Haunted Eureka Springs

With two family members I went up to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, recently. I say we went up because Eureka Springs is high in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. Eureka Springs once billed itself as a health resort; it is now very much a tourist destination. Packed with small shops and historic sites, a trip to Eureka Springs is in some ways a journey into the past.

The three of us stayed in a motel on the main highway. I know I shouldn’t complain—our lodgings were probably better than those of half the world’s population—but the place was rather decrepit and poorly-run. The one lock on the main door to our room was hard to work—even the motel manager struggled with it. The door to the bathroom closed but did not latch shut. Both the heater and the refrigerator were loud, making it difficult to fall asleep once the lights were out. The cleaning service left a plastic cup on the floor behind the toilet and a slipper on the floor by the dresser. The complementary breakfast was missing, except for a little breakfast cereal and a pitcher of milk in the mini-fridge. Worst of all, the room we were staying in was haunted.

Let me immediately interrupt my account to say that I do not believe in hauntings. The Bible says that when a believer dies, his or her soul is immediately taken to Paradise; when an unbeliever dies, his or her soul is immediately taken to Hades. Human spirits do not linger on this planet. Accounts of hauntings are due to a combination of wishful thinking (or dread), imagination, exaggeration, occasionally deliberate fraud, and unexpected events that fool the senses into seeing or hearing something that is not really there. The fact that I do not believe in ghosts does not prevent me from enjoying a good ghost story. I’ve even written a ghost story, which you can read here if you wish.

The Crescent Hotel, high atop a hill in Eureka Springs, is claimed to be haunted. It opened as a hotel and currently operates as a hotel, but in between it has been a girls’ school and a hospital. The proprietors encourage legends of ghosts in the building and even provide a tour of the hotel to allow guides to talk about the history of the building and the ghosts that supposedly remain there. For example, one ghost lives in a certain room of the Hotel and generally leaves guests alone. If they are loud or quarrelsome, though, it has been known to take the clothing the guests hung neatly in the closet and drop them to the floor.

The three of us stopped by the Crescent Hotel, not to take the ghost tour (which all of us have taken before), but to look at Christmas decorations. We also drove around the city to look at other decorations. When we returned to the motel, we hung up our winter coats and sat down to play a card game. The hangers in the motel, like those of many budget motels, are not ordinary hangers with hooks on the top. Instead, they have pegs which fit into slotted knobs on the hanger rod. I guess this keeps guests from stealing hangers from the hotel, since those peg-topped hangers would be useless anywhere else. Like everything else in the motel, the peg-topped hangers and slotted knobs were worn with age and with frequent use.

So we were playing a card game—not being particularly loud or at all quarrelsome—when one of the coats across the room dropped to the floor. Its owner picked it up and hung it again. Soon the same coat and another both dropped to the floor. At various times each of us had to rehang our coats, although mine dropped only once. We congratulated ourselves at experiencing a ghost in Eureka Springs without having to pay the fee for the ghost tour of the Crescent Hotel.

During the night I was startled awake by a voice that called my name. It was a young woman’s voice, although not that of anyone I recognized. We agreed the next morning that I must have been addressed by the same ghost who played with our coats, and another of us had to search for her socks in the morning, as they were not where she remembered leaving them the night before.

If anyone wants to stay in the haunted motel room in Eureka Springs, I can tell you the name of the motel and the room number. But don’t expect to sleep soundly or to be fed breakfast in the morning. About all they have to offer is their ghost. J.

PS: Due to trouble with the modem that serves my home computer, I am having to reach WordPress at the library. As a result, you can expect some irregularity in the posting of my Advent thoughts.