October 14, 2023 • 24 mins
This 2016 episode covers the Crescent Hotel of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. A colorful part of the hotel's history involves a man who claimed that doctors couldn't be trusted, and that he had the cure for cancer.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
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.
(00:22):
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
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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,
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:43):
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,
(04:04):
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.
(04:29):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:32):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:15):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:57):
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,
(07:21):
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.
(07:42):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:26):
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,
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:29):
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,
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
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,
(11:15):
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
(11:36):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:51):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:33):
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.
(14:55):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:38):
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.
(16:00):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:14):
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
(17:34):
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
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
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
(18:39):
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.
(19:00):
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
(19:21):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:03):
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,
(20:26):
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
(20:48):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:33):
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
(21:55):
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
(22:16):
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,
(22:38):
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,
(23:02):
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
(23:23):
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,
(23:47):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:36):
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.
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.
(00:22):
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
(00:43):
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
(01:06):
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,
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:43):
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,
(04:04):
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.
(04:29):
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
(04:49):
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
(05:11):
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
(05:32):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:15):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:57):
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,
(07:21):
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.
(07:42):
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
(08:05):
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
(08:26):
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,
(08:46):
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
(09:07):
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
(09:29):
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,
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:53):
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,
(11:15):
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
(11:36):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:21):
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
(12:44):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:31):
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
(13:51):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:33):
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.
(14:55):
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
(15:18):
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
(15:38):
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.
(16:00):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:14):
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
(17:34):
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
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
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
(18:39):
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.
(19:00):
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
(19:21):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:03):
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,
(20:26):
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
(20:48):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:33):
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
(21:55):
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
(22:16):
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,
(22:38):
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,
(23:02):
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
(23:23):
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,
(23:47):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:36):
iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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