SYMHC Classics: Crescent Hotel

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. We talked about ghosts and hauntings this week in an installment of six Impossible Episodes, and we mentioned that we were not including any haunted hotels in that episode, so we thought we would revisit a haunted hotel for today's Saturday Classic, and that's the Crescent Hotel of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. As a note, there is a moment in this episode that caused me to laugh out loud when I listened to it ahead of choosing it for a Saturday Classic. It is when we compare the cost of building the Crescent Hotel in eighteen eighty six to the cost of buying a house at the time that we recorded it. I just want to say, we are definitely aware of how much the average home price in the US has risen since that episode came out on March ninth, twenty sixteen. Like it's an amount of money that was already much lower than hous's costs in a lot of places the time, but it was roughly in line with the median at that time and it is not anymore. Also, just please excuse how I said the word penitentiary. So enjoy. Welcome to stuff you Missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, look, welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today's topic is a request by our listener Jordan. We're talking about a hotel with a fascinating history and allegedly some lingering spirits who never checked out. And what's really kind of interesting is that this is a hotel that has had many identities in its one hundred and thirty two years since it first opened, but the most colorful phase involved some quackery and incredibly misleading medical claims on the part of a particular gentleman. So we're talking about the Crescent Hotel and Norman Baker, and we're just going to jump right into kind of talking about how the hotel got made, and then we'll talk about Norman Baker, and then we'll also talk a little bit about the ghosts that are allegedly there, So it'll be a little early springtime ghost story to start at the beginning. In eighteen eighty two, the Eureka Springs Improvement Company was founded in you guessed it, Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Carpetbagger and former Arkansas Governor Powell Clayton founded the company, which was focused on bringing the railroad to the town and also on developing some infrastructure, housing attractions that would serve people once they arrived by the railroad. So from eighteen eighty two to eighteen eighty four there was construction going on at just a breakneck pace, and the town was actually a popular destination for travelers before all that development, though, and even before it was even officially founded as a city in eighteen seventy nine, and all that tourism was due to the fact that the springs for which the town was named were believed to have curative properties. The magical healing reputation was started when a doctor allegedly cured his son's blindness with spring water there in eighteen fifty six, and throughout the Civil War and after it, more and more stories emerged from people who claimed to be cured or know someone who had been cured by the water from these springs. In eighteen eighty four, construction started on the Crescent Hotel, and it was part of the larger effort by the Eureka Springs Improvement Company. It was also in collaboration with the Frisco Train company. The site for the resort was chosen at the top of West Mountain above Eureka Springs proper, and it was on twenty seven acres that overlooked the valley. In eighteen eighty five, while the hotel was still being built, an Irish stone mason is said to have lost his balance and fallen several floors into the second floor area, and he died there. In hotel lore, this mason is named Michael. I was not able to verify the accuracy of this tale, one way or the other. I spent a lot of time combing through the Arkansas Free Public Records directory online, and without a last name attached to it, just the name Michael, Eureka Springs and the year of death really did not churn up anything that corroborated this, one way or the other. Despite this purported death, the work continued on a hotel, and the Crescent opened its doors for business the following year, on May twentieth of eighteen eighty six. At this point it was a sumptuous, well appointed Victorian resort, and it was intended to cater to the wealthy with every possible luxury. The hotel had cost an exorbitant two hundred and ninety four thousand dollars to build. That is a massive amount of money for the time, even though today that would buy you a lovely house and a medium neighborhood in many cities. There was a galla ball and a banquet serve to launch the hotel's life as part of this big opening, and it was lauded as the utmost in luxury in all of the newspaper coverage. Guests were offered all manner of amenities to enjoy, including a spa. Of course, the spring waters were still a big part of the draw. There was cro Okay, a walk in beautiful gardens could be taken at any time. There was a stable of one hundred horses from which guests could choose a ride. There was an in house orchestra that they retained there at the resort that played regularly. There were picnics and open coach rides for guests who wanted to relax outdoors. To the great delight of Powell Clayton and his business investors, the venture really succeeded in drawing a wealthy clientele. People traveled from all around the country to enjoy these dazzling parties and to take dips in the healing waters. In eighteen eighty eight, the train lines directly into Eureka Springs were completed, and that made accommodations at the luxury resort even more accessible for the people who could afford to stay there. In eighteen ninety six, William Jennings Bryan delivered one of the orations for which he was famous at the Crescent Hotel. This was the year when he made his famous Cross of Gold speech and was the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, so this really was a pretty high profile appearance. The