Fordyce Bathhouse

Now a museum operated by the National Park Service, the Fordyce Bathhouse has been carefully preserved to showcase what spa life was like in the early 1900s on historic Bathhouse Row.

The Fordyce Bathhouse stands at the center of Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a collection of eight ornate bathhouses built along the eastern slope of Hot Springs Mountain to harness the thermal waters that emerge from the earth at 143 degrees Fahrenheit. The Fordyce was designed by architects Mann and Stern of Little Rock, built at a cost exceeding $212,000, and opened on March 1, 1915. At approximately 28,000 square feet across three main floors, two courtyards, and a basement, it was the largest bathhouse on the Row. The facility was the vision of Sam Fordyce, a prominent Hot Springs businessman, and construction was supervised by his son John. Contemporary reviewers proclaimed it the finest bathhouse in Hot Springs, and its appointments reflected that ambition — stained glass ceilings, marble walls, classical statuary, a gymnasium that mirrored the one aboard the RMS Titanic, and hydrotherapy equipment that, to modern eyes, resembles nothing so much as elegant torture devices. Steam cabinets enclosed the body while the patient's head protruded from the top, and the treatment rooms on the upper floors featured an array of mechanical contraptions designed to pummel, heat, and pressure the human body into better health.

Despite its grandeur, the Fordyce was the first bathhouse on the Row to close, ceasing operations on June 30, 1962. The building sat vacant for decades before undergoing extensive restoration, reopening in May 1989 as the visitor center for Hot Springs National Park — the only national park set within the boundaries of a city.

The Fordyce's haunted reputation is understated compared to the nearby Arlington Hotel, but the phenomena reported within its tiled halls carry a distinctive character. Visitors have described an overwhelming sensation of stepping backward in time upon entering the building — not the nostalgic charm of a well-preserved museum, but the unsettling feeling that the bathhouse is still in active operation, with patients and attendants moving just beyond the edge of perception. Faint whispers have been heard in the treatment rooms on the upper floors when no other visitors are present, the sounds carrying through the marble corridors as though conversations from 1915 had become embedded in the stone itself.

Park rangers stationed at the Fordyce have developed a studied ambiguity about the phenomena, neither confirming nor denying whether the bathhouse harbors spirits — a diplomatic approach that only deepens the building's mystique. Staff members working after hours have reported the sound of running water in bathrooms that have been dry since 1962, and footsteps on the tiled floors of the upper treatment rooms. The gymnasium on the top floor, with its mechanical exercise equipment frozen in mid-century disrepair before restoration, has generated reports of metallic sounds — the clink and clatter of equipment being used in a room where nothing has moved under its own power in over sixty years.

The basement, which spans most of the building and once housed the mechanical systems that pumped and heated the thermal water, has a persistent reputation as the most uncomfortable space in the building. Visitors on rare occasions when the lower level is accessible have described cold spots that move through the space, a heaviness in the air, and the sensation of being watched from the shadows between the old pipes and boilers. Whether these sensations are the product of suggestion in a genuinely atmospheric space or evidence of something more, the Fordyce Bathhouse remains the grandest and most mysterious of the surviving bathhouses on the Row. It is open daily from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM with free admission, closed only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.