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I would go downstairs and sit in a recliner in the fetal position,

scared out of my mind.

That meant I was up the rest of the night.

And this continued and continued,

and I started noticing my smile had left me.

I was depressed for the first time in my life.

I don't live in Eureka Springs anymore.

I don't work at this hotel anymore.

And it's still happening to me.

It's four years later, and it's still happening.

I think Norman Baker is haunting me.

Well, Eureka Springs is a relatively small town.

We have about 2000 people here.

We're located in northwest Arkansas,

not too far from the Missouri border.

That's kind of, sort of in the middle of nowhere,

which makes it even more unique

when you come into town and you've driven for a long time

not seeing a whole lot of anything

and then come to this beautiful little town.

Eureka Springs is a really unique place,

and the community is super supportive of each other.

As early as the 1960s, 1970s,

they actually called Eureka Springs the Town Where Misfits Fit.

We have a long history of artists, writers,

musicians, LGBT,

just lots of people who maybe don't fit in in the rest of Arkansas.

But in Eureka Springs, we seem to get along pretty well.

Historically, you know,

it was the springs that drew people here.

In 1879, we had the first person

that was allegedly healed by the waters,

and word spread pretty fast.

But long before that, the natives that were here

had their own legends about the healing springs.

They had their own tales that were passed down

from generation to generation.

Essentially, the legend of the springs went out all over this area.

People started searching for it.

The town quickly built up.

We had several thousand people here just within the first year,

so kind of like a boom town but for water

instead of gold or silver or something like that.

Powell Clayton was the ninth governor of Arkansas.

He saw this place, being healing,

having potential for a health-spa resort.

They'd had a lot of these places on the East Coast and in Europe at that time.

They were super popular with the wealthy class of people,

and that's who they were trying to draw in to build the town up.

And he had some wealthy associates.

They called themselves the Eureka Improvement Company.

One of the first things they committed to was bringing in the railroad,

and they did that by 1883.

And they came into town, they built nice roads,

they put in gas lighting downtown and some really nice buildings,

including the Crescent Hotel.

Powell Clayton built the Crescent Hotel in 1886,

and it was an open house and a gala affair

for probably ten years or more.

The Crescent was a big deal when it was built.

It wasn't the first big hotel in town,

but it was definitely the first of its kind.

And it had amenities that people hadn't seen at home.

You know, Edison light bulbs, electricity, steam heat,

you know, so you were comfortable.

And of course, the healing waters

were being piped into the hotel as well.

And they were running it more like a country club.

You couldn't just come stay here.

You had to be invited.

It was, you know, first of the first class.

When it comes to the promotion of the hotel,

they actually did what they called "press excursions."

They would invite 100, 200 newspaper people from the neighboring states

to come into town and visit Eureka Springs.

They would take them all through town,

and they would show them all the sites,

and then they would put them up at the Crescent Hotel,

you know, which was, of course, the great opulent castle in the sky.

What draws people to the Crescent Hotel

is the atmosphere and the uniqueness of it and the beauty of it.

It's such a gracious, dignified building.

I've always been intrigued

by that sort of Gothic aspect of the Crescent Hotel,

how it's this structure

that sits at the highest point of town

and just sort of looms over the entire city.

There's something about walking around this place

and the history that you can't help but love.

You walk in and you just kind of feel a sense of the past.

It just kind of surrounds you,

and it's just something very fascinating about the place.

Although, at times, it can be a little scary.

Is the Crescent Hotel haunted?

Is the Crescent Hotel haunted? Umm...

Yes, I believe that the Crescent Hotel is haunted.

Very much haunted.

As a historian, you know, we don't really talk about ghosts,

'cause we don't really have factual data to refer to.

On a personal level, you know, I will say I had one slight experience at the Crescent.

I'm not gonna say there's, like, ghosts running up and down the halls,

because I'm a little bit of a skeptic in a way.

But I feel like there's something here.

I think that, if any place is haunted,

the Crescent Hotel would certainly be a contender.

Yes, the Crescent Hotel is extremely haunted.

I'm Danita Willhite.

I've been coming to the Crescent

pretty much every year since 2010.

Can you tell me about your experience in Room 205?

The first couple of times that we came,

we didn't really have a lot that happened.

But on one subsequent visit, we stayed in that room.

And I happened to be sleeping in the bed with Courtney.

I woke up in the middle of the night,

and I could feel the bed shift.

I thought Courtney stood up from the bed.

And then I saw a shadow,

someone walk across the foot of the bed.

And then it stopped.

It seemed like an actual person was walking across the room.

And I assumed that it was Courtney

because I had felt the bed shift down at the foot of the bed.

I heard her make a noise

and realized it wasn't her.

