Enlivened by the SPIRIT
Posted on Sunday, February 26, 2006
For the Crescent Hotel & Spa, Oct. 19, 2005, marked a significant change.
On that date, a secret that general manager Jack Moyer and other staff members had kept for four months was revealed. It wasn’t revealed to just the residents of Eureka Springs, where the Crescent resides atop a steep hill. It was revealed to more than 2. 3 million people across the country, according to Nielsen Media Research.
That was the date cable’s Sci-Fi Channel broadcast a Ghost Hunters episode filmed last summer in Eureka Springs. The show features Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes, plumbers by day, paranormal investigators by night, and founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS. The episode, “Ghostly Soldier / Medium House,” showed Wilson and Hawes wandering through the basement of the 1886 hotel, through an area known as the “morgue,” where bodies were taken in the hotel’s days as a hospital in the 1930 s. The men entered a small storage room and panned around the room with a Flir Systems thermal imaging camera. The camera revealed paint can laden shelves, an old locker and a man in a hat who nodded at them. A man who wasn’t really there. Things haven’t been the same at the hotel since.
PARANORMAL PICKUP The episode boosted occupancy at the hotel and attendance of its now-nightly ghost tours, Moyer said. The hotel has hosted the Eureka Springs Ghost Tours since 1999. The tours ran on the weekends and closed for the winter. After June, when the TAPS investigators filmed the Ghost Hunters episode, the group decided to expand the Crescent tour to seven nights a week and all year long.
The payoff came in October.
Moyer said the hotel never really kept a headcount of the tour’s participants until October, although the numbers used to be far below what they’re seeing now.
In October, the tour had 1, 306 participants. In November, when the tour used to be shut down, 647 took the tour, and another 410 toured the hotel in December.
Moyer said much of it could be attributed to Ghost Hunters.
The show’s revelations affected the hotel in other ways. Last summer, the hotel created a new Web site apart from its main site, www. crescent-hotel. com. The new Web site, www. americasmosthauntedhotel. com, saw 4, 500 new visitors the night the episode aired.
“The night of the show, our phones literally rang off the hook,” Moyer said.
The hotel sold 274 of its Paranormal Pair packages that allow visitors to stay a night at the Crescent and a night at the nearby Basin Park Hotel, which also is said to be haunted. More than 100 of those room packages were sold in October, Moyer said.
“We had far and away the best October, November, December and January that we’ve ever had, and quite honestly we attribute a great deal of that to the show,” Moyer said.
TEMPTING TAPS Little Rock-based Stone Ward advertising agency sent information to the show’s producers about the Crescent. The company hoped to tempt the TAPS crew to Arkansas to do an investigation. Wilson, co-founder of TAPS and one of Ghost Hunters’ stars, said he heard several of the ghost stories from the hotel. He and Hawes often debunk places reputed to be haunted. Wilson said he expected to debunk the Crescent. Instead, they caught the footage of what appeared to be a man in the cramped basement storage room, next to an old locker filled with shelves and hardware and with the number “2” painted on the right door. “It gave me chills, because I was probably two or three feet from there,” Wilson said.
Wilson and Hawes use the thermal imaging camera to pick up unexplainable cold spots as well as drafts that might cause cold spots. Such cold spots are said to be attributed to entities that pull the heat from the air to use as energy, often to manifest through audio or visual means.
The cameras, which visualize temperatures with vibrant colors, usually are used by firefighters to find people in burning buildings, Wilson said.
Hawes was controlling the camera that night in the basement.
“We panned over, saw the [man ] nod and as Jay was panning back to the right, that’s when he realized, whoa, what was that ?” Wilson said.
The man appeared to be standing sideways, his head turned toward the men. As the camera hit him, the man bowed his head. He appeared to be wearing a cap.
At first, the pair thought it might be Wilson’s reflection. But a closer examination of the locker revealed a matte-painted finish that was dulled with age and dirt. They couldn’t re-create any kind of reflection in the locker, Wilson said.
“We spent probably two hours, twice, trying to figure out what happened there,” Wilson said.
