A GHOST STORY FROM AMERICA’S MOST HAUNTED HOTEL
Turn off the lights, grab a cup of hot cocoa and hide under the covers. This week’s edition of our blog features a ghost story!
Most hotels would try to bury any part of their history that made guests uncomfortable… but Arkansas’s Crescent Hotel embraces its spooky past.
The Crescent is self-proclaimed “America’s Most Haunted Hotel.” Of course, like all hotels, they want guests to feel safe and secure, but at the Crescent they know that a portion of their guests actually want to be a little creeped out during their stay. There’s a whole group of people who come to “America’s Most Haunted Hotel” solely due to its reputation.
The hotel is officially known as the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa, a title which highlights the property’s long history. To illustrate just how old the Crescent is think about this: when it first opened Grover Cleveland was president, the U.S. flag only had 38 stars and the Statue of Liberty was brand new. It’s no surprise that over the years the Crescent has become a popular ghost hotspot.
Room 419 and the Legend of Theodora
One of the best ghost stories from the Crescent is about a hotel denizen named Theodora, who’s known to appear as an old woman outside of room 419. Guests who stay in that room have noticed things move around the room seemingly without an explanation and their are even accounts of items being neatly packed up or the room being tidied during times when housekeeping wasn’t schedule. It doesn’t sound too bad, until you learn about Theodora’s back-story.
Theodora’s tale starts in 1937 with an ambitious businessman named Norman G. Baker. Upon discovering a cure for cancer, Baker decided to repurpose the Crescent as a specialty hospital to treat cancer patients.
The Cure for Cancer… False Hope
Unfortunately, Baker’s “cure” consisted of nothing more than injecting patients with benign substances like water, corn silk and clover.
The hospital obviously wasn’t very successful in healing patients, but as a money making scheme it was amazing. The Baker Cancer Hospital even helped revitalize the local economy while making Baker himself over $4,000,000 in the process. Unfortunately for the con-man, the government was able to shut him down. In 1940 the courts declared Baker’s cure a “pure hoax.” and sentenced him to 4 years in prison.
The injustice of people dying believing they were receiving cutting edge treatment while a charlatan becomes a multi-millionaire sounds like a perfect recipe for haunting.
So where does Theodora come into all this? While her exact connection to the hospital isn’t clear, some people say she was one of Baker’s patients, others say she was nurse. What is clear is that she was at the hospital while it was a cancer ward and that she was known as a very neat, organized and clean person.
What’s in an OCD Ghost?
This takes us back to Theodora’s OCD habits. Why would a ghost be obsessed with cleaning? Perhaps it was Theodora’s way of dealing with the helpless nature of terminal illness. Maybe tidying up gave her something she could control in a world where most things felt completely beyond her control.
Either way, knowing that the Crescent once served as a place that profited off of people’s desperation s a truly creepy concept.
So if you’re ever staying in room 419 don’t be afraid if you’re room looks a little nicer than you left it, just let Theodora know that you don’t want any trouble… and if you’re an oncologist, you might want to avoid room 419 all together.
Read more about Theodora and the other ghostly inhabitants of the Crescent at their website: America’s Most Haunted Hotel. You can also hear about some first hand haunting accounts at Traveltails.net and Haunted-places-to-go.com