At that time, I felt at peace with it.

It didn't scare me

like the other incident that we had scared me.

So in the fall of 2013,

it was our fall girls' trip

to celebrate Courtney's birthday.

And by that time,

some of the front-desk people kind of knew our names.

We were lucky enough to get an upgrade into the north penthouse,

which we were ecstatic to have.

We'd never been.

We didn't have anything that happened the first night.

The second night, however,

is when we did have some activity that occurred.

Courtney saw lights.

I had my eyes closed,

but she saw lights and made kind of a noise.

And right after she saw the lights,

we heard someone walk down the wooden staircase.

We heard footsteps come all the way down the staircase.

And when they got to the base of the staircase,

one of the girls had brought some Tylenol in a bottle,

and we heard the pill bottle shake.

It was as though someone picked the bottle up

and shook it back and forth.

It was very easily identifiable.

It got very cold.

I know that everyone says it gets cold.

It got cold.

And so we grabbed our cameras and started taking pictures

as fast as we could take pictures.

Courtney got a photo that had

just hundreds of orbs, it looked like, in it.

I took a picture with my camera,

and there looks to be a lady

sitting against the wall in a long skirt and blouse.

We got so scared.

I felt the overwhelming need to leave that room

and leave it immediately.

Is the Crescent Hotel haunted?

Well, that's not a yes-or-no question, I'm afraid.

It has had the reputation of being a haunted hotel

for pretty much as long as it's been here.

And there have been odd things that happen.

Things that are difficult to explain.

There's a serious, profound issue there,

which everybody in the world is interested in.

I've heard so many people over the years

give their evidence for what they've seen,

and it's very often something very fleeting.

There's a breath on the side of their cheek,

or they think they heard their name called somewhere far away.

And maybe they did. And maybe that's a ghost.

I'm still waiting to be convinced.

But I know it is haunted by the stories of the people

who were here at one time

and maybe still are.

The Crescent Hotel was not cheap to run.

It was not cheap to operate.

And by the early 1900s, they started trying to come up

with some other ideas to bring in revenue.

And one of the ideas that stuck

was they could run a women's college

during the winter months.

And in 1908, they invited

the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Ladies

to join them, making it a boarding school

for wealthy young girls in the winter

and then still open to the public in the summertime.

And it was a really important place for these ladies

because this was an accredited college.

For its time, it was quite groundbreaking

for a college for women that taught such a robust curriculum.

At that point in time,

most of the schools for women were mostly--

You know, they were interested in just teaching women how to be housewives.

And the Crescent College was different.

A lot of the courses they taught to women at that time

are still being taught in colleges today.

We had spirit activity even then.

We had students here that had sent a postcard home

asking for their family Ouija board to be sent

so they could figure out who was connecting with them.

The school went on here until 1934.

You know, at that time, the Great Depression had hit this area.

Even the most wealthy families couldn't afford to send their young ladies

to a college like that, you know.

And the entire hotel shut down for about three years.

And then the place just went on the skids.

There was nothing here.

It was really tough times for everybody.

There are stories about people going out shooting squirrels for dinner

until they ran out of squirrels.

A lot of people didn't have jobs,

because we didn't have other industries here in town

to fall back on when the tourism dried up.

The hotel was closed during the Depression,

and Baker came up and bought it in 1938.

When Norman Baker bought the hotel,

he claimed he could cure any kind of cancer in six weeks' time.

He was boasting a 100 percent success rate.

The medical field, they just despised him.

I think he just wanted to make money,

and he made a lot of money.

He lacked compassion entirely.

I don't think he had a good intention in his body.

He wasn't a doctor. He was a quack.

He was using human beings as guinea pigs.

He, in effect, murdered those people.

Norman Baker was brilliant.

He was very smart.

He was an inventor.

And during his life, he divided people,

and he still does.

My name is Sean Fitzgibbon,

and I've researched the Crescent Hotel for about 15 years.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by these stories

that I heard of, like, Norman Baker's cancer serum

being poured directly into patients' skulls

and stories of calcium found in the floor

of the Crescent Hotel and in the walls.

In fact, I've even heard stories of skeletal remains

being found in the walls of the Crescent.

These were the type of stories that sent me on this journey

to figure out, like, what the true story was,

what really happened in this place

at that particular time.

So who is Norman Baker?

Well, that is a very interesting question.

He's an enigma.

He was born in Muscatine, Iowa,

which is a river city on the Mississippi.

His parents were German immigrants.

His father was an engineer.

They had ten kids. Only half of them grew up.

And Norman Baker was the youngest of them.

And he was, by all accounts, a brilliant kid,

especially with technical stuff and practical stuff.

He was really good at putting things together, making things.

