The Crescent Hotel: The Cancer Hospital Hiding Behind America's Most Haunted Hotel
We want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Elise Roenigk, owner of the 1886 Crescent Hotel and the 1905 Basin Park Hotel, who passed away on the morning of July 19, 2026. Elise and her husband Marty purchased the Crescent in 1997, and after Marty’s death in 2009, she continued that work on her own for another sixteen years. In 2022, Historic Hotels of America honored her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The hotel described her as a familiar and supportive presence, known for her walks through the property, her conversations with employees and guests, and her genuine care for the people who made the hotel special. She considered her staff an extension of her family. We are visiting her hotels this week, and we will be carrying her memory with us when we do.
The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas has held the title of America's most haunted hotel for decades, and most articles about it stop at the ghost stories. Seventeen paranormal television shows have filmed there. More than thirty five thousand people take the ghost tour every year. Investigators have captured what looked like a full bodied apparition on thermal camera. All of that is true, and all of it is the easy part of the story.
The harder part is a man named Norman Baker, who owned the Crescent in the late 1930s and turned it into something much worse than haunted.
A Mountain, a Governor, and a Boom Town
Eureka Springs was founded in 1879 on the belief that its natural springs could heal the sick. People arrived from all over the country desperate for a cure, and the town grew fast. A former Arkansas governor named Powell Clayton decided the town needed a hotel to match its reputation, so he hired a St. Louis architect and brought in crews of Irish stonemasons to build it on top of the mountain overlooking downtown.
The walls were eighteen inches of limestone, fitted together without mortar. The project cost close to three hundred thousand dollars, which is more than ten million dollars today. When the Crescent opened in 1886, it was declared the most opulent resort in the country.
It didn't last. Spa tourism faded, the money dried up, and by 1908 the hotel had become a girls' boarding school just to stay open. The school ran until the Great Depression closed it in 1933. After that, the Crescent sat empty on its mountain for four years.
Norman Baker Buys a Hotel
Norman Baker grew up in Iowa and dropped out of high school to become a machinist. A traveling mentalist show changed the direction of his life, and from then on he had an appetite for spectacle and persuasion that never faded. He built a radio station called KTNT, which stood for Know the Naked Truth, and used it to broadcast his opinions, his populism, and eventually his medical claims.
Baker was not a doctor. He never pretended to be. He made that into his pitch, framing the entire medical profession as corrupt and himself as the outsider brave enough to tell people what they weren't allowed to know. The American Medical Association eventually forced him out of Iowa, so he moved his operation to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and ran one of the most powerful border blaster radio stations in North America. His nightly broadcasts mixed cancer cure claims with antisemitic and anti-Catholic rants.
In 1937 he found Eureka Springs. The town was struggling, the Crescent sat empty, and he saw an opening. He bought the hotel and opened the Baker Hospital and Health Resort in 1938, painting the lobby purple and covering the walls in geometric designs to match. He drove an orchid colored car, wore white suits with lavender shirts, and had his office sealed behind bulletproof glass with two submachine guns kept within reach.
The Business of False Hope
Baker's brochures promised what medicine could not: cures for cancer and tumors without operation, radium, or x-ray. He preferred patients who had no close family nearby to ask questions. When someone new arrived, he had them sign undated letters declaring themselves cured and doing well. As their condition worsened, he mailed those letters home to buy more time. When a patient died, he sent a condolence note asking for money to cover arrangements, and kept it.
The treatments themselves were injected directly into the cancer site, sometimes up to seven times a day. The formula included alcohol, glycerol, ground watermelon seed, corn silk, clover leaves, and carbolic acid. Baker never told his patients that carbolic acid, also called phenol, is a poison that causes organ failure. Around the same years Baker was injecting it into cancer patients in Arkansas, the same compound was being used in Nazi concentration camps.
When patients deteriorated to the point that their suffering became audible, Baker had a solution for that too. He soundproofed an entire wing of the hotel, sealed it behind steel doors that locked from the outside, and called it a psychiatric ward. Anyone screaming in pain was moved there, out of earshot of the rest of the building.
