting backdrop for the stories.

A tall man in cowboy boots and hat on upper floors, a giggling girl in stairwells, cold spots and phantom music in the ballroom, whispers and shadows in the lower levels, and guests’ tales of flickering lights and moved belongings.

The third and fourth floors, the stairwells, the top-floor ballroom and the lower levels cut into the limestone bluff.

Eureka Springs supports several ghost tours, and the Basin Park Hotel is a regular stop on them. The Barefoot Ball tradition is part of the hotel’s own folklore.