His father had a machine shop,

and so he grew up looking at the workings

and the way the machines worked,

and he worked in there for a while as well.

Right away, he walked in-- He was just a kid, 16.

Walked in, saw how they were doing things,

and he said, "Let me help you out here,"

and rearranged their factory floors

so that they got better production and stuff.

And then he went kind of itinerant.

He wandered around a little bit as a freelance engineer.

And he got real sick in St. Louis when he was 19 years old.

And he went to see the doctor. Doctor told him he had TB.

He said, "You got three months to live."

Baker, by then, had been educating himself

through correspondence courses.

One course that he took influenced the rest of his life.

It was called Mental Therapeutics.

It's mind over matter.

He had read that if a person concentrated hard enough,

they could cure themselves of any sickness.

He was far away from home, he had no money,

he was shivering under a thin blanket

and thought he was gonna die.

But he applied what he'd learned from Mental Therapeutics,

and three months later,

he was up and about and he was walking.

And after a while, he got all his strength back and he got all his weight back.

And he considered that he had defeated death.

He came out of that sickness--

It seemed like it was a big turning point in his life.

He came out with a lot of determination.

And one of his determinations was that he was gonna make money.

And not just money, but a lot of money.

The thing that really influenced Baker more than anything else

was one day when a traveling vaudeville group arrived in town.

He was so taken by this performance

that he creates his own vaudeville troupe.

In vaudeville, he was a sleight-of-hand magician,

and he'd do the act where you walk around the audience

and tell people what they got in their pockets, that kind of stuff.

Which meant he was really good at reading people.

And he did that for ten years.

He was a mentalist, you know,

which is all show.

It's all sleight of hand.

He was a showman.

You see it through that lens,

a lot of his actions later in life

start to actually make sense.

With his background in machinery,

he makes his first million dollars

by inventing an air calliaphone, is what he ends up calling it.

The calliaphone originally was for riverboats

to make a lot of noise to let people know they're coming through the fog.

It's really, really loud.

But they ran on steam. They blew up all the time.

They were really not user-friendly.

But Baker found a way to produce the same amount of sound

using compressed air.

So you could take these things, you could put them on the back of a truck,

and you could drive them around in neighborhoods

and have them at funfairs and circuses and things.

And so he became extraordinarily wealthy with that.

But he wanted more.

In 1925, radio came along.

And he was one of the first people

to see the possibilities of radio.

So he tried to get the city to build a radio station for him.

They wouldn't do it, so he said, "To hell with you. I'll build it myself."

Some pieces of equipment, you could only get from the government,

and they wouldn't give it to him.

So he said, "Screw you. I'll figure out how to do it,"

and he did.

And he built himself a radio station on a hillside just outside of Muscatine.

He provides a voice for the people of Iowa

by starting his own radio station.

It's called KTNT,

Know the Naked Truth.

He taps into the sentiment of rural Iowans

and what was going on at the time.

You know, you had a lot of people who,

they were watching as their kids are moving away.

They're leaving the countryside, they're moving into the cities,

they're abandoning, you know, the rural way of life,

and they're feeling left behind.

Any kind of authority that was out there,

he would attack.

So he would get on his radio station

and rant, without a text, for hours and hours sometimes.

And he built himself up a great base.

While he's looking just for material for his radio program,

he heard about a guy who was down in Kansas City

named Dr. Ozias, who claimed to have a cure for cancer.

So just for entertainment,

Baker bankrolled five suffering cancer victims

to go down to Dr. Ozias and take his cure

and see if it actually worked.

By spring of that year,

all five of the test patients are dead.

And so, what does Norman Baker do?

He reprints that magazine,

claiming to have the cure for cancer and its effectiveness

and that all these patients are cured.

He reprints it not once, not twice,

but three different times, without changing a single word.

Then he opened a hospital in Muscatine

and made promises that it would cure people of cancer.

And there was-- At the time, there was nowhere to go.

The only possible treatments for cancer

were X-ray, radium and surgery,

and they didn't seem to work for anybody either.

They were the only treatment sanctioned by the American Medical Association.

And so he had an alternative.

A lot of people came to be cured

and were claimed by Baker that they were cured.

Well, it was all very fishy,

and the AMA was against him right away.

He was in Muscatine.

It was awful. It was horrible.

The conditions were abysmal.

The hospital there was actually an old skating rink

converted into this hospital.

It was very unsanitary conditions.

Dishes were not scalded,

and people were using bedpans to wash themselves.

It was that disgusting.

The American Medical Association was after him from day one

because, you know, he was telling people

that the traditional cancer cures were no good.

And the AMA started applying pressure

to the Federal Radio Commission to shut him down.

At that time, radio was not supposed to be a marketplace.