hotel was expanded in nineteen hundred and running water was added throughout the facility, and additional quarters were built for servants and staff as sort of an annex. But even then the hotel's popularity was starting to wane. People had realized that the rumors of the water's seemingly magical powers were not really substantiated, and the hotel's bookings were starting to drop off. And as the prosperity of the Crescent Hotel was on this downward trajectory, Powell Clayton decided to leave behind his venture, and in nineteen oh two he left Eureka Springs behind, and he started a new job as the US Ambassador to Mexico. There were connections that he had made through his position as head of that company that kind of gave him the end to that position, and from the time of Clayton's departure, the hotel really just slowly fell into disrepair. In nineteen oh eight, a new business plan was launched to try to fill the empty rooms of the hotel and to bring in more money. The hotel opened up as the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women. In the summer, it was still the Crescent Hotel and was open for resort guests, but for the rest of the year it was a ladies educational institution. The hope was that the same families who were drawn to Eureka Springs as a vacation locale would also be happy to send their daughters there for school, and this kind of worked for a while, actually for a pretty decent amount of time, but by the nineteen twenties, remember this was launched in nineteen oh eight, so more than a decade, but by the nineteen twenties, the income from enrollment was not really keeping up. It wasn't enough to make up for the lack of guests that they had, and in nineteen twenty four, the Crescent Hotel closed as both a hotel and as a woman's college. There was a brief gasp of life again in nineteen thirty when the Crescent reopened again, this time was a junior college, but once again it couldn't sustain itself as an educational facility, and the school closed just six years later. And we're about to get to what's considered the most colorful and kind of c d part of the Crescent Hotel's history. But before we do, we're going to pause and have a word from one of our sponsors. Before we talk more about the Crescent Hotel, we'll have to talk about its next owner, who was Norman Baker. Norman was born on November twenty seventh of eighteen eighty two in Muscatine, Iowa, and his parents, John and Francis Baker, had ten children. Norman was the youngest. I also saw it listed once as nine children, but a large herd of children, and he was the youngest. And the Bakers were pretty industrious people, but before becoming a wife and mother, Francis did a good bit of writing, and John owned and ran a manufacturing company, and he had more than one hundred patents to his name. But Norman was different from his parents. He would turn out to have drive of his own, but it manifest in very different ways. He dropped out of school after his sophomore year and then spent several years drifting around picking up machinist work here and there. Then he found inspiration in a Vaudeville act. Believing he could put together a similar and lucrative act to the one that he had seen that inspired him, Norman started his own traveling act that featured various actresses in the role of Madame Pearl Tangly, who is a mind reader and a mystic. And he toured the mind reading show for a full decade, including making one of the Madame Pearl Tanglies his wife briefly before having that marriage annulled before he wrapped that particular project, just because I know that mentioning Vaudeville will probably bring in emails from people saying, hey, you should do a podcast on the history of Vaudeville. They're already two in the archive. Yeah. So, once he was done with this entertainment enterprise, Baker went back home to his hometown in Iowa and turned his hand to other business ventures. He ran a correspondence school that taught art lessons and mail order business, and he invented a device called the air calliophone. This caliophone was an organ that ran on air pressure and it could carry it sound really incredible distances. He patented this device in nineteen fourteen, and he opened a factory to produce them. In nineteen sixteen, After almost another ten years of running his various small businesses, Norman Baker decided to get into radio and he started his own radio station with the call letters KTNT that stood for No the Naked Truth, and he used his broadcast to talk about the issues of small town life, some of it things like agriculture and sort of basic need to know type things, but also to comment and participate in larger issues, such as the nineteen twenty eight presidential race, in which he was a very vocal supporter of Republican candidate Herbert Hoover. Baker would also broadcast attacks on anyone who criticized him or any of his work, and he seemed to really have a grind against Catholicism because he would attack the Catholic religion on the regular, KTNT became something of a branding juggernaut. Baker produced a magazine called The Naked Press that served as a supplement to his on air editorials. He opened a gas station and a restaurant under the KTNT name, and while he was broadcasting from what you might think of as a local station, he wound up with incredible reach. Allegedly he could be heard at times as far away as Hawaii. Baker had been so devoted to the Hoover campaign that once the election was over and Hoover had won, Norman was invited to meet the President, and this connection would later pay off with yet another business venture, as Hoover supported Baker in his launch of The Midwest Free Press in December of nineteen thirty. As this publishing empire began to expand, Baker also started to be really vocal about another group doctors, claiming that he knew better than they did, so much so that he claimed he could cure cancer. This is like just the thing that quack doctors always seemed to jump to you, So, I mean, never mind that he had zero medical