TLDR
Room 443 at Arkansas's Arlington Resort Hotel was Al Capone's. Guests smell cigars in the non-smoking suite, and the sealed-side doorknob turns by itself.
The Full Story
Room 443 still smells like cigars.
The Capone Suite earned its name honestly. Al Capone rented the entire fourth floor of the Arlington when he came down from Chicago in the 1920s and '30s, and 443 was his. There's a gold placard on the door today that reads "AL CAPONE SUITE." The hotel went non-smoking years ago. The smell shows up anyway, in that one room.
There's a connecting door to the room next door. The doorknob on the other side was removed long ago, so nothing can be turning it. Guests in 443 still report hearing the knob turn. Knocking on the door has become a thing locals dare each other to do. The Boston Globe sent a writer in 2022 who tried it and left the suite intact in the telling.
The Arlington sits across an entire city block at 239 Central Avenue, facing Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs National Park. Twin Mediterranean Revival towers, two large public dining rooms, an original 1924 manual elevator with beveled glass and brass that still runs. The current building is the third Arlington on this site. The first opened April 1, 1875, a three-story wooden hotel financed by railroad executive Samuel W. Fordyce (the man Fordyce, Arkansas is named after). The second went up in 1892-1893 in Spanish Renaissance style: 300 rooms, four stories of red brick, corner towers. That one burned to the ground on April 5, 1923, in an electrical-panel fire that killed a fireman and did $1.6 million in damage. Pinkerton detective agency founder William Pinkerton was a guest that night and, by the contemporary account in the Sentinel-Record, sat on the veranda smoking instead of running for his belongings. He lost everything.
The current building was designed by Mann and Stern (George R. Mann had been the primary architect of the Arkansas State Capitol). Construction began October 25, 1923 and finished November 28, 1924. Eleven months and three days. Roughly 480 rooms. The Crystal Ballroom, the Magnolia Room, the Venetian Dining Room. All still standing.
Capone's stretch here in the 1930s is the part everyone remembers, but the guest list runs long: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Will Rogers, Tony Bennett, Yoko Ono, Barbra Streisand. The U.S. Army commandeered the whole hotel from Labor Day 1944 to the end of 1946 as a recreation center for servicemen. Joe T. Robinson announced his acceptance of the 1928 Democratic vice-presidential nomination from the front steps, broadcast across the continent by KTHS, the first radio station in Hot Springs.
The reason Capone treated this place like a vacation home: Hot Springs in the 1920s and '30s was a wide-open gambling town protected by local political machines. The Spa City era. He didn't have to hide here.
The Capone Suite is the loudest story but it isn't the only one. Room 824 is the 3-to-4-a.m. room. The bathroom sink turns itself on in that window, hot enough to steam up the room. Things fall off shelves. The lights flicker. Up on the seventh floor, footprints appear in the carpet outside Room 723, and a woman in a white gown walks the hallway. Some witnesses describe her as a bride, though the bride backstory shifts depending on who's telling it. No documented wedding tragedy, no named bride, no death on record.
A young girl in a pink dress appears in the lobby. She stands. She vanishes. Witnesses put her at six or seven and describe her hair as Shirley-Temple-curly. Nobody can name her either. A man in a black suit shows up in the laundry area and sometimes waves at the workers. In the bathhouse, where thermal water still pipes in from the Hot Springs Reservation, a figure described as a soldier has been spotted bathing. In one of the twin towers, a woman in a wedding gown looks down at the street at night.
Ghost tour scripts also name a bellman, "Henry Tweedle," walking the fourth floor and passing through closed doors. The name appears in Hot Springs ghost-tour scripts and on a handful of regional paranormal blogs. It does not appear in census records, in Sentinel-Record archives, or in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry. He's named in the legend; nobody has shown he ever worked here. Take that for what it is.
The Magnolia Room and the Venetian Dining Room chandeliers flicker and dim. Electricians have inspected the wiring more than once and found nothing wrong. The fourth-floor elevator is reported to stop on four without being called. The Hot Springs Sentinel-Record ran a full feature in October 2020 documenting staff and guest reports across the property; the headline was "Unexplained happenings commonplace at Arlington" and the reporter was Cassidy Kendall. A local daily running a 1,000-word ghost story on its front pages sets the Arlington apart from the average haunted-hotel listing. The stories aren't just sold by tour guides. They show up in the paper.
Sky Capital Group bought the hotel in 2017 from the Monty Scott family, who'd owned it since 1954. A $30 million renovation began in 2023, backed in part by Arkansas Federal Credit Union, with the explicit goal of returning the exterior to its 1924 appearance. Crews stripped seven layers of old stucco off the facade to get back down to the original brick. New self-healing stucco. New windows. Plaster, paint, plumbing replaced stack by stack. The hotel stayed open for guests through all of it. As of early 2025 the work was in its finishing stages.
The Capone Suite stayed bookable through the renovation. The cigar smell is still there. The doorknob turns on the sealed side. The gold placard reads AL CAPONE SUITE. +++
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