11Apr10 (Sun) - The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, AR

Another legit diner, another greasy breakfast. “Can I read to you information I downloaded about the Crescent?” Derek asked as we chowed down, referring to our intended stay that night at one of America’s most haunted hotels. I eyed him. “Do I have a choice?” but he had already begun reading. I learned its sordid history (a man died while building it, and is said to be the reason behind the haunts in 218, one of the Crescent’s most infamous rooms. It changed hands many times, and a quack doctor took it over and turned it into a cancer hospital, where many people died in pain and were hidden downstairs in the basement morgue.) And with that sweet good morning story, we were on our way To Eureka Springs.

Entering Arkansas, especially Eureka, felt like a green homecoming. The trees were a relief from the endless grasslands, everything in bloom, the sides of the roads decorated with the fuscia of dogwoods. Here was the America both Derek and I knew and remembered, and though we both enjoyed the bizarre, alien scapes that we had been through, there was an instant warmth and happiness in returning to green. Add to that the gorgeous light at 4:30pm when we were driving through, …well I could forget for a moment about our impending stay, and we were both all smiles.

We saw a sign that warned: Motorcyles Beware! With a curvy line indicating hard turns ahead. There were many sharp curves in the road, with dropoffs and no guardrails, so we understood the warning. It’s clearly a favored place to bike, as we spassed a reststop for bikers only. Well, only a few miles down the road, we happened upon an accident minutes after it happened. A group of bikers huddled around one of their own, a gruff looking fellow with white hair and beard, wearing leather, sitting up and bloodied. 50 feet away, a red truck with a long scar of a dent in the drivers side was stopped in the middle of our lane. Clearly, one or both had been to close to the center of a sharp curve, and had sideswiped each other. The biker was lucky that he hadn’t gone off the cliff (and that he hadn’t smashed his brains in when he fell). In any case, a slightly sobering note leading up to our stay at the Crescent, which was probably appropriate.

The closer we came, the crankier and more nervous I became, afraid of staying at a haunted hotel. Derek, on the other hand, was like a little kid, practically bouncing in his seat. “We’re gonna stay at a haunted hotel, baby!” He’d declare, all smiles. Perhaps it was these repeated affirmations that caused my increasing unease.

We arrived at the looming, aged Crescent Hotel. It was such a nice day that it couldn’t look too haunted from the outside. They did a good job with the gloom in the interior however, everything in dark wooden colors, dust floating in the dimly lit inside, everything slightly shabby, and crooked, giving an off balanced feel.

Derek checked in as I wandered around the lobby, checking out some of their ghost tshirts, mugs and postcards. When he was all checked in, I asked him what room we were in. He pretended not to hear me, talking about some other subject completely. “What room are we in?” I asked again. Derek looked around and commented on how cool the building looked. I tugged on his shirt. “What – room – are – we – in?”

He mumbled something that sounded like “218.” “You didn’t just say 218, did you?” “Well, when I requested it, I didn’t ACTUALLY think it would be available,” Derek said again. I could see the excitement in his whole demeanor though, he was practically wriggling with glee. “At least I didn’t bring all of my ghost hunting gear!” He pronounced, though he seemed a bit saddened by this. I dragged my feet as we walked towards the steps. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m DOING this,” I muttered.

As soon as we entered the long dark hallway towards 218, we both felt a heaviness. Whether it was a product of our minds working overtime; the effect of color, crooked fans, and old carpeting; or an unhappy spirit, I’ll never know, but it was undoubtedly there. We opened the black door, light-absorbing door with its gold numbers, and our room revealed itself to us. A dingy carpet, uneven floor, lumpy bed, dim lamps, and creepy pictures on the wall. Sweet.

Derek began taking photographs immediately, looking for orbs, or as I call them, dust specks caught in the light of a flash. I want to know, if these orbs are spirits trying to manifest themselves, why one can’t capture them without a flash, or with the naked eye. Its dust motes, I say, that’s why. I’m a skeptic, but I still believe in ghosts. Just not a lot of what people attribute to them. Derek’s not sure he believes all the reflected balls of light are orbs either, but it didn’t stop him for looking. I made a vow to only take pictures without flash. If an orb wanted to manifest itself in my photo that way, then I would believe it.

