St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church

You enter St. Elizabeth's through its bell tower, a design so unusual it made Ripley's Believe It or Not. Railroad magnate Richard Kerens built the church in 1908-1909 with Italian marble and a dome inspired by the Hagia Sophia. A Lady in White haunts the gardens at twilight clutching a rosary, and the manually operated bells chime by themselves late at night in a locked, empty building.

Richard Kerens ordered marble from Italy for a church on an Ozark hillside. The railroad magnate, Irish-born and self-made, had built his fortune on mail contracts out of Fort Smith after the Civil War, then bet big on rail lines into northwest Arkansas. In 1904, he started building a memorial chapel on a limestone bluff in Eureka Springs, dedicated to his deceased mother Elizabeth. The dome was modeled after the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. He imported marble altars, mosaic flooring, and white Carrara marble Stations of the Cross sculpted in Italy by a team of five carvers. Decades later, in 1953, an Italian sculptor named Checchi Mario directed the carving of the white marble garden statues that still stand outside the church, including Our Lady of Fatima with the children and sheep, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. Joseph, St. Francis, and St. Elizabeth. The church itself was dedicated on May 11, 1909. Kerens added the bell tower the following year, then left Arkansas to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Austria-Hungary.

The entrance makes no sense and that's the point. You walk in through the bell tower, the only church in the world with this design, a fact that earned a spot in Ripley's Believe It or Not. The terrain forced the decision. Eureka Springs is built on slopes so steep that the street-level entrance lands at the top of the building, and the bell tower became the way in. Local dolomite limestone from surrounding quarries forms the exterior walls. Inside, a chandelier with approximately 7,500 crystals was added in 1983. The roof was completely rebuilt in 2014. Full rewiring came in 2018, followed by art restoration of the rotunda ceiling, painted deep blue with gold stars, in 2019.

Father Michael Smythe had established the congregation earlier, completing a simple frame church on this bluff around 1882. The Sisters of Mercy opened Hotel Dieu Hospital next door in 1901, running a convalescent facility and school with thirty-four pupils on opening day. They served the community for eleven years. Kerens's stone replacement was built to outlast all of them.

The Lady in White shows up in the gardens at twilight. She wears a flowing white gown and holds a rosary. Witnesses describe her as calm but unmistakably sad, and she fades fast when anyone gets close. One theory ties her to a bride who died shortly before her wedding at the church. Another connects her to the Sisters of Mercy. She's appeared in visitor photographs without anyone noticing her presence at the time the picture was taken.

The bell tower is harder to dismiss. Staff and clergy hear footsteps climbing the tower stairs when nobody is there. The bells have chimed late at night, which shouldn't be possible. They require physical effort to ring manually. A retired caretaker told a local ghost tour company that after locking up following a wedding rehearsal, he heard the bells ring clearly as he crossed the street. The church was empty and locked. He didn't go back inside to check.

Near the memorial plaques in the gardens, visitors describe sudden waves of grief or heaviness that arrive without warning and pass just as quickly. A hunched figure has been seen kneeling beside plaques, vanishing when approached directly. During Mass, parishioners have noticed candles refusing to stay lit, doors pulling shut by themselves, and flickering lights near the altar. The church sits at 30 Crescent Drive, a short walk below the Crescent Hotel, and both locations are standard stops on Eureka Springs ghost tours. St. Elizabeth's remains an active parish.