training. Baker opened up his own curative facility, which was the Baker institute which had one hundred beds, a whole out of staff, with really dubious certifications, and the promise of curing cancer. Hospital slogan was cancer is curable and to prove his claims that he had the cure that the medical establishment did not. And here is a brief warning that things are about to get a little dicey if you're squeamish. Although I believe it to have been a theatrical thing and not an actual thing, Baker staged a festival, drawing a massive crowd of thousands. Estimates, depending on what you read, put the number of attendees everywhere from between seventeen thousand and thirty thousand, so in some ways this was a callback to his days running the Madame Pearl Tangley Show. There were entertainers and testimonials, and then Baker went on stage to extol the virtues of his miracle elixir. It was magic in a bottle, according to him, and just the contents of one bottle could cure twenty five people according to his pitch. And the grand finale to all of this, with these many thousands of onlookers, was kind of a grizzly spectacle, A farmer named Mandis Johnson, who was sixty eight, was broad on stage his head bandage. Mandis, according to Baker, had cancer in his head, and Baker and his surgeon assistant removed the man's bandages and then, according to witnesses, peeled back a portion of the man's scalp and a part of his skull to show the cancer riddled brain beneath. Baker made a big show of quote treating the cancer with a powder form of his elixir, and then the skull, fragment and the skin were replaced. Johnson's skull was rebandaged, and then the farmer, seeming to be aoka and totally fine after this treatment, shook Baker's hand and left cured, according to Norman Baker. Unsurprisingly, this demonstration drew a lot of attention. So did Baker's continued broadcasts from KTNT, which had taken on a more and more anti medical establishment tone. This included denouncing vaccinations. The American Medical Association, concerned that he was disseminating dangerous information and telling people not to see doctors, went to the Federal Radio Commission with its concerns, and nineteen thirty one, Baker lost his broadcast license, and Baker sued the American Medical Association for libel in nineteen thirty two, claiming that the organization had ruined his hospital business because people stopped checking in for the cure once he no longer had his free radio advertising. But Baker lost that case. His cancer cure had been found to be nothing more than clover, watermelon seed, corn, silk, and water. This didn't stop him, though, He built a new radio station in Mexico, which started broadcasting in nineteen thirty three. But he really wasn't willing to give up his place in the sun back in Iowa. He returned back to his home state to run for the United States Senate in nineteen thirty seve He had already lost a run at being governor, and he lost a Senate race as well. He was arrested briefly for practicing medicine without a license, but it appears that he only spent one night in jail. After an RKO newsreel rand that discredited the Baker Institute, Norman with paying patients really slowing down to a trickle at best, shut down his hospital, and in nineteen thirty six, Norman also paid to have his biography written, and this, like so much of his other enterprises, was pure theater. The introduction to that biography reads, quote, this is an inspiration book for young and old, a fact story of how a man fought his enemies, How he faced gunman dynamiters and enemy doctors. How he fought the medical racket, the radio trust, the aluminum trust, and others. He did it for you. There has never been a book prepared so carefully. This makes it the most important book ever written. Read the life story of Norman Baker, the greatest one man battle ever fought. He continued to spread his distrust of traditional medicine, Catholic Jews, science, and basically anything that contradicted him by his Mexican radio station. In nineteen thirty seven, he was convicted for shipping gramophone recordings out of the country to broadcast them in Mexico, which was in violation of the Federal Communications Act of nineteen thirty four, but this ruling was later overturned in appeals court. And this brings us to the point in the timeline where Norman Baker's story meets up with the Crescent Hotel. So after his legal battle and presumably in search of a new enterprise suitable to his goals and personality. He made his way to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and he bought the Crescent Hotel. Baker renovated the rundown buildings, painting them his favorite colors lavender and purple throughout, and he reopened it as the Baker Cancer Hospital. We're going to talk about the Crescent incarnation and Norman Maker and the claims that it's now haunted. But first we're going to take another brief break from the history to have a word from our sponsor. Just as he had been doing in Iowa, Baker promised patients he could free them of disease. Once he was in Eureka Springs. It's estimated that Norman Baker was making half a million dollars a year from the hospital. Desperate patients, hoping that his claims were true, would often hand over their life savings to receive the Baker cure, which often involved lots of poking with needles and prodding, occasionally subverbal treatments, but no real medical treatment. By this time, Baker, who was still a showman, was appearing in crisp white suits with lavender and purple ties and shirts, and he had also become really paranoid. His office at the new hospital in Eureka Springs was walled with bulletproof glass, and he kept guns within reach at all times while he was there. As part of his advertising campaign for the facility, Baker started mailing out pamphlets in literature extolling the virtues again of the treatments that patients could receive in his care. I believe their tagline was where Sick People Get Well. And despite all of his other seed doings that we've talked