It was already 6:30pm, and Derek had scheduled us a ghost tour at 8pm, so we had to hurry and eat dinner. The hotel offered dining services, but we both agreed it was a good idea to leave the oppressiveness of the hotel behind for a bit. The concierge recommended an Italian place that was voted best Italian restaurant of Arkansas last year, and just so happened to be in walking distance of our hotel. We took to the hilly streets of Eureka, the sun warming us, filtered through the trees in dappled light. It was in complete contrast to our hotel. I sighed and smiled, enjoying the walk, and trees, and smell of spring. The houses in Eureka are mostly Victorian, cute, small, pastel colors, white porches…we arrived at Ermilio’s, a house converted into a restaurant, with a white wooden post and a sign swinging from it with a painted picture of two old Italian folks. Inside it was decorated with lots of old family photos, black and white wedding pictures and what not, and I swear they could have been taken from my grandparents photo albums, so similar in look were both the pictures and the people. We had a romantic, delicious dinner, and I highly recommend the restaurant to ANYONE who visits Eureka Springs.

We returned to the gloom & doom hotel just in time for our ghost tour. We learned about all the various happenings to guests in the hotel, and the tour leader assured us that most of it was just ghosts playing pranks, none of it had ever seriously harmed people. The most common occurrences were hearing footsteps, or voices, or bouncing balls, or feeling a tap on the shoulder…we walked around the hotel, learning about the hotspots (such as the one staircase where a little girl fell four floors to her death) or room 423 where the mistress of the quack doctor used to stay, and often plays tricks on the residents of that room, including moving their suitcases towards the door, or, to one unlucky bride and groom, taking their wedding outfits from their hangers and crumpling them into little balls into the corner of their closet (why you would want to stay at the Crescent when you’re getting married, I have no idea. Ok, I guess I could see Derek liking that idea. To each his own). The woman showed us some pictures that have been captured by other guests of the hotel, and a few of them are actually creepy (though some of them could be anything).

And then we arrive outside of our room. We find out we can’t enter because there are guests staying there tonight (US!), but we learn that it’s the most haunted room in the hotel. That the man working on this place was a bit of a ladies man, and he was waving to some women when he fell to his death, and that he mostly likes to play tricks on the women guests in the room, things like pinching their butt, preventing the door from closing when they enter the bathroom, reaching hands out of a mirror towards them …that sort of thing.

I gave Derek a long look and elbowed him hard in the side. “A womanizer ghost?!” I whispered harshly. “You pick the room with a ghost that tortures WOMEN?!” “I didn’t know, I didn’t know!” he hastily whispers back. Oh, GREAT.

We finish the tour in the notorious Crescent basement, the former morgue, where the morgue table still stands, rusted, in the corner. The tour guide attempts to play famous footage from Ghosthunters at the Crescent Hotel, what Derek says has been called “the holy grail of ghost hunting footage” (and something Derek has shown me many times in recent years), but she can’t find the exact track, and blames the ghost for messing with her DVD, which she had set up prior to the tour. She scrolls through the various tracks on the film, and it is Derek who knows exactly which one to play of the footage she is looking for. Finally, she’s able to play us the moment the ghosthunters capture a heat signature of a ghost on film in front of Locker #2. The tour guide dutifully leads us around the corner so we can see the paint chipped green locker with our own eyes. A few of us lingered there (me, mostly waiting for Derek) and as we took photos of the locker, we heard a rattle of the locked door next to us, as if someone had shaken it. The four of us there jump. But putting our cameras through the cracks at the top and side of the door prove that the next room is deserted. We’re pretty sure its not a prank, as the ghost tour takes itself seriously, and they’ve solemnly told us that they fire any hotel employee who tries to stage a prank. What was the rattling then? Wind, animal, ghost? Who knows. I’ve got bigger, badder ghosts to deal with back at our room.

