1886 Crescent Hotel

Guests at the 1886 Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas keep reporting a man in the lobby — a lavender shirt, a white linen suit. The staff think they know who he is. They say he's Norman Baker, and Baker is the reason the hotel keeps a morgue in its basement.

In 1937 Baker bought the building and opened a cancer hospital, despite having no medical training and an Iowa court injunction already on his record for practicing medicine. He painted the lobby a bright lavender, drove a custom lavender Cord automobile, and sold Eureka Springs to the dying under the slogan "Where Sick Folks Get Well."

His cure was a mix of carbolic acid, ground watermelon seed, corn silk, and clover, injected at the tumor site up to seven times a day. The patients who died were wheeled down to a basement morgue with an autopsy table and a walk-in cooler. Baker took millions before the federal government charged him with mail fraud, and in 1940 a court called his cure a "pure hoax" and "utterly false" and sent him to Leavenworth.

The hotel's other ghosts come from those years. Theodora, said to have been one of his cancer patients, keeps to Room 419. Dr. Ellis, a house physician, leaves the smell of cherry pipe tobacco in Room 212. The oldest of them is Michael, an Irish stonemason said to have died in a fall during construction in the 1880s, though no death record or account of the fall has ever turned up.

For decades all of it was just a story told on the nightly tour. Then on February 5, 2019, a gardener expanding a parking pad hit glass in the dirt, and the Arkansas Archeological Survey began pulling up bottles — hundreds of them, Baker's cure, dating to the years he was injecting people. Among the specimen jars they sent to a medical school in Little Rock, one held a bedsore cut from a patient. The clinic had always claimed it performed no surgery. The jar proved otherwise.