Crescent Hotel

Eureka Springs grew up around its mineral springs in the late 1870s, and in 1884 the Eureka Springs Improvement Company, led by former Arkansas governor Powell Clayton, hired St. Louis architect Isaac S. Taylor to build a grand resort on the hill above town. Irish stonemasons cut its eighteen-inch limestone blocks from a quarry on the White River. The Crescent opened in May 1886 with a banquet for James G. Blaine, and for a time it drew wealthy visitors by rail to its electric lights, elevators and mountain views.

Fashion moved on and the hotel struggled, opening only in summer. From 1908 it housed the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women, which closed during the Depression. In 1937 it was bought by Norman G. Baker, a radio broadcaster, inventor and serial litigant from Muscatine, Iowa, who had no medical training but had already been barred from practising medicine in Iowa. He repainted the interior in lavender and reopened it as the Baker Hospital, advertising over the airwaves a cancer “cure” that relied on injections and spring water and urging listeners to shun surgery. Desperate patients paid heavily; many died. In January 1940 a federal court convicted Baker of mail fraud, calling his cure a “pure hoax”; after his appeals failed he served his sentence at Leavenworth from 1941 to 1944.

After years of neglect the Crescent reopened as a hotel in 1946, survived a fourth-floor fire in 1967 and was restored in stages from the 1970s. Marty and Elise Roenigk bought it in 1997 and spent years restoring it; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. In 2019 an excavation for a parking expansion turned up hundreds of bottles from Baker’s “treatments”.

The hotel’s ghost stories cluster around both chapters of its history. Staff tell of “Michael”, said to be an Irish stonemason who fell to his death during construction in the area that became Room 218 – a death for which no record has been published – and of “Theodora”, who introduces herself to housekeepers in Room 419 as one of Baker’s patients. Others describe Baker himself in the lobby and a nurse pushing a gurney in the basement near the old morgue. The owners market the Crescent as “America’s Most Haunted Hotel”, and it has been featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures and many other paranormal shows.

Guests and staff report a figure in Victorian dress in the dining room, a man in a white linen suit taken to be Baker, a nurse and gurney heard rattling through the basement, a child seen in the kitchen, doors slamming in Room 218, hands said to appear in a bathroom mirror, guests being “tucked in” at night, and laundry machines starting by themselves near the morgue.

Room 218 (“Michael”), Room 419 (“Theodora”), the Crystal Dining Room, the lobby, the kitchen, and the basement morgue with Baker’s autopsy table and walk-in cooler, which is the climax of the nightly ghost tour.

The Crescent’s nightly ghost tours, its preserved Baker-era morgue and its “Most Haunted” branding make it one of the best-known ghost destinations in the South. Norman Baker’s story has been told in books and documentaries about American medical quackery, and Eureka Springs as a whole has built a lively autumn ghost-tourism season.