Palace Hotel and Bath House

This 1901 limestone hotel in Eureka Springs operated as a bordello during Prohibition, and a working girl named Rosemary who died on the job still knocks on guest room doors when she thinks the house fee has not been collected.

A couple was in the middle of an intimate moment at the Palace Hotel when someone pounded on their door. The woman wrapped herself up, opened it, and found an empty hallway. According to local lore, that was Rosemary, and she was upset nobody had collected the fee up front.

The Palace Hotel and Bath House in Eureka Springs was built in 1901 by George T. Williams, who spent $1,000 on a building he wanted to look like a European castle. Irish stonemasons quarried the limestone locally and stacked it into a Richardsonian Romanesque structure with a mansard dome and bold metal finials at the corners. The bath house opened with 16 rooms, steam heat in every one, and electric light bulbs that were still a novelty in rural Arkansas. Water came from nearby Harding Spring, heated in steel tanks positioned above the bathhouse floor and fed down through the tubs. The original clawfoot tubs are still in use.

Somewhere in its history, the Palace operated as a bordello. The details are fuzzy, but the reputation stuck, and so did the ghost. Rosemary, as staff and locals call her, was a working girl who died during Prohibition, the story goes, "in the throws of passion." She started showing up after that. The knock on the door is her most famous move, an old madam's reflex, making sure the house gets its cut before anything proceeds.

The stonework and dome are worth the trip even without the ghost story. In the 1940s, a neon sign went up on the facade. Local lore calls it the first neon sign installed west of the Mississippi, possibly imported from Europe, though neither claim is easy to verify. An artist named Golly later repainted it. The sign has become a landmark in its own right, one of those details that makes Eureka Springs feel permanently stuck in its best decade.

Eureka Springs attracts most of its paranormal attention through the Crescent Hotel up the hill, and the Palace operates in that shadow. It does not market itself as haunted. There are no ghost tours through the lobby, no themed rooms. The hotel runs its century-old spa, offers eucalyptus steam treatments in wood barrel cabinets that have not changed much since 1901, and lets the architecture speak for itself.

Rosemary, if she is still around, seems to prefer it that way. She keeps to her one trick: a sharp knock, an empty hallway, and the faint suggestion that certain services require advance payment.