about up to this point, this was the thing that really got him into trouble. Postal inspectors spotted his mailings and believed them to be fraudulent, and in nineteen forty Norman Baker was arrested for mail fraud. The hospital at the once Grand Crescent Hotel shut down. Baker was found guilty, and he spent March nineteen forty one to July nineteen forty four at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. He had defrauded patients in Eureka Springs of as much as four million dollars. Unlike some of the other quacks that have come up on a podcast. None of his patients died as a direct result of his treatments, but they were missing out on actual medical care, which you could have made it. They've died faster than if they would if they had gotten actual treatment. Yeah, we don't know if any of those desperate people could have potentially even you know, had improved health and lived for a long time because they weren't seeing doctors. Two years after his release, Baker attempted to reopen his hospital in Muscatine, Iowa, but he never managed to do so, and he ended up living his last twelve years on a yacht in Florida. He died on September eighth of nineteen fifty eight of cirrhosis of the liver, and he was actually buried back in Muscatine at the Greenwood Cemetery, next to his sister. The hotel sat abandoned for six years after Baker closed the operation down, and then in nineteen forty six it was purchased by a group of businessmen from Chicago A Byfield, John R. Constantine, Dwight o' nicholas, and Herbert E. Shutter, and they intended to restore it back to being a hotel. They did get it up and running, even offering a special tour package which included travel from Chicago to the resort, a six day stay, and meals, all for the low price of sixty two dollars and fifty cents. The business did really pretty well under their stewardship for two decades, but in nineteen sixty seven, a bellman burning boxes in the lobby fireplace started a fire that completely consumed the fifth floor and partially destroyed the fourth floor. For the next thirty years, the Crescent would pass from owner to owner, restoration project to restoration project. At one point it was bought by two married couples, the Fenians and the Corries, who reopened it and gave a cat name Morris the title of hotel manager. But they eventually sold the hotel, which was then owned by several banks and businesses until finally, in nineteen ninety seven, Marty and Elise Ronik bought the Crescent and restored it over the course of five years to be the grand Lady of the Ozarks. They voted ever since, and they've turned it into a vibrant vacation destination once again. So now we're going to talk about the ghosts that a leg hang out there at the Crescent because for years the Crescent Hotel has held this reputation of being one of the most haunted hotels in the United States. So we're going to talk about a few of the ghosts who are alleged to wander the halls. We remember the story of Michael the Mason from the beginning of the Crescent Hotel's construction. Where he fell is allegedly where room two eighteen now exists, and it's long been rumored to be a hotbed of paranormal activity. The people who claim to have been visited by Michael while staying in the room report doors opening and closing, pounding on the walls, even hands coming out of the bathroom mirror, which is pretty freaky. Yeah. Uh, there's a nurse that allegedly appears on the third floor pushing a gurney with a deceased cancer patient on it. Of course, that also comes with the creepy sound of squeaking wheels. Some lower lovers like to believe that even Norman Baker himself has come back to the Crescent Hotel in the afterlife, appearing in his signature white suit with a per sure and tie and There's even a ghost that some claim introduces herself as Theodora and tells whoever she's speaking with that she's receiving cancer treatment, usually right before she kind of vanishes before their eyes. There's another who has been dubbed Doctor Ellis, who is a man that wears a stovepipe hat and sometimes gives people advice. There are so so many more ghosts that are rumored to appear at the Crescent, and they come from all points of the hotel's history. Because it's had such a tumultuous history of shifting ownership and identities, the history of the hotel is pretty fertile soil in which to grow ghost stories. It's got all the best options for spirit characters. There are rich victorians, there are college kids, they're ailing patients who have been duped by this flim flam man. Yeah, so it's you know, I think I've said before the podcast, I'm not a ghost believer myself, but it seems like if you're into that sort of thing, this is a super fun and very beautiful place to go kind of play in that sort of arena if you wanted to do so. And today, the town of Eureka Springs in its entirety is on the National Register of Historic Places, with approximately two thousand historic buildings included that have been restored and are carefully maintained. You can get ghost tours of the Crescent Hotel. They're available for anyone who wants to visit with the spirits that are rumored to haunt its halls, and it does look like an absolutely lovely town. I would love to go visit at some point, so it's now on my list. It was not before I did this episode because I didn't know about it, but now I think maybe we go to Eureka Springs. It's not that far from well from where you are. It's not that far from where I am. It's really far. Yeah. I like how now that you live in Boston everything feels really fun. It really does. Whenever we get invitations to go somewhere, I'm like, this flight is two hours longer than it would have been from Atlanta. Yes, So thank you listener Jordan for suggesting this episode. It was one that ended up being really fun. When I first thought, oh, I'll look into the haunted hotel thing, and then the Norman Baker Angle was so sort of fertile and fascinating that it ended up being lovely. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.