Our haunted vacations: Direct feedback from our 'My Ghost Story' show

Here is an Published article I was sent regarding our story(s) from the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Celebrity Ghost Discovered In
“America’s Most Haunted Hotel”

The 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa in Eureka Springs, Arkansas has been investigated by several of the top paranormal TV shows in America. They have “discovered” several “guests who checked out but never left”. One such recent discovery was noted 20th century celebrity Irene Castle

(EUREKA SPRINGS, ARKANSAS) -- Spirits from various places and various eras make up the “guest register” of those “guests who checked out but never left” what many consider America’s most haunted hotel”, the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa. This five-story mountaintop spa resort each year seems to discover yet another one of those famous “guests” by name. This year it was dancing legend of the early to mid twentieth century, Irene Castle.
“We were thrilled to find out that Ms. Castle still visits the hotel as she did during her final years here as a resident of Eureka Springs (AR),” stated Bill Ott, marketing director of this Historic Hotel of America, “and it was only as we linked casual references of a young girl describing a paranormal encounter were we able to piece together that her encounter was with someone who once frequented our property.”
Irene Castle and husband Vernon were the best-known ballroom dancers of the early twentieth century. They operated ballroom dancing clubs and would travel the country charging as much as a thousand dollars an hour for lessons. She appeared in a Broadway show and several movies. Her popularization of social dancing with her husband was portrayed in a movie starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire entitled “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle”.
“It was after the death of her fourth husband when Irene moved to Eureka Springs in 1959 to be near her son from her third marriage,” Ott explained. “She bought a house on a small parcel of land just blocks from the Crescent, a place she called Destiny Farm. She died in 1969 while living here in Eureka.”
Ott said that locals have told him that it was her love of the social life in her latter years that brought her to the Crescent on numerous occasions. It is said of Irene that even in her sixties that she was still “trim, lovely and fashionable lady with nothing to do but embrace the social scene of Eureka Springs” for whom the Crescent was the epicenter.
“It was a family that vacations annually at the Crescent who were part of the encounter where links to Irene came to the fore,” Ott said. “This story, which was recounted on a recent episode of the Biography’s Channel My Ghost Story, takes place when the mother was giving her daughter a bath in their room and the young girl began talking as if she was having a conversation with someone.
“The young girl said there was a princess standing right behind her mother but the mother saw no one. The mother thought it was unusual because her daughter was using such words as pirouette, ballerina, tango, princess, castle and bob.

“It wasn’t until the girl’s father read about Irene Castle’s connection to the Crescent on our hotel blog was he able to put the puzzle pieces of that encounter together. He writes, ‘the strange words my daughter had said that we had made note of began to make sense. The princess was someone in a costume. That princess did not live in a castle; she was Castle. The Bob was a hairstyle popularized by Ms. Castle. Those dancing terms were words commonly used by a professional dancer. It was clear, my daughter had been talking to Irene Castle.’”
Ms. Castle is only one of many paranormal guests who have been named at the Crescent. “Two of the better-known spirits are Michael, the Irish stonemason who fell to his death during construction of the hotel in the footprint of Room 218; and Theodora, the cancer patient who fumbles for her key outside Room 419,” Ott noted.
Whether named or nameless the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa has become a haven for those wanting to encounter the shadow, the whisper, the tingling touch of someone, something who stealthily walks the halls of the hotel proper. Nightly ghost tours have been selling out for years. In fact, hotel management now encourages guests and visitors to purchase ghost tour tickets in advance to ensure their opportunity to walk with these Ozark specters on the night they desire.
“October sees the interest grow exponentially in the paranormal aspect of our hotel,” Ott concluded, “however the frenzied interest is year ‘round. It has escalated so much that later this fall we will be introducing ‘Midnight In The Morgue: A Portrait of Norman Baker’. This exciting new, multi-media theatrical presentation will give our guests and visitors a chance to ‘meet the man’ who purchased the Crescent and operated the hotel in the late ‘30s as a cancer curing hospital.”

For more information, one may go to americasmosthauntedhotel.com.

From their website http://www.eurekaghosttours.com/index.htm
here is the history of the hotel:

Eureka Springs was born on July 4th, 1879…offspring of the many legends and stories of the MAGIC HEALING SPRING of the Osage Indians. These legends and tales were spread word of mouth from Indian to traders and trappers and explorers who spanned the region from the Great Lakes to Southern Florida. The Osage Indians were hunters and this area made an ideal habitat for their lifestyle. The heavily wooded Ozark Mountains were rich with wildlife for hunting and trapping… and the Osage made the ideal “Guardians” for the Magic Healing Spring. They permitted anyone to come to the spring to drink and bathe and heal - even the white man. The area was considered by the Osage to be SACRED GROUND because of the healing quality of the waters. As such, no form of hostility was acceptable and weapons were not permitted in the area of the springs. Fear of antagonizing the SPIRIT OF THE SPRING was a strong incentive for hospitable behavior by all who visited the area.

In 1854, a doctor named Alva Jackson came to the area on a hunting trip. He had long heard of the healing waters and, although he lived in a neighboring community, had never really believed the tales. He was hunting in the area with his son who suffered with a chronic eye infection. Dr. Jackson sent the son down the mountain to wash his eyes in the spring and, within three days, the eye infection had been cured. Dr. Jackson began bottling the water as “Dr. Jackson’s Elixir”.

By the 1870’s, the region was well known by the white man and small groups of health seekers came to the area in search of whatever cures were needed. At that time, a group of approximately 400 settlers had gathered around what we now know as Basin Spring. The Osage Indians had hewn the basin out of a large rock ages ago and the spring flowed freely into that basin. The community was a ramshackle assortment of tents, lean-to’s and shanties. During an Independence Day celebration, the idea was proposed to formalize the settlement. A group of seven wealthy businessmen, including Alva Jackson, calling themselves the “Eureka Improvement Company” took it upon themselves to see to the development of this “Health Resort”. By the next year, the city charter had been formalized and the population had grown to 15,000. By the turn of the century, our full time population had grown to more than 20,000 permanent residents.

By 1880 an elegant, 4-story hotel known as the Perry House was built on the site of the healing spring. Like most other buildings in Eureka at that time, the Perry House was built completely out of wood and by 1890 it had fallen victim to one of the four fires that completely leveled Eureka Springs to the ground. By 1895, William Duncan organized the capital stock necessary to build the Basin Park Hotel on the site of the former Perry House. Following the lead of the Crescent Hotel, it was decided to use our local limestone to build the hotel. In the ten years it took to build the property, Duncan overextended his interest in the project and bankrupt the Citizens Bank and almost every other investor in the Syndicate. The hotel finally opened in 1905. William Duncan died in 1907 but it is believed that he continues to roam the hotel in his trademark brown suit and derby..........

Eureka Springs was born on July 4th, 1879…offspring of the many legends and stories of the MAGIC HEALING SPRING of the Osage Indians. These legends and tales were spread word of mouth from Indian to traders and trappers and explorers who spanned the region from the Great Lakes to Southern Florida. The Osage Indians were hunters and this area made an ideal habitat for their lifestyle. The heavily wooded Ozark Mountains were rich with wildlife for hunting and trapping… and the Osage made the ideal “Guardians” for the Magic Healing Spring. They permitted anyone to come to the spring to drink and bathe and heal - even the white man. The area was considered by the Osage to be SACRED GROUND because of the healing quality of the waters. As such, no form of hostility was acceptable and weapons were not permitted in the area of the springs. Fear of antagonizing the SPIRIT OF THE SPRING was a strong incentive for hospitable behavior by all who visited the area.