St. Elizabeth's Catholic Church

> St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church sits on Crescent Drive in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, on the side of a mountain between the Carnegie Library and the Crescent Hotel. To get inside, you walk under a forty-foot stone tower and follow a hundred-foot path down to the chapel. It is the only church in America you enter through its bell tower — a layout so strange that Robert Ripley put it in "Believe It or Not!" three separate times, in 1931, 1953, and 1961. > > The bells in that tower are operated by hand. They are not built to ring on their own. But staff and clergy say they do — chiming at odd hours, including the dead of night, when no one is in the tower to pull them. > > One retired caretaker tells the worst of it. He locked up after a late wedding rehearsal, crossed the street, and heard the bells ring out behind him. He turned around. The church was empty, dark, and locked tight. > > All of it traces back to a single source — the same one that reports footsteps climbing the tower stairs when no one is there, and a Lady in White seen at twilight in the gardens. None of it is corroborated. No death or named figure is tied to any of it. > > The history, by contrast, is solid and stranger than the ghosts. The man who built the church was Richard Kerens, an Irish-born railroad man who came to Eureka Springs in 1881 and helped build the Crescent Hotel next door. He raised the chapel in memory of his mother, Elizabeth, and the church for both his parents. The design was modeled on Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The altars and floors are Italian marble. The chandelier in the center holds 7,511 crystals. > > The church was dedicated on May 11, 1909, the same year Kerens was named United States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary. He funded the freestanding bell tower the year after. > > It's in use to this day, more than a century on. The bells have to be rung by hand. People who work there say they hear them anyway, when no one has touched the rope.