In Brief
Mountain Village 1890 in Bull Shoals, Arkansas is a make-believe town assembled from real old buildings trucked in from across the Ozarks. Its ghosts — a girl named Amanda, a Lady in Red — come almost entirely from one paranormal tour guide, and turn up in no record.
The Full Story
Mountain Village 1890 in Bull Shoals, Arkansas is a town that was built somewhere else and moved here piece by piece. In the late 1950s a Little Rock attorney named Roy Danuser flew over the Ozarks looking for old buildings worth saving, then had them trucked to a hillside and reassembled into a make-believe town. He set it in the year 1890 because, he said, it was a happy time. The buildings are real even though the town never was.
The oldest is a log cabin hand-hewn around 1830 and brought log by log from northwest of Jasper. The bank came from Ash Flat, built in 1881. The church was raised in Blue Eye, Missouri, in 1888. The depot was cut in two and hauled over from Pyatt, and it's the gift shop now, where the tour starts.
The ghost story is that when the buildings moved, whoever lived in them came along. Almost all of it comes from one man — a Tulsa paranormal investigator named Bill Fleming, who runs seasonal ghost tours and tells it as he walks visitors through. In his telling, the cabin belongs to an eight-year-old named Amanda, who laughs and tosses a ball and leaves cold spots; the general store is still watched over by the man who built it in 1889; and a fully solid Lady in Red glides past the bank and vanishes. The church is the worst of them, he says — pacing footsteps, sobbing, a hand reaching out from a pew. He says the caverns under the hill, all that limestone and water, amplify whatever happens above.
None of the named ghosts turn up anywhere but Fleming's tour. There's no record of an Amanda dying in that cabin, no violent night at the Ash Flat bank to explain a lady in red, no photo or recording from any of his investigations. The buildings have real pasts of their own — a Confederate colonel's house, the original Calico Rock jail, a blacksmith and coffin shop — but the spirits arrived with the tours, not the lumber. The village's own website, which made the National Register in 2023, doesn't mention a single one.
Everything here was secondhand by the time it arrived, hauled in from somewhere it used to belong. When the village made the National Register in 2023, the listing walked through it building by building — and named not one of the ghosts.