And they yanked his broadcasting license,

which just ruined him.

They were charging him with practicing medicine without a license.

And so he quit. He left.

He went down to Mexico.

When he moves to Mexico, he does it to, really, avoid the law,

avoid, you know, being put in jail.

And so he becomes what they called a "border blaster."

And he starts his station right on the border of Mexico

with the idea being that he's no longer under the jurisdiction

of the United States Federal Radio Commission,

so he can broadcast for as far and wide as he wants to.

He doesn't have to adhere to wattage limitations or anything like that.

And when he was in Mexico, he built a radio station

that was 150 times the power of the one he'd had in Muscatine.

You could hear the radio stations

all the way from Mexico to Alaska.

He became very much a household name.

Pretty soon, he was the most listened-to radio station in the United States.

...the multiplicity of knowledge...

He was on his radio station all the time

talking about his cure for cancer.

And he had a vision in his mind,

which he was going to have cancer-curable hospitals

all over the world.

He said, "When I'm done,

the Mayo Clinic will look like a corner drugstore."

He implored people to write to the Texas governor

to allow him back into the country, where he could practice.

It was stacks and stacks of letters written by people saying,

"Please allow Norman Baker back into the country.

I'm suffering from cancer, and only he can help me."

They all sound the same, so they're all kind of dictated by him on the radio station.

So eventually, there were rumors of civil war in Mexico,

and Baker was not doing as well as he wanted.

So he went back to Muscatine to face the music there.

There was a big trial, and he claimed that,

no, he wasn't doing any of the--

You know, the medical treatments himself.

He had doctors, real doctors, doing it.

They fined him $1000,

which he probably had in his back pocket,

and one day in jail.

Then he decided to look for somewhere else to live.

A few states allowed an eclectic degree.

You had to go two terms of medical school,

and after that, you could write prescriptions,

you could write death certificates, and you could diagnose.

And that's the kind of people that Baker had working for him,

and Arkansas was one of the states that allowed that.

He was actually invited here to Eureka Springs to be part of our town

because he was making so much money at that time.

Eureka Springs was down.

Most people in town, even if they'd heard,

you know, some of the bad things about his past,

initially, they were willing to look the other way

because he was bringing some money into town.

All the businesses in town, "Welcome, Norman Baker.

We're so glad you're here.

Thank you for helping bring the town back."

So he moved to Eureka Springs, bought the Crescent Hotel,

took six months to renovate the building,

and opened his doors for business.

The first thing he did was to bring in

all the patients from Muscatine in boxcars overnight

and installed them into the Crescent Hotel,

so the place was pretty much full with those patients.

It wasn't just the patients that were coming in.

Their relatives would visit them,

and they had people coming in by the busload.

The ground floor was for visitors.

Very brightly decorated in these bizarre kind of designs and colors.

He had a fetish for the color purple.

He used to drive a purple car, wear purple shirts,

write on purple paper in lavender ink.

And he decorated the building up with a lot of purple.

And you can still see paint on the side of the chimneys

that are purple dating back to when it was the Baker Hospital.

They took all the doors off all the rooms,

and they were called wards.

And that's where the patients were confined to, the upper floors.

Oftentimes when people came here,

they didn't have cancer, and they didn't know that.

When they diagnosed cancer back then,

they were doing it with surgery, x-rays.

Norman Baker's hospital boasted no X-rays, no surgery.

They were basically just pushing around on a stomach, saying,

"Oh, if that hurts, it's probably cancer.

And if you have $5000, we'd be glad to treat you."

When he set up his general hospital

and he claimed to cure almost anything

with various numbers on his recipes,

Recipe Number 5 was the one

that was supposedly to cure cancer.

There were five ingredients:

glycerin, watermelon seeds,

corn silk, carbolic acid,

and spring water.

Obviously, he was capitalizing on the curative properties

of the springs in Eureka Springs.

He would also have his doctors, his staff,

inject the serum, oftentimes into their chest.

From my research, that was probably

the most grueling part of his procedures,

was just these painful injections

that he would give the patients each day.

I've seen different reports on the amount of carbolic acid

that was used in his recipe.

Some of them say it was, like, 2%, and some say it was more like 30%.

That was the gas that was used in the gas chambers,

was from carbolic acid.

It was very dangerous stuff he was messing around with.

He didn't need to be injecting it into the patients,

but he was, you know, and up to seven times a day.

But also, he was not offering any pain medication.

He had very few people with an actual medical degree

to be able to prescribe it.

So oftentimes, people suffered through the end of their days

with very little to no pain medication.

Hi, my name is Anne Soden,

and I've been coming to the Crescent Hotel for about 16 years now.

I'm a breast-cancer survivor.

I had stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer back in 2011.