The men later showed it to firefighters and other professionals accustomed to using the thermal imaging camera, but none of them could explain how the man ended up on the film.
Wilson said the find gave him the chills, because it was exactly what they had hoped to get for a long time.
“It’s one thing to look for it, but to actually find it, that’s a different situation,” he said.
Moyer said he could sense something exciting had happened prior to the pair revealing the footage.
“I could tell the moment that I met them right afterward that they were different,” he said. “There was a clear shift in attitude from arrival to departure, that’s for sure.”
Moyer and other staff members privy to the find had to sign confidentiality forms promising not to reveal the results of the investigation to anyone.
The wait proved frustrating for Bill Ott, director of marketing for the Crescent and Basin Park hotels. Moyer wasn’t allowed to tell him what was found.
Ott said that whenever he’d be asked what would appear in the episode, he didn’t have an answer.
“‘ Yeah, it’s going to be great. ’ ‘What’s going to be on there ?’ ‘ I don’t know, but it’s going to be great, ’” Ott recounted the conversation. Despite the Crescent appearing on Travel Channel and A&E shows in the past, the Ghost Hunters show had the biggest impact by far, Ott said. He said it could be attributed to the brief video clip of what some believed was an apparition. Such a clip was extremely rare, Ott and Moyer said. “It’s almost like a scientific find,” Moyer said. The clip was real, rather than the re-creations shown in most ghost-related programs. “This was the finding of King Tut,” said Ott.
A DOSE OF SKEPTICISM Not everyone is convinced that the Crescent is haunted.
“There’s never been scientific evidence of ghosts. Science has never authenticated a ghost,” said Joe Nickell, senior research fellow for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, known as CSICOPS. The organization publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine and looks into claims of the paranormal.
The concept of a life force not dissipating when the body died, but staying around and reacting with intelligence, doesn’t seem logical, he said.
“The idea is just totally, totally incompatible with science,” he said.
Ghost hunting isn’t truly a scientific endeavor, because it isn’t done by true scientists, Nickell said.
He said he watched the exclusive video clip from Ghost Hunters on Sci-Fi Channel’s Web site, www. scifi. com / ghosthunters, which featured the image captured in the basement of the Crescent.
“Is there something on that video ? Yes. What does it mean ? It means nothing. It isn’t evidence that would hold up in a court of law,” he said. “I could think of several possible explanations of their sequence, the least likely of which by a hundredfold is a ghost.”
Nickell said most talk of the paranormal is based on illogical claims that assume that because something cannot be explained, it must be related to ghosts.
“When you say, ‘I don’t know,’ you cannot then draw a conclusion,” Nickell said. “That’s faulty logic.”
Logical or not, a February 2003 poll from Harris Interactive found that 51 percent of Americans believe in ghosts. Of the different age groups polled, 65 percent of those ages 25-29 believed in ghosts, while only 27 percent of those older than 65 believed.
The reports of paranormal activity have meant big business for the Crescent, as well as more ghost stories to add to their collection.
“The number of people seeking us out is way up, and yes, we’ve had more [ghost ] stories submitted,” Moyer said.
Moyer said he hoped the hotel would get another boost when the show is rerun March 22.
“We wish they would show it every month,” he said.
As for the show, Wilson said the group was filming in Oklahoma before heading to Colorado to investigate The Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining.
The crew has no plans to return to Arkansas at the moment, although there are a couple of other sites in the state on their list, he said, but he couldn’t reveal them.
Wilson said the crew was impressed by Arkansas, which surprised them with its beauty.
“Arkansas has found a place in our hearts, and I’m looking forward to returning there,” he said.
Sci-Fi Channel will rebroadcast the Ghost Hunters episode “Ghostly Soldier / Medium House,” featuring the Crescent Hotel & Spa of Eureka Springs and Eureka Springs Ghost Tour guide and medium Carroll Heath, at 8 p. m. March 22. Information on the show is available at www. scifi. com / ghosthunters
A clip of the show featuring the discovery in the basement can be seen by clicking the box in the top right of the Web page with the headline “Exclusive Case File Video.”
New episodes of the show return March 29.
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