The Ohio Club

In the back room of the Ohio Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas, there's a slot machine that bartenders say runs by itself. It sits where the old casino used to operate, and the staff tell it the same way: the thing turns over on its own, even though they've kept it unplugged for years.

That back room earned its ghost. The Ohio Club opened in 1905 and is considered Arkansas's oldest continually operating bar, and for most of that run it was a casino as much as a saloon. When Arkansas outlawed gambling in 1913, and Prohibition outlawed the liquor in 1919, the club didn't close. It put on a disguise.

The front became the "Ohio Cigar Store" — a storefront built only about ten feet deep, with doors at the back. Walk through, and the full bar opened up on the main floor, with gaming tables running upstairs. It worked in plain sight for years. The club even advertised two phone numbers, 210 and 211, for its two kinds of business.

The crowd it drew matched the disguise. Hot Springs ran as a neutral zone for the underworld, and the Ohio Club was a favorite hangout, its visitors said to include Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Owney Madden. Babe Ruth drank here during spring training. A life-sized Capone statue greets people at the door today, in case anyone forgets what the building used to be.

The other haunted spot is the basement, a regular stop on the city's ghost tours. The story tour guides tell is that a gangster was executed down there — though that account runs against the record, since Madden didn't settle in Hot Springs until 1933. Visitors say that at night, standing at the top of the basement stairs, you can feel cold air rising "that has nothing to do with HVAC."

None of it is written down. There's no death record, no name, no date for the slot machine. What's documented is the building: a casino that hid behind a cigar store for half a century, and the one machine in it the staff swear they cannot keep switched off.