Derek has never found me so amenable to having a drink at the bar as he did that night. Hang out at the bar with other people for a couple of hours or in our creepy woman-obsessed, ghost infested room? Hmmmm let me think about that one. Derek set up the video camera while we left the room, since I had asked him not to film us sleeping. He did that once when we were staying at what turned out to be a haunted old house in Plymouth (UK) and watching the footage was disturbing. Not because of any ghosts, but just watching ourselves sleep, tossing and turning in the night. Something about it really creeped me out. Plus, we’d just seen Paranormal Activity. We didn’t need any demons riding along with us on the rest of the trip.

At the bar, we saw some people from the tour and chatted with them for a bit, sharing our pictures and stories. One girl, skeptic, proclaimed she saw a shadow figure that freaked her out. Talk turned to other things, and they mentioned that there was a UFO convention there that weekend. Derek gasped. “There was?!” Be still, his beating heart. “Good thing for you I didn’t know about that sooner,” he told me. I AM glad. Who knows what beauty we would have had to cut out of the trip to make it to a UFO convention. Sounds like D’s idea of heaven and mine of….well, of a lot of time for shopping and catching up on the blog.

Eventually the time came when we can procrastinate no longer, and we must return to the room. We take a few pictures from the bed, me more to play with the effect of the ‘orbs’, and I find that if I point the camera a certain way at the light I can always pick up ‘orbs’, where if I point it further away from the light, I am less likely to capture them. Just more proof of the play of dust and light if you ask me. Derek’s point and shoot leica starts freaking out, which freaks me out, but all the other cameras work fine, and I realize he’s probably just messing it up in the sand dunes (indeed, it’s still having the same problems, days and ghost free hotels later). I get tired of orb photos and immerse myself in my blog, while Derek tries to call up the ghost. He finally gives up, and after midnight, falls asleep beside me. I am fine until I finish my blog, but once I clap my computer shut, I suddenly realize that I am the only one conscious in the room, essentially alone with a potentially woman-fixated ghost. I talk to the ghost (as the tour guide recommended). Michael, I don’t want any trouble, please just leave me alone tonight. If you feel the need to torture someone, Derek is the one who really likes ghosts.” Then I shake sleeping Derek and tell him to wake up, because I have to go to the bathroom and am to petrified to do it without his moral support. It takes several shakes before he wakes up to mumble through talking me to and from the bathroom. I feel only a little guilty for waking him, since he was the impetuous behind this stay, and thus my current terrified state.

I can’t get the image out of my mind of hands reaching from the mirror, so I avoid looking at the mirror at all costs, ducking my head low as I half-assed spray some water across my hands, then take a bounding leap to the bed beside Derek. I wrap every body part possible around him in a show of solidarity and comfort, and to help prevent the one thing that Michael has been known to do to men – push them out of the bed. My mind is racing, I keep waiting for a pinch, and in this state of mind, I stay awake for an hour. It becomes very warm in the room (this, at least, has never been attributed to a ghost) so I’m forced to untangle my sweating self from a still angelically sleeping Derek to change into shorts and a tank top. I dive into bed again, reattaching myself to Derek in octopus fashion. I have a terrible nights sleep, interrupted every 5 minutes by imaginings of ghosts. Derek, on the other hand, except for when I was waking him up, slept like a champ.

The only odd thing that happens the next morning is that he can’t get the shower water to stay warm, it either goes way hot or way cold for him. The tour guide had mentioned how this can be a trick of the ghosts. I suspect a trick of old pipes instead, but it is odd how when I shower, the water is perfectly even, the entire time.

We eat breakfast in the grand old dining hall the next morning, and leave the haunted hotel behind, relatively unscathed, and only slightly worse for the wear.

CAPTIONS:

1. The Crescent Hotel. Kidding. On the drive to Eureka

2. The Crescent Hotel for real.

3. The entryway to fear

4. Beard shot photo, Derek at Ermilio's

5. The ghost tour in a haunted stairway

6. The ghost tour in a haunted men's room (because what better place to spend the afterlife than a smelly old men's room)

7. Derek and Locker #2

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