In September 1939, as German tanks rolled into Poland and Europe descended into war, federal agents arrested Norman Baker in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The charges were mail fraud, seven counts of it. Baker, a man with no medical training, had spent the previous three years running a fraudulent cancer clinic out of the Crescent Hotel, a once-grand Gilded Age resort perched atop West Mountain. Desperate patients had come to him seeking hope.

What they found was a con man peddling injections of alcohol, watermelon seeds, and lies. The story of the Crescent Hotel began half a century earlier, in 1886, when two railroad magnates looked at that remote Ozark peak and saw opportunity. Powell Clayton, a former Union brigadier general and governor of Arkansas, had pivoted from politics to railroads, understanding that the man who controlled the tracks controlled everything that moved on them. His partner, Richard Kerens, had risen from wagon master to chief deputy US marshal for the Frisco Railroad territory.

Together they recognized that Eureka Springs, a boom town built on faith in healing spring waters, desperately needed a grand hotel to match its reputation. They commissioned architect Isaac S. Taylor, whose signature style blended French Renaissance elegance with Richardsonian Romanesque solidity. Taylor designed a five-story limestone castle, and construction began in 1885.

Irish stonemasons, led by a master mason named O’Shaughnessy, quarried white river limestone ten miles away near Beaver, Arkansas. The total cost reached $294,000, an almost unimaginable sum for the time, but the result justified the expense. The hotel featured Edison electric lamps, a hydraulic elevator, steam heat, and electric call bells in every room. It crowned the mountain like a medieval palace.

On May 20, 1886, four hundred guests gathered in the Crystal Dining Room for the inaugural banquet. The guest of honor was James G. Blaine, former secretary of state and Republican nominee for president. The event established the Crescent’s reputation overnight.

For the next fifteen years, wealthy travelers flocked to the hotel, booking rooms weeks in advance. Guests rode horseback along mountain trails, attended tea dances in the dining room, and dined on signature dishes like Crab Lorenzo. The guest registry read like a directory of American power: federal judges, senators, railroad magnates, mining entrepreneurs. But the golden years could not last.

As modern medicine advanced, faith in spring water cures crumbled. Occupancy rates dropped, and by the early 1900s the Crescent was closing through the winters just to survive. In 1908, a local businessman named Maddox proposed an unconventional solution: transform the hotel into a girls’ boarding school. The Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women opened in September 1908 with eighty-eight students.

Tuition ran approximately four hundred dollars per year, ensuring only daughters of wealthy families could attend. The school operated on the opposite schedule from the resort, with students in residence from September through June and hotel guests filling the building during the summer months. The college sustained the building for sixteen years. In 1924, it closed, and a brief attempt to revive it as Crescent Junior College collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.

By 1933, the building stood empty and vulnerable. What came next was a monster. Norman Glenwood Baker was born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1882. A high school dropout and former machinist, he found his calling in showmanship.

Baker patented a portable organ called the Air Calliaphone, ran a mail-order business, and in 1925 established radio station KTNT, which stood for Know the Naked Truth. Through his broadcasts, he attacked banks, corporations, and what he called the Medical Trust. In 1929, Baker met Dr. Charles Ozias, a medical con man who claimed to have a cancer cure: glycerin, carbolic acid, alcohol, watermelon seeds, corn silk, and clover leaves.

Five volunteers tried the treatment. All five died within a year. Baker covered up the results and declared the cure a success. He purchased the patent and opened the Baker Institute in Muscatine.

The American Medical Association exposed him as a quack, he lost his defamation lawsuit, and in 1936 Iowa issued a warrant for his arrest for practicing medicine without a license. Baker fled to Mexico. In July 1937, he purchased the Crescent Hotel. The town embraced him.

Eureka Springs was desperate, still reeling from the Depression, and Baker promised economic revival. He transformed the grand hotel into the Baker Cancer Curing Hospital. Patients woke at six in the morning to castor oil, then received a tonic of mysterious composition. The main treatment was Formula Five: injections administered three to seven times daily, depending on how much the patient could pay.

