Crescent ghost stories nothing new
Posted on Sunday, February 26, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/147027/
In June, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS ) and the duo behind Ghost Hunters captured an image on film of what appeared to be a man. Staff at the hotel where the film was made say it’s a man who died in the 1880 s.
Who is this man lurking in the basement of the Crescent Hotel & Spa in Eureka Springs ? Staff members say it is Michael, a stone mason who died during construction of the hotel from 1884-1886. Legend has it Michael fell, landing in what is now Room 218 of the hotel.
Today, Room 218 is known as “Michael’s room,” although he is said to wander the hotel, playing pranks on staff members and guests.
It is one of many legends surrounding the hotel, which has been a luxury resort, a college for women and a hospital for cancer patients run by a fraudulent doctor named Norman Baker.
Other “ghosts” said to haunt the hotel include Theodora, a former patient of Baker’s. She is said to inhabit Room 419, occasionally speaking to guests. She gets angry if guests speak ill of her room or the hotel, and will show guests the door by putting items such as their luggage or briefcases up against the door.
That’s what Wilson of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Ghost Hunters heard when he went to the hotel. Wilson stayed in the room and said he deliberately tried to provoke Theodora’s spirit by complaining aloud about the hotel and room.
It seemed to work, Wilson said.
He put his laptop case up against a table next to the bed of his suite, which includes a sitting room in the front.
When Dustin Pari, a TAPS investigator and Ghost Hunters regular, needed to get into his room later, he found resistance while trying to open the door, Wilson said.
“He pushed the door open and realized he pushed my laptop case out of the way,” Wilson said. “That would have had to have gone about 20 feet, maybe 15 feet.”
At first, Wilson said, he figured someone was trying to play a prank.
“But how do you close the door with something in front of it from the inside ?” he said. “I don’t know, it’s just weird.”
Wilson said another weird event happened to a member of the Ghost Hunters crew named Sarah. She was trying to get into her hotel room but was having problems getting the door open. Wilson said she “voiced her displeasure” at the door, and it opened — as did the others down the hall, simultaneously. Those weird stories are common to the Crescent, says hotel general manager Jack Moyer. Even Moyer has his own weird story involving his wife, a photo and a mysterious woman.
Moyer and his wife were staying in Room 3500, a suite located in what is believed to be the old asylum of Baker’s hospital. Late at night in May 2002, Moyer and his wife, Misty, were asleep.
“Something woke her up, and she said standing right at the foot of the bed was this girl,” Jack Moyer said.
Last year, a woman who stayed in Room 3600 across the hall sent a photo to the hotel. The guest took the photo of her suite when her television was off, yet an image can be seen in the television. Although upside down, an image of what appears to be a young woman is visible on the television screen.
The Moyers were eating in the hotel when the front desk clerk brought the photo for them to see.
“The front desk clerk says ‘ Wait till you see this one, ’” Jack Moyer recalled. “She handed that image over, and Misty turned pale white, and just was really freaked out about the whole thing.”
“‘ That’s her, ’” Moyer said his wife exclaimed upon seeing the photo.
The photo was among those sent to the producers of Ghost Hunters to encourage them to come investigate the hotel.
“Obviously, it helped,” Moyer said.
Lisa Rogers of Blanchard, Okla., a regular guest to the hotel, also captured an unusual image.
She visited the hotel with her husband, Wes, on Jan. 13 to attend the Crescent’s first ghost seminar. It was her birthday present, Lisa Rogers said, because the hotel was one of her favorite vacation spots.
She and Wes took the nightly ghost tour. While downstairs outside the New Moon Spa, the medium leading the tour guide, Ken Fugate, said he detected a ghostly presence.
“Ken told us there was a ghost there with us, a little boy named Christopher,” Lisa Rogers said.
Lisa Rogers said she was standing on the stairs, while her husband was on the floor. She said she began taking several photos in a row after Fugate mentioned the boy’s presence.
She didn’t see anything unusual until later when she loaded the pictures from her digital camera onto a computer. She saw something odd in a photo of her husband, and lightened it a bit.
There, next to Wes, appeared to be the translucent profile of a child, whispering to her husband, Rogers said.
“I called him at work and said, ‘ Did Christopher say something to you ?’” Rogers recalled. “He said, ‘ What are you talking about ?’”
Rogers said her husband told her he felt something odd, but that he heard nothing.
“My husband is very much a skeptic concerning ghosts, so we have tried and tried to figure this picture out,” she said, but they haven’t arrived at any logical explanations.
“How can you explain a body-less, see-through head ?” she asked.
Are such stories real ? Skeptics call such stories marketing tools or the products of vivid imaginations.
To those who say they have experienced them, especially at the Crescent, they’re real.
“Anytime you walk down the hall or go anywhere, you feel like there’s someone there with you,” Rogers said.
Wilson said he entered the hotel with a bit of skepticism, thinking some of the stories he heard easily could have been advertising campaigns.
“I didn’t expect to see a lot of what they were telling me,” he said. “I honestly thought it was a marketing ploy.
“ That’s what I thought, but”...
He laughed.