1886 Crescent Hotel

Dubbed America's Most Haunted Hotel, this 1886 Victorian resort became Norman Baker's fraudulent cancer hospital in the 1930s. Bodies were found in the walls during renovations.

The 1886 Crescent Hotel rises from the limestone bluffs of the Ozark Mountains in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a grand resort conceived by the Eureka Improvement Company under former governor Powell Clayton. Architect Isaac S. Taylor of St. Louis designed the building in a blend of French Renaissance and Richardsonian Romanesque styles, and construction began in 1884 using eighteen-inch-thick limestone blocks hand-carved by Irish stonemasons from a quarry on the White River near Beaver, Carroll County. The stones were cut and fitted with such precision that no mortar was needed. The hotel opened to the public on May 1, 1886, at a cost of $294,000, and on May 20 a banquet honored former Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine. The Eureka Springs Times-Echo declared it "America's most luxurious resort hotel."

The hotel's first death occurred during construction. In 1885, an Irish stonemason named Michael fell from the roof to the second-floor area that would become Room 218. His death marked the beginning of the building's haunted reputation, though the darker chapter was still decades away. After declining tourism forced the hotel to close, it operated as the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women from 1908 to 1924, then briefly as a junior college from 1930 to 1934.

In 1937, Norman Baker purchased the hotel and transformed it into the Baker Hospital and Health Resort. Baker was a former vaudeville performer and radio broadcaster from Iowa who had no medical credentials. He had previously operated the Baker Institute in Muscatine, Iowa, where his cancer treatments generated over $75,000 monthly. At the Crescent, he painted the building lavender and administered his "Formula 5" — a mixture of alcohol, glycerol, carbolic acid, ground watermelon seed, corn silk, and clover leaves — by injection at the cancer site, up to seven times daily. The basement kitchen was converted into a morgue. During the twenty months the Baker Hospital operated, forty-four patients died. Federal authorities arrested Baker in January 1940 after just seven fraudulent letters placed in the U.S. mail were sufficient to convict him. The court found his cure a "pure hoax" and "utterly false," sentencing him to four years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he served from May 1941 to July 1944.

The hotel reopened on July 4, 1946, survived a fourth-floor fire in 1967, and underwent restorations beginning in 1973. Marty and Elise Roenigk purchased the property on February 28, 1997, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 26, 2016.

At least eight distinct spirits are reported. Michael, classified as a poltergeist due to the frequency of his activity, haunts Room 218 — the hotel's most spiritually active location. He flips lights on and off, pounds on the walls, knocks on the headboard while guests sleep, ties curtains and towels into knots, and swings the balcony doors open dramatically. Female guests report being touched on the shoulder and hearing the scream of a falling man in the ceiling. Hands have been seen emerging from the bathroom mirror. Theodora, a cancer patient from the Baker era, is encountered outside Room 419 fumbling for her keys and has been known to tidy guest rooms — but only if she approves of the occupant. Dr. John Freemont Ellis, the hotel's in-house physician in the late nineteenth century, is detected near his former office, now Room 212, by the scent of his cherry pipe tobacco. Breckie, four-year-old Clifton Breckinridge Thompson, who died in the hotel from complications of appendicitis, is seen bouncing a ball throughout the property; child guests describe a curly-haired boy in period clothing. Norman Baker himself appears in the lobby wearing his signature lavender shirt and white linen suit. A nurse pushing a gurney has been witnessed vanishing through a wall in the old morgue corridor — a guest first reported this in 1987. The Girl in the Mist, whose identity remains unknown, reenacts a fall from the balcony before dissolving. And Morris, the hotel's beloved orange tabby cat who served as unofficial General Manager for twenty-one years until his death in 1994 — more than eighty people attended his burial on the grounds — continues to be seen and heard patrolling his domain.

The hotel has been featured on seventeen paranormal television programs. TAPS investigated for Ghost Hunters Season 2, capturing a thermal camera figure in the morgue that Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson could not debunk and concluded resembled a Civil War soldier; they also recorded high EMF readings in rooms 419 and 2500. Ghost Adventures Season 18 Episode 7, which aired June 8, 2019, documented Zak Bagans falling ill in a section known as "The Pain Ward" and the team making contact with Michael while hearing a gurney squeaking in the morgue. Days after the Ghost Adventures investigation in April 2019, landscaper Susan Benson accidentally uncovered a dump site while expanding a parking area. University of Arkansas archaeologists excavated the find on February 5, 2019, unearthing over five hundred bottles of Baker's Formula 5, a bone saw, sixteen-millimeter film showing "before Baker treatment" images, and specimen jars — some containing human tissue, including one identified as a bed sore removed from a patient. A full-body apparition was captured on laser grid technology during the 2021 Paranormal Weekend in the Crystal Dining Room, corroborating years of eyewitness accounts of a figure sitting by the window.

Over 35,000 ghost hunters take the nightly tours annually, led by the Eureka Springs Paranormal Team. The hotel also hosts an annual Paranormal Weekend investigation event and maintains a Facebook community of nearly 20,000 members sharing experiences and photographs. Its limestone foundation, which paranormal investigators believe may absorb and release electromagnetic energies, continues to fuel one of the most documented hauntings in America.