The formula was worthless, little more than alcohol and ground garden weeds, but it caused extraordinary pain when injected directly at tumor sites. Baker’s staff would discover additional ailments their patients supposedly had, each adding to the bill. And as patients lay dying, Baker forced them to write letters home claiming miraculous recoveries. Those testimonials became his promotional material.

Over one hundred fifty people died during Baker’s three-year operation, roughly one death per week. Bodies were moved quietly to a makeshift morgue in the basement, where the hotel’s bowling alley had once been. The lobby featured display cases filled with specimen jars supposedly containing removed tumors. Later analysis suggested they were pig organs or medical school surplus, props to convince desperate people his treatments worked.

The US Postal Inspector’s Office had been building a case against Baker for years. On September 1, 1939, they arrested him for mail fraud. The strategy was elegant: the government did not need to prove his cure failed. It only had to prove he had used the mail to defraud consumers with false advertising.

The trial began in 1940. Former patients testified about the worthless injections. Family members described sending loved ones to Arkansas with hope and receiving their remains in return. Baker was convicted on all seven counts and sentenced to four years at Leavenworth Federal Prison.

The Baker Hospital closed permanently. Local residents began avoiding the building, claiming something terrible lingered in its limestone halls. The ghost stories started almost immediately: shadowy figures in hallways, sounds of crying from empty rooms, the sensation of being watched. Baker served his full sentence and was released in July 1944.

He retreated to Florida, living out his remaining years on a yacht that had once belonged to railroad magnate Jay Gould. On September 8, 1958, he died. The cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver. But another cause was listed on the death certificate, carrying an almost unbearable irony: cancer.

The man who had sold cancer cures for twenty years died of the disease he had pretended to master. The castle itself survived. In 1946, a group of Chicago businessmen purchased the property and began restoring it, stripping away Baker’s garish purple and orange paint. On July 4, 1946, the hotel reopened.

For two decades, it operated as a traditional resort. Then in 1967, faulty wiring sparked a fire that destroyed the fourth floor and penthouse. Reconstruction took years. By the late 1970s, reports of supernatural occurrences had become part of the hotel’s identity.

Guests claimed sightings of a stonemason named Michael in room 218, a woman called Theodora in room 419 who rearranged luggage, a child named Brekie playing in the fourth-floor hallways, a nurse pushing a gurney down the third-floor corridor, and a girl in white mist falling from an east-side balcony. Whether genuine spirits or psychological echoes of tragedy, the stories took hold. The Crescent began marketing itself as America’s most haunted hotel. In 1997, Marty and Elise Roenig, antique lovers and historic preservationists from Connecticut, stood in the lobby and decided to save the building.

They announced a ten-year restoration plan and completed it in five. They recreated the original roof line on the fifth floor using period photographs, hired a master artisan to repaint the Victorian stenciling, modernized bathrooms while preserving nineteenth-century character. In 2002 and 2008, they added new suites and cottages to fund ongoing preservation. The conservatory, demolished decades earlier, was rebuilt as an event space.

A spa opened in the garden level, offering legitimate therapeutic services on the site where Baker had promised fraudulent cures. In 2016, the Crescent Hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2009, Marty Roenig was killed in a car accident. Elise continued their work alone.

She saw the restoration through to completion, and in November 2022, Historic Hotels of America awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award. When construction crews excavated a parking lot in February 2019, they uncovered hundreds of buried specimen jars, matching the ones displayed in Baker’s lobby. Testing revealed some contained human tissue, others animal organs. They were Baker’s props, buried and forgotten.

The jars are now displayed in the hotel’s fourth-floor museum. The Crescent Hotel stands today as the last surviving grand springs resort hotel in Arkansas. Its limestone walls have outlasted the men who commissioned them, the fraud that corrupted them, and the neglect that nearly destroyed them. The basement that served as Baker’s morgue is now part of a spa.

The halls that once echoed with dying patients’ forced testimonials now host weddings, ghost tours, and yoga classes. The building holds all its stories, the grandeur and the suffering, the beauty and the horror. And it refuses to let them go.