Our Favorite Local Haunt

Location: Crescent Hotel; Eureka Springs, AR

Dates: August 2-3, 2008

The Crescent Hotel has become a favorite haunted location for my family over the past few years. We decided to go back this summer because we were bored and my boyfriend, John, had never been “ghost hunting” before. Nor had he ever experienced the quaint little town of Eureka Springs.

Our first night there we stayed in room 428. It’s one of the Crescent’s regular rooms, and as far as we know, nothing too paranormal has been reported there. The second day, however, we moved over to 419, Theodora’s room. On a past visit, we’d had a lot of fun with Theodora, so we were hoping she’d introduce herself to John.

During the day, we went all over Eureka looking in antique stores and enjoying the downtown area. The most memorable experience of the entire trip though, and one of the strangest, happened while we were visiting Turpentine Creek animal sanctuary. Unbeknownst to us, lions and other large cats are able to “spray” things when they get annoyed. My dad became one of those things. The large male lion got rather perturbed at us trying to take a picture with him, so he backed up to the fence and gave my dad a high-powered, smelly, hosing off. After changing clothes, we managed to enjoy the rest of the day and make it back to the hotel in time for the nightly ghost tour. The new guide told us a lot of new stories about the hotel’s past and it’s present haunts, and along the way I got a couple of decent orbs in my pictures.

Orb in the hallway at 8:25 pm

Same hallway only a few seconds later

Orb caught on the ghost tour

The night passed by relatively uneventfully. The one event we couldn’t explain was a feeling my mom got on three different occasions. Around three, she had gotten up to walk around and snap a few pictures just for the fun of it, and after that she had trouble going back to sleep. While lying in bed, she thought she felt my dad get up and get off the bed on three separate occasions. In reality, my dad didn’t even get up once that night.While we were there, we ran a digital voice recorder for a good part of the time. My parents asked questions and tried to get responses on several occasions. The next morning while she was waiting for us to all get ready, my mom decided to go back and listen to the audio we had recorded. The recorder can run for almost 20 hours, and it had new batteries in it for the trip. My mom had left it on the TV stand, running when she went back to bed that night. The next morning, she found that it had shut off during the night. There should have been several files on the recorder labeled with 8-3-08 as the time stamp. When we looked for them, they were all gone. There was no record of our trip to the Crescent this time. The oddest part was that the recorder’s date had been reset and now read 2-4-10. And even stranger, when you hit play, instead of automatically going to the last file recorded like it is programmed to do, it went back several years and began playing the file from the Stone Lion Inn. The batteries never died, and there is no way it could have shut itself off otherwise, much less reset its own date. We’d been told before that Theodora doesn’t like new technology, and I guess she might have taken offense at my voice recorder being on all night. How else could a rather simple piece of equipment manage to do so much work by itself?

Hayley.