Palace Hotel and Bath House

Originally built as a bathhouse in 1901 to take advantage of Eureka Springs' healing waters, this downtown hotel has been in continuous operation for over a century.

The Palace Hotel and Bath House rises at 135 Spring Street in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a Richardsonian Romanesque structure of local rusticated limestone built in 1901 at the height of the town's fame as a Victorian healing spa. Eureka Springs had been founded on July 4, 1879, after Judge J. B. Saunders of Berryville visited Basin Spring and was allegedly cured of a severe skin disease. Word of the miraculous healing waters spread so rapidly that by 1881 Eureka Springs had become Arkansas's fourth-largest city, and by 1889 its second largest, behind only Little Rock. Thousands of travelers from around the world journeyed to the Ozark Mountain town to bathe in its mineral springs, and the Palace Hotel emerged as what newspapers of the era called "the best-equipped bath house in the state."

The building was designed in the dramatic Romanesque style, its two-story facade dominated by a large entrance arch with a two-story arch above it, capped by a metal-covered mansard dome and pressed-metal cornice. Bold metal finials mark the building's corners. Built on the edge of a cliff, the hotel descends three levels below the main floor to reach the bathhouse, where original six-foot-long clawfoot tubs from 1901 remain in service alongside Victorian-era eucalyptus steam barrel cabinets. The Palace had electric lights and steam heat in every room, as well as an electric elevator -- extravagances in a town where many buildings still lacked indoor plumbing. Celebrity guests included comedian W. C. Fields and chewing gum magnate C. W. Wrigley, who came to take the waters alongside senators, businessmen, and society figures.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the building's second floor served a purpose that management preferred not to advertise. Like many establishments in the Victorian resort towns of the era, the Palace operated a brothel upstairs while maintaining its legitimate hotel and bathhouse business below. The arrangement was common enough in Eureka Springs, where the influx of wealthy male travelers created a reliable market for companionship alongside hydrotherapy. The madam who ran the upstairs operation kept careful accounts and, by all evidence, ran a tightly managed enterprise.

Patronage of the hotel and bathhouse diminished during the Great Depression, but after World War II the Palace enjoyed a revival. Today it operates as the only remaining historic bathhouse in Eureka Springs, a National Historic Register property that preserves the town's heritage as what was once called "America's Medicine Teepee." The mineral baths in the original clawfoot tubs remain the hotel's primary draw, with couples massage and eucalyptus steam treatments offered in spaces that have provided therapeutic bathing for over a century.

The ghosts at the Palace Hotel appear to be connected to both chapters of the building's history. Guests report the scent of lavender and bath salts permeating rooms where no such products are present -- phantom aromas from the thousands of mineral baths drawn in the original tubs over more than a century. The fragrance arrives without warning and dissipates just as suddenly, as if a treatment session from 1901 is replaying in the room's memory. A woman in early 1900s bathing attire has been seen on the second floor, walking the hallway that once served as the approach to the bordello. She appears solid enough to be mistaken for a living person before vanishing through a wall or simply ceasing to exist when looked at directly. Doors throughout the building open and close on their own, a phenomenon reported by staff and guests in different rooms and on different floors, suggesting a building-wide pattern rather than a single spirit.

One account from guests at the hotel describes a loud, insistent knock on their door during an intimate moment. When they answered, no one was there. The event was attributed -- with some humor -- to the madam from the old brothel, upset that she had not collected her fees in advance. Whether the spirit was genuinely enforcing the house rules of a business that closed generations ago or the knock had a more mundane explanation, the story captures the Palace Hotel's unusual dual identity: a place of healing and pleasure, of mineral waters and human desire, where the building's thick limestone walls have absorbed more than a century of both.