I was pregnant at the time, and I found a lump in my breast.

After I had my son,

I still had the lump, and that's when we went in and had my mammogram.

And I found out after a biopsy that I had stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer.

When I found out, I remember Declan was, you know, newborn.

My mom went with me to the biopsy.

And I got in the car after I'd had the biopsy, started crying.

And I said, "I just got everything I want.

I don't want to die."

And so that was-- You know, we sat there and we cried.

My mom and I both did.

So from there, it was, boom, fast acting.

This was in September.

And by October, I was having chemo.

We went trick-or-treating.

We all went trick-or-treating as a family,

thinking, "Is this the last time I'm gonna go trick-or-treating?"

I still think of that night. I can remember it like it was yesterday.

We always go on the ghost tour.

And after we went on the ghost tour, we learned about Theodora.

Theodora, as far as I know, was a nurse.

We learned that she will straighten up things in your room

and has been known to stack your change.

So that morning after we'd been on the ghost tour,

my husband woke up and he was like, "Why did you do this?"

And I'm like, "I don't know what you're talking about."

So on his nightstand, all of our--

His change was stacked, from quarters to pennies.

I mean, it was pristine, of how it had been stacked.

And I'm like, "You know I wouldn't do that

because I'm not gonna joke with you about spirits doing something to you."

So we like to think of it as Theodora was taking care of us

by straightening up our change.

It was a comforting feeling in a way. I didn't feel scared.

And that was the first experience that we had with her.

And we've had several other experiences too, as we've stayed.

I think Theodora does seek me out because I am a cancer patient.

Because having gone through, you know, chemo

and all the treatments that you go through that they didn't have back then,

I wonder if she is intrigued by someone that has survived.

There was a lot of souls here that lost their lives.

If I had been a patient here under Norman Baker's care,

you know, I just can't imagine.

That could have been me 80 years ago.

When people did die of cancer,

he had this list of exercises that people were supposed to go through,

and that was sort of his fail-safe.

He would blame it on the patients.

They weren't doing their mental therapeutics properly.

It wasn't his Formula Number 5 that was failing, of course.

He didn't care if he cured anybody.

His MO would be, he'd bring them in,

convince them they were sick, give them his treatment,

declare they were cured, and send them home. And that's when they would die.

It wasn't uncommon for people to just leave

and they would die on the trains leaving Eureka Springs.

We do know that 42 people were picked up from the hotel here

during the time that he was here by the local mortuary.

So there is records of people being taken to be processed.

But all of his hospital records were either nonexistent

or they were burned up in a small fire.

How was he able to avoid long-term imprisonment,

especially when patients died under his care?

I've asked myself that same question

because you would think someone like that,

you just lock him up and throw away the key, right?

I mean, this is serious stuff.

But he was brilliant at deceiving people.

It's a miracle he lasted as long as he did,

but I don't think he would have lasted much longer.

It's a lot like the gangsters.

You know, you never get them for what they actually were doing.

It's always mail fraud or tax evasion or something like that.

He started to exercise his influence over, you know, local government,

and that was where he really started to step on some toes.

He also crossed Claude Fuller.

He said something at some point about,

"You don't need Claude Fuller anymore. You've got me."

Here's why it was important

for Claude Fuller to shut down Norman Baker.

Claude Fuller was mayor of Eureka Springs.

He was also an Arkansas congressman.

So he spent his time between Eureka Springs and Washington, D.C.

Norman Baker was always trying to push his cancer cures

and all his things onto Claude Fuller,

trying to get his ideas pushed through Washington.

So Claude Fuller is kind of seeing through all of this.

My name is John Fuller Cross, and I grew up in Eureka Springs.

My grandfather came here in 1885,

and it was a poor family.

He and his brother picked chickens for Powell Clayton,

who had the Crescent Hotel at the time.

He wanted to better himself. He didn't wanna be poor all his life.

So he became a lawyer,

and he had almost all of the big cases in town.

In 1906, he was elected mayor of the town.

When Dr. Baker made that remark about my grandfather

and said the town wasn't big enough for him and Claude Fuller,

why, that's when my grandfather decided it was time for Baker to go.

Claude Fuller set up a sting,

which probably would not fly today 'cause it's a bit like entrapment.

His brother, Harvey, ran the post office.

And so seven fictitious people from Little Rock

reported to have written letters to Norman Baker just inquiring about his cure.

They'd written letters from Little Rock,

so the case would be dealt with in Little Rock, not in Eureka Springs.

So anybody who wrote a letter, they were on the hook, and he wouldn't let them off.

Then they would get letter after letter saying,

"Come and see me now. Come and see me now, before it's too late."

He made promises that he was gonna cure them.

Well, that amounted to mail fraud,

which is a federal crime.

