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The 1886 Crescent Hotel - Not Everyone Checks Out in the Morning...

Care to spend a night in a haunted hotel? One where a strange doctor used to use the building and make his patients test subjects for his experiments? We did! And plenty of strange things happened to us which didn't leave a doubt in our minds that there's a few extra guests besides the living ones staying at the old hotel in the victorian town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

 

Planning on traveling to Arkansas? Let Michigan’s Otherside recommend the beautiful and haunted Crescent Hotel in the old fashioned Victorian town of Eureka Springs. We headed out to the Crescent Hotel to attend a paranormal conference. The hotel was so entertaining and the weather was so amazing, I couldn’t find myself able to sit inside and listen to the speakers. I sat upstairs in the vender’s room on a veranda outside soaking up as much sun as I could, wishing I could bring it home with me. Coming from Michigan in March, Arkansas was like being in a tropical resort at 70 degrees compared to the 30 degrees back home.

The Crescent Hotel has quite the history to back up its haunted activity. Built around 1884, the hotel started out originally as a posh place for people looking to get away at a cozy mountain retreat. Ownership of the hotel went through many hands, but when the place fell into the hands of Norman Baker, the atmosphere of building would change drastically. All kinds of terrible tales have been told about this doctor. It’s been said his patients were buried within the walls and in the morgue of the building as well. When one of his experiments went wrong, he stuffed the body within the hotel somewhere.

Our buddy Doug of Ghostly Talk Paranormal Radio splurged and reserved the “haunted penthouse” the first night and the infamous haunted room 218 the next night where a few strange things happened. The room is very tiny compared to some of the other rooms in the hotel but there is a nice window that opens onto a veranda overlooking the mountains and the backyard of the hotel along with wrought iron tables to lounge at. An eerie picture of a boy hangs above the toilet in the bathroom.

When they came into the room, the water was running after Shawn Burris had used it and remembers turning it off. We did some EVP sessions but as far as I know, no one caught anything.

 

 

The Ouija Board Gets A Little Freaky in Room 218

I collect Ouija boards. I adore Ouija boards. But I don’t use them. It’s not that I think they are terrible instruments of the Devil like a lot of people do, I just don’t have the patience to sit there and wait for the dumb thing to move. So when one girl who uses the Ouija bored frequently brought hers with, I had to stay and watch as they pulled it out and began asking questions about whose spirit was present. Just before the Ouija boards session started, our friend Jason who was in a kneeling position on the floor, propping his body up on the bed, could have sworn he saw an arm reach out from under the bed. Was it just his imagination? Either way, it spooked him out.

Messages started coming through on the Ouija with speed and I can verify that the people using it were not pushing the planchette around themselves. A few different spirits came through. One lady said she had been one of the victims killed and walled up. Another said he was the man who had died in the room and a few others seemed to push their way to the front of the line.

I watched as the planchette whooshed over the board, spelling out words and answering questions as quickly as they were asked. When the spirit of the man who had died in the room was coming through, Tom from Michgian’s Otherside came into the room.

As soon as Tom stepped into the room, the planchette that had been moving wildly over the board, went to “Good Bye” and moved off the edge of the board. We all got quiet for a second then looked at Tom. Tom just shrugged and wasn’t surprised. He practices Shamanism and seems to have a “way” with sending spirits off at times. I guess that night it just took him walking into the room! Jason was still spooked from the “arm under the bed incident” from earlier and seeing the Ouija react the way it did to Tom, Jason promply left the room with Tom. Everyone else wanted to continue the mini-séance and the spirit wasn’t going to come back with Tom in the room.

As soon as they left the room, the planchette started moving once more. The sitters asked is the spirit left because of Tom and why. The board spelled out, B-A-D-M-O-J-O or “Bad Mojo.” We seemed kind of stumped on this but we think if there was in fact a spirit coming through on the board, Tom’s energy made it shy away.

Later on that night, Tom was in the basement which used to be the morgue of the quack doctor Norman Baker. Standing by the locker that read “5,” Tom was listening to the tour guide explain what had happened to the patients of the crazy doctor. When a camera flash went off, Tom saw a guy standing to his right. Instantly, Tom said, “Whoa…did anyone else see something there?” The guy giving the tour then said, “Ah yeah…I had seen someone standing next to your right when the flash went off.” And that was exactly what Tom had seen.

So is the Crescent Hotel haunted? You’ll have to go there to find out for yourself.

I found out after we had left, that mine and Scott’s room was supposedly a haunted room. When the building was a college for women, one of the girls jumped out of the bathroom window and committed suicide. Is it true? No clue. But nothing happened to us and we slept great on the kind size bed complete with a feather mattress. And I recommend the Day Spa!

 

Crescent Hotel Official website

Read more on the haunting of the Crescent Hotel here

 

Check out the pictures from our weekend at the Crescent Hotel

 

 

Written by Amberrose Hammond

 

 

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