The 1886 Crescent Hotel

In the summer of 1937, a man in a white linen suit, a lavender shirt and a purple tie arrived in the little Ozark mountain resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and bought its grandest hotel.

His name was Norman Baker. He was a millionaire, a radio broadcaster, a showman and an inventor. He carried a pistol. He drove a lavender car. He had been run out of Iowa. And he announced to the world that he had found a cure for cancer.

For the next two years, the elegant Crescent Hotel on the hill above town became the Baker Hospital. Desperate, dying people came from all over the country. Many of them did not leave alive.

The Grand Hotel

The Crescent Hotel was built in 1886, in the boom years when Eureka Springs was one of the most fashionable resorts in America. The town had grown up around natural springs whose waters were said to cure everything from rheumatism to blindness. Wealthy visitors came by train from St. Louis, Kansas City and beyond to take the waters.

The hotel was the jewel of the town: a massive limestone palace with towers and balconies, perched on a mountaintop with sweeping views over the Ozark hills. It had electric lights, elevators and a dining room that seated five hundred. For a few decades, it was the place to be.

But by the early twentieth century, the fashion for spa towns had faded. The hotel struggled. For a time, it became a college for young women. Then it closed again during the Depression.

That’s when Norman Baker arrived.

The Quack

Norman Baker had no medical training. He had been a vaudeville performer and a successful inventor — he made his fortune with a calliope, an instrument powered by air. In the 1920s, he founded a powerful radio station in Muscatine, Iowa, and used it to attack doctors, the American Medical Association and “big business,” and to promote his own cures.

In 1929, he opened a cancer hospital in Muscatine. He claimed that he could cure cancer without surgery, radiation or X-rays, using his own secret formulas. Investigators later found that the “cure” was injected or taken orally and was made of ordinary substances — reportedly including things like watermelon seed, corn silk, alcohol and carbolic acid. The American Medical Association called him a fraud. Iowa revoked his radio license. Facing legal trouble, Baker left the state.

In Eureka Springs, he started over.

Baker Hospital

Baker bought the Crescent Hotel, painted parts of it in his favorite color — purple — and reopened it as a hospital and health resort. He advertised across the country, promising cures and attacking the doctors who had told patients there was no hope.

Patients came. They were sick, many of them dying, and Baker offered them something no one else did: hope. They paid large sums for treatment. According to the testimony later given in court, patients who got sicker were told it was a sign that the cure was working. Some were sent home to die. Some died at the hotel.

Baker made a fortune. Investigators later estimated that his cancer business earned him millions in today’s money.

In 1939, federal authorities charged him with mail fraud for using the U.S. mail to advertise his false cures. In 1940, he was convicted and sentenced to four years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. The Baker Hospital closed. Baker lived out the rest of his life in Florida, and died in 1958.

The Morgue

Over the decades, many stories grew up about what happened at the hotel during the Baker years, and not all of them can be confirmed.

There are stories of a morgue in the basement, where bodies were kept, and of a room with a large walk-in cooler and an autopsy table. When renovators worked in the hotel, according to accounts told by staff, they found jars containing human tissue and specimens hidden in the walls or under the floor. There are stories that Baker kept bodies on the property or buried them on the grounds. Historians caution that many of these details are difficult to verify. What’s certain is that real people, already suffering, were exploited by a con man, and that some of them died within those walls.

The Hotel’s Ghosts

Since reopening as a hotel, the 1886 Crescent Hotel has embraced its reputation as one of the most haunted hotels in America. It offers ghost tours every night and has been featured on numerous paranormal television shows.

The stories involve many eras of the hotel’s history.

The most famous ghost is said to be named Michael, an Irish stonemason who, according to legend, fell to his death during the hotel’s construction in the 1880s, landing in the area where Room 218 now stands. Guests in Room 218 report hands coming out of the bathroom mirror, the sound of something falling, the television turning on and off, and the door opening by itself.

Then there are the ghosts said to come from the Baker years. Guests and staff report seeing a nurse pushing a gurney down the halls at night. Others describe a man in a white suit and lavender shirt standing at the bottom of the stairs in the old recreation room — the description of Norman Baker himself. In Room 419, guests describe a polite woman who introduces herself as a former patient and then disappears.

There are also stories from the college years — of a young student who fell from a balcony — and of a Victorian gentleman with a beard who sits at the hotel bar.

The Real Monster

When I write about places like the Crescent, I’m always struck by how the legend tends to soften the real horror.

The hotel’s ghost stories are fun. Tours are lighthearted. There’s a gift shop, and the bar serves cocktails named for the ghosts. But the real story behind the Baker Hospital years is not entertaining at all. A man with no medical training lured terminally ill people with the promise of a cure, took their money, and told them their worsening pain was a sign of healing.

That’s the real horror story of the Crescent Hotel. And if any of those patients do still walk the halls, I hope that someone, someday, tells them the truth: it wasn’t their fault. They were only looking for a way to live.