Claude Fuller and his brother then brought the action against him.

And on the day that Hitler invaded Poland,

September 1st, 1939,

Baker was arrested

when the FBI rolled up,

took him down to Little Rock, and charged him.

In January of '40, supposedly the longest case ever tried in that courthouse,

at the end of it, he was given four years in jail and a $4000 fine.

Once Norman Baker was convicted of mail fraud,

he ends up at Leavenworth, you know, federal penitentiary.

And it's pretty fascinating,

'cause even while he's in Leavenworth, he's filing patents.

And of course, the country's at war, and so even while he's in prison,

he's trying to get in on the war games.

You know, he wants to get in on the defense contracts.

He would have got out in three years, but he had some bad behavior,

which, as you might expect, was an altercation with a doctor in prison.

So he got out in three years and three months.

He ends up trying to go back to Iowa

and opening up another clinic,

and they weren't having it.

And so he ends up moving to Florida, and he retires in Florida.

He buys a large yacht and lives the rest of his days on a yacht.

After Norman Baker died,

his gravestone was destroyed just after his death.

And then shortly after that, it was reconstructed.

And on the anniversary of his death, every year,

someone lays purple flowers mysteriously at his grave.

And to me, that really sums up Norman Baker and the way that he divides people.

The repercussions of his chicanery,

his demagoguery, his fake cures,

it was long-lasting not only while he was there

but long after he was gone.

Many people still suffer from that.

The Crescent Hotel was another stage.

It was a theater by a sideshow magician

whose performance had ended.

The Crescent Hotel is still standing.

It's still there.

And Norman Baker was a chapter of that history, and that's the darkest chapter.

And that's where so many of the legends come from.

We definitely had things that were tragic that happened here.

That can hang around, and so it's not surprising

that some of these negative energies are still around here.

Some of these tragedies that still get refelt and rehashed and...

Even the patients at the hospital,

their sadness is felt by some people that are more sensitive to it.

And it can be very overwhelming for people.

My name is Bonnie McCarty,

and I've been coming to the Crescent Hotel for about 17 years.

When it comes to believing in the paranormal,

I watch the programs on TV and stuff,

and I'm somewhat of a skeptic,

but I think there is something.

You know, we go somewhere after we die.

There's something that happens to us.

But what happened to me at the Crescent Hotel is

there was a weekend where myself and three of the ladies I work with,

we decided we were gonna come spend the weekend over here.

And the second night, we decided to go on the ghost tour.

Back then, there was a gentleman named Carroll Heath that conducted the ghost tour.

And as we got ready to start, there were two ladies that joined us.

He said that they were mediums from Kansas City.

He never really gave us their names or anything,

just that they were gonna join us on the tour.

So we went through the ghost tour.

It basically was kind of uneventful as far as anything mysterious happening.

But after the tour,

these two women that were the mediums from Kansas City walk up to us.

And the one lady, she didn't tell me her name, she didn't do anything.

She just asked me, she says, "Do you want to feel him?"

I had really no clue what she was talking about.

But before I could even answer, she took her hand and put it on my chest

like this, and took my other hand and put it on her chest

and put her hand over it, so we were standing fairly close.

And she doesn't say anything. She just closes her eyes.

We're standing there like this, and all of a sudden,

starting at the very top of my head, working its way down,

I felt this real hot, burning heat coming down my body.

And as it slowly worked down,

I started feeling all kinds of emotions,

like hate and disdain and anger and pain,

and just every bad thing you could think of

just kind of started working its way slowly down my body,

and I could feel it, like, even in my heart and stuff.

It almost felt like I was gonna have a heart attack or something.

But I could feel it slowly working down my body.

I couldn't hear anything, and I kind of saw some lights under my eyelids

flashing around sort of dimly.

And I guess all those terrible feelings that I was feeling,

I guess I was picking up on everything that had happened in this place

because there had to be a lot of bad feelings and pain and misery going on.

The feeling of all those things going through me,

it was almost to the point that it made my body hurt and my heart hurt.

It was...

It was just terrifying.

And at that point, I mean, I opened my eyes,

and I had tears running down my cheeks and stuff.

I mean, I was just, like, shaking and everything else.

And it seemed like-- When I opened my eyes,

it seemed like the whole thing just kind of stopped at that point,

as far as feeling the heat and the feelings and stuff.

She takes my hand, and she starts going like this.

She starts going, "Let him go. Let it go. Let it all go."

Like this down my hands.

And she told me that that was Doc Baker.

And she said that he had been with us the whole time.

That was, I have to say, one of the most terrifying things.

See, to this day, it still kind of gets me choked up when I think about it.

But it truly was the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life.

I feel like I was picking up on residual energy in the building.