Historians have confirmed at least forty two deaths at the Baker Hospital in roughly two years of operation, though the real number is likely much higher since records survive from only one of the five mortuaries operating in the area at the time. Baker walked away with somewhere between one and ten million dollars from people who had nowhere else to turn.
His downfall had nothing to do with the deaths. He was convicted of mail fraud in 1940 for using the postal service to promote his fake cures, and served four years in federal prison. During the trial, prosecutors read aloud his own words describing how much money he expected to make off what he called suckers.
Baker later tried to open another hospital in Iowa and was refused. He retired to Florida, settled onto a yacht that once belonged to railroad developer Jay Gould, and died in 1958 of cirrhosis, a disease he had spent his life pretending he understood how to cure.
The Bottles in the Backyard
In 1997, Marty and Elise Roenigk purchased the Crescent and did something previous owners hadn't. Instead of downplaying the building's supernatural reputation, they leaned into it, launching nightly ghost tours and treating the hotel's full history, including its darkest chapter, as something worth preserving. The Crescent was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.
In February 2019, a landscaper named Susan Benson was extending a parking area on the property when her equipment turned up medical bottles in the first scoop of dirt. She called the hotel's ghost tour manager, who recognized them immediately from an old Baker promotional poster in the hotel's archives. What followed was a full excavation by the University of Arkansas, which uncovered somewhere between four hundred and five hundred bottles and jars, some containing Baker's so-called secret formulas, some containing what appeared to be preserved tumor and tissue samples. Archaeologists also recovered reels of film, a dispensing spoon, and what looked like a bone saw.
After the discovery made news, the hotel's general manager heard from people who had lived through the Baker years and remembered seeing those exact bottles in the basement decades earlier. Stories that had circulated for eighty years turned out to be true.
The Ghosts of the Crescent
Michael is considered the oldest ghost in the building, believed to be one of the Irish stonemasons who fell to his death while building the hotel in the 1880s. He haunts room 218, one of the most requested rooms in the hotel, and is known for turning lights and televisions on and off, slamming doors, and pulling back shower curtains on female guests.
Theodora is a former cancer patient from the Baker years who appears outside room 419, fumbling with keys that won't work, and tidying the room after guests leave. One couple returned from dinner to find a handful of loose change stacked neatly by denomination on the coffee table.
Breckie is the ghost of a four year old boy named Clifton Breckinridge Thompson, the son of a college president during the school years, who died of complications from appendicitis. He's usually heard before he's seen, a bouncing ball or the sound of small feet in the hallway.
Dr. John Fremont Ellis, the hotel's former in house physician, is detected by the smell of cherry pipe tobacco that appears and disappears near room 212. A Victorian gentleman in formal dress has been spotted at the lobby bar and the bottom of the main staircase, and a nurse in white has been seen pushing a gurney down the third floor corridor, the sound of the squeaking wheels sometimes heard on its own.
The basement morgue, where Baker once stored human remains next to his autopsy table, is where the most disturbing reports come from. Guests and staff have described children huddled under the table asking for help, and there's a specific spot just above the morgue where visitors have repeatedly gone pale and fainted against the wall.
Why This Story Matters
The Crescent Hotel has stood on that mountain for over 140 years. It has been a luxury resort, a boarding school, a fraudulent hospital, and a ruin, and now it's a hotel again with ghost tours running most nights of the week. What connects every era of its history is the same thing: people arriving with a need, and the building giving them some kind of answer.
The people who came for the springs wanted to be healed. The people who handed their savings to Norman Baker wanted the cancer to be curable. The people who book room 218 nine months in advance want to feel something on the other side of the wall. The Crescent has never turned any of them away empty handed.
We're covering the Crescent Hotel ahead of our own trip to Eureka Springs, where we'll be staying in the hotel and attending Obscuracon. Listen to the full episode of You Two Scare Me for the complete history and every haunting we cover, plus a new Somebody Told Me story about a child ghost spotted at Key West's La Concha Hotel.
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, and follow You Two Scare Me on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for updates from our trip.
