(EUREKA SPRINGS, AR) – If there was a National Trust for Haunted Places, some say that the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa, located here atop Crescent Mountain, should be on the national register. Here are just a few reasons why:
- Jack Moyer, hotel general manager, was having Sunday Brunch in the hotel’s Crystal Dining Room with his wife Misty when another employee joined their table and handed them a recent “ghost sighting” photograph taken by a hotel guest. Hotel employees for the most part are used to seeing photos of orbs, shadows or other sometimes unclear unexplainables but when Jack handed this particular photo to Misty she turned white. Still ashen, she struggled to whisper, “It’s her… the woman I saw.”
The photograph, taken in one of the hotel’s new luxury suites, was of a hotel guest modeling a new outfit she had purchased from a downtown Eureka Springs’ boutique. In fact the series of photos had her modeling several different outfits. As she would step out of the bathroom and strike a pose her husband would snap a photo. In each you could see the corner of the bed, the Jacuzzi tub and the 32” television that was turned off. The particular photo that caused the reaction from Ms. Moyer showed on the screen of the television set the reflection of a young woman in Victorian attire. The same woman Ms. Moyer claims she awoke to see at the foot of her bed early one morning in that same room when she and her husband had stayed there several months earlier.
(continued)
PAGE TWO OF TWO
“America’s Most Haunted….”
- Steve Garrison, a cook for the hotel’s Crystal Dining Room restaurant for the past fourteen years recounts, “I’ve lived here (Eureka Springs) all my life and I have never been one to believe this stuff.” That all changed two different mornings in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Morning 1: Garrison was “slicing and dicing” vegetables when he looked up and saw a little boy with “pop bottle” glasses, dressed in very old-looking clothes such as knickers, who was skipping around the kitchen. Morning 2: When opening that same kitchen early one morning he flipped on the lights only to see “some or all of the pots and pans come flying off their hooks.” He was quick to add, “I don’t drink on the job. In fact, I don’t drink… period.
- A former gift shop employee vividly remembers a late night “customer” she encountered, “One slow evening, I was leaning gently against the display case, kind of looking downward, but not really at anything when I looked up. There in the store’s doorway into the hotel lobby stood a man, looking out of place in time. He was dressed in a long, black cutaway coat with a tall shirt collar and ascot-like cravat, top hat and his face was adorned with mutton-chop sideburns. His trousers were gray striped but as I continued to gaze down his image ended around the middle of the lower leg. It didn’t go all the way to the floor. His image was there. It was very complete and lifelike, not at all wavy or wispy.
I blinked and said, ‘Whoa!?!’ and in that instance he disappeared. I sped into the lobby toward the Crystal Dining Room then back toward the Governor’s Suite but he was absolutely gone. I never saw him again.”
It is stories like these that adequately intrigued the producers of the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Ghost Hunters” program to spend nearly a week in the hotel this summer to investigate, film, and discover stories of their own. Although those individuals involved in the production of the Crescent Hotel episode have taken a pledge of secrecy until the show airs sometimes this fall, all indications are that the show will reveal even more titillating tales of the plethora of precocious poltergeists that have been checking in but never leaving this Historic Hotel of America since 1886.