And, you know, these walls have seen a lot of things.

All the energy that is in this building, it stays.

As if tales of ghosts and hauntings at the famous Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs

aren't disturbing enough,

well, they have dug up bottles filled with human body parts.

Archaeologists say they can tell a lot of thought went into the disposal of these bottles.

I really didn't have any idea what was going on until I picked up the first bottle

that had a clear fluid in it with something in it.

When we made the discovery in 2019,

the very first people we called was the police department.

'Cause we didn't know if it would be a crime scene.

I get a call, I think it was about 7:00 in the morning,

from Susan, the head gardener,

said, "I found something I think you should come and take a look at."

My name is Susan Benson.

I was the grounds manager of the Crescent Hotel all of 2018 and 2019.

I've been coming here my entire life.

And when I applied for the job here, it was...

It meant a lot to me. It really did.

My first year here, I won best landscape in Eureka Springs.

And then the second year, I won best commercial landscape in Eureka Springs.

When guests are here, they walk every inch of this place.

So that back area that's asphalt--

Got asphalt on it.

I wanted that area cleaned up.

And I had one of the guys on the tractor scraping the dirt that had come off that slope,

scraping that dirt back.

And right before he left, he did one more scoop, and then he drove off.

Well, something hit the corner of my eye, like something shiny.

So I looked over, and I could see that there was a jar in the ground,

and I pried that jar out.

And when I held it up, I could see that there was a clear fluid,

and what was in it was tissue, human tissue.

When I pulled that jar out,

the earth behind it, down below, kind of gave way.

And in less than one hour, I'd pulled out a hundred jars.

And I thought, "You know what? I need to stop what I'm doing here."

And I called Keith Scales, who was in charge of the ghost tours.

And things changed from that moment on.

Got very interesting.

And when the police got here, of course,

all the guests that were here and all the staff

were just kind of wondering what was going on.

'Cause we were wanting to keep it quiet.

When the police were there, I just saw them all huddled

around the bottles,

and they had decided that it was not a recent active crime scene.

And they signed off on it.

And then we waited for the archaeologists to come.

Right off the bat, we did get the old rolled film.

And it said "Dr. Norman Baker's cure for cancer" on it.

It just verified what we had.

And we were really starting to get just layer upon layer of bottles.

And we just kept that up for an entire week.

Many were broken. It was acres of broken glass, of course.

It might be there's hundreds more bottles, or it might be surgical instruments.

I mean, who knows what's back in there?

But then, when the archaeologist came,

I pulled back some dirt,

and half-exposed jar was a man's scrotum in a jar.

And I called one of the archaeologists over there and looked,

and, I mean, it was obvious what it was.

They've discovered 500 bottles altogether

that point to the stories of Norman Baker

using the hotel back in the late 1930s to treat cancer patients.

Now, they also found an old bone saw that they believe

Baker may have used to cut the patients.

The University of Arkansas was able to confirm for us

that it was organic material that was packed in alcohol and not formaldehyde.

And that usually indicates a collection, a display,

and not necessarily something that you're saving for medical treatment.

What Baker did was to take organs, supposedly removed from his patients,

put in alcohol, not formaldehyde, even, but in alcohol,

in bottles on display in the lobby.

He did use it as promotion in his TNT Magazine.

He basically says, "We have proof of our success, and it's those jars."

Baker also claimed he didn't do surgery.

And his big advertising thing that he had in his magazine

said "No radium, no X-ray, no knives."

So how did he get these tumors and whatnot out of people?

When we were pulling the jars out,

it bothered me as a human being

because all I could keep thinking every time I would look at one of those jars is,

"This was maybe somebody's grandmother or grandfather or child."

It just did something to me.

It changed who I was at that point

because I'd never been exposed to anything like this before in my life.

And it was horrible.

It was horrible.

People want to know, was he really this bad guy?

You know, 'cause you hear people's opinions of him, and they kind of--

They run the gamut from, you know, he's this murderer,

to, you know, well, no, he was just somebody

that was advocating alternative medicine.

Do you think that he ever had good intentions,

or do you think that he knew exactly what he was doing the entire time?

Um, I do not think he ever had good intentions.

I think he was an evil bastard.

I mean, he let people lay and die,

and then he took their organs and put them in jars and buried them out back.

So, yeah, I think he's a murderer.

It makes me feel sad for the people that come up here

'cause they wanted a cure for cancer.

They wanted to live, and he took advantage of them, and they died.

When he was doing this, you know, we didn't know as much about cancer as we do now.

And he was able to take advantage of people, you know,

telling them these stories about how he could cure them and stuff,

and them really not knowing any better.

They truly believed him.

He deserved to go to prison.

