In Brief
Room 443 at the Arlington Resort Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas was Al Capone's. The hotel went non-smoking years ago, but guests still report cigar smoke in the suite — and a connecting doorknob that turns, on a door with no knob on the other side.
The Full Story
At the Arlington Resort Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, there's a suite people pay to be unsettled in. Room 443, fourth floor, a gold placard on the door that reads AL CAPONE SUITE. The hotel went non-smoking years ago. Guests still report the smell of cigars in 443.
The room was Capone's. When he came down from Chicago in the 1920s and '30s, he didn't book a room — he booked the entire fourth floor, for himself and the men he traveled with. Hot Springs was a wide-open gambling town then, its casinos running in the open under the local machine's protection, and a Chicago boss could vacation here as freely as any banker. Room 443 was his favorite, and the floor around it was his.
The suite connects to the room next door, and the knob on the far side of that door was taken off long ago. There's nothing there to turn. Guests in 443 say they hear it turn anyway. Knocking on that door has become a local dare. Of everything people carry out of the room, the knob that turns on a door that can't is the one they repeat.
The hotel they smell him in is the one he knew. An earlier Arlington on this spot burned to the ground in 1923 — an electrical fire that killed a fireman — and the replacement went up fast, open by late 1924, the building still standing today. This is the floor Capone took, in the house that rose right after the fire.
The Arlington just finished a $30 million restoration: seven layers of stucco stripped off the exterior to expose the original 1924 brick, the plumbing replaced floor by floor. It stayed open the whole time. Room 443 never closed. You can still book it. The cigar smell comes with it.