He deserved to be hung, actually, you know,

and bury his body parts out there somewhere.

What Norman Baker did to his patients

goes against everything in me as a nurse.

You protect your patients, you take care of your patients,

you try to heal your patients,

and Norman Baker did none of that.

The nurse part of me wants to heal them

so that they can go on and be at rest.

When I found those bottles in 2019,

it's been the worst thing that's ever happened to me in my entire life.

Three days after I found the bottles, I was at home,

and I went upstairs to watch TV.

I got into bed, and I had the remote, just going to town,

and had no idea that I had fallen asleep.

I wasn't tired. I wasn't sleepy.

I had slept the night before.

But in my dream, this hand came up out of my mattress

and went right over my mouth.

And all of a sudden,

all these other hands come out through my mattress,

grab my body, and they're pulling me into my mattress.

I don't ever remember even having a bad dream before this.

It's four years later, and it's still happening.

When that hand comes up out of that bed, I instantly panic.

And when I would have one, which was four nights a week,

three nights a week, two nights a week,

I never knew when they were gonna happen.

And this continued and continued,

and I started noticing my smile had left me.

I was depressed for the first time in my life.

I was miserable, and I couldn't tell anybody.

I was afraid to.

What people would think,

that, "Oh, my God, she's lost her mind."

And that wasn't the case because this was so real to me.

Because in my dreams, I didn't even know I'd fallen asleep.

Are those dreams the reason you had to stop working at the Crescent Hotel?

Yes. I can tell you that right away. Yes, it was.

I haven't talked about the Crescent a lot.

I miss it like crazy.

And I had planned on retiring here.

And I couldn't take it anymore.

I was miserable, completely miserable.

I don't live in Eureka Springs anymore.

I don't work at this hotel anymore.

And it's still happening to me.

Do you think that those hands are the victims

that were patients at the Crescent Hotel

trying to reach out to you for something?

Possibly.

It could be the patients because I've thought that.

They went through hell when they were here until the day they died.

And even if it's just a body part or a tumor, I don't know what,

but it left this hotel, and it finally got placed in the ground as a burial.

And are these people mad at me

for disturbing their final resting place, their peace?

If they wanted me to find those bottles,

they were asking to be remembered.

I would put a memorial out there listing their names

and what happened to them here

because they are so forgotten.

They are forgotten people.

Haunted is one of those things where I think a place's history

can sort of permeate.

I'm pretty skeptical about so many things

when it comes to that.

But there are stories that I've heard that I'm like, "Well, who am I to say?"

I definitely believe in paranormal experiences

and in ghosts.

And I'm a believer that they're all people too.

The spirits are people that have lived before,

and that some are more negative than others,

and some are more positive than others,

but definitely all have a reason to be here and connecting with us.

Something like 60% of the population

will claim they've had a supernatural experience,

which I think is a wonderful facet of human nature.

I don't know if it proves the existence of life after death,

but having an emotional connection to the ghosts

as if the ghosts were real people,

and they have empathy for those people,

that's when I think the stories are the most powerful.

I feel like there's something here.

There's got to be for people to get drawn back so many times to this place.

It's just the unknown of what can happen here at the Crescent

that draws people in.

Strange things keep happening here over and over again.

Every time I come here, something always happens.

I'm just waiting, what happens today.

What sticks with us over the years is the questions.

If all the mysteries of Norman Baker's time

at the Crescent Hotel and the Crescent Hotel itself,

like, if we knew all the answers,

I think then it would be like a package wrapped up in a nice little neat bow,

and then we'd kind of put that aside, and we'd move on, you know?

But because we still have something to kind of wrestle with to this day,

and the fact that the Crescent Hotel, slowly, over the years,

keeps unraveling little bits of the mysteries,

that's what keeps bringing us back.

You know, it's known today as the most haunted hotel in America,

and it's impossible to gauge how many stories

are encapsulated in this one building.

For years, the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs

has been touted as the most haunted hotel in America,

home to some of the most prominent ghostly activity.

The Crescent Hotel is known not only for its historic Victorian beauty

but for its active array of spirits who reportedly roam the halls and grounds

of this hotel and spa built in 1886.

It's recording now.

- It's recording? - Yes.

Can you tell me about your experience?

I do. I want to talk to somebody.

Please don't do that.

Oh, my God.

Do you want us to leave?

Do you want us to stay?

What the actual f#*#*#*?

It could be dust, though, too.

I think it's dust.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

If you're-- Those are coming at us.

I don't think he wants to talk anymore.

...2019, sightings recorded on a shocking discovery.

- Oh, my-- - Oh, my God!

The camera in my phone's cracked. I can't take any pictures here.

Everything's gonna look like an orb.

What was that?

What room is this?