Exploring Arkansas Special Edition: Hauntings of Arkansas

[Music] back when it was first built in 1886 the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs was America's newest and most luxurious hotel well as time passed and it changed hands the Crescent Hotel became known worldwide for quite a different reason as America's most haunted hotel [Music] tales of the Crescent ghosts began even when the hotel was still being built meet Michael one of the Irish stonemasons who lost his balance and fell through the middle of the building landing on a beam which is now roomed 2:18 and where he is said to linger in the 1920s when the hotel functioned as a conservatory for young ladies the history of the school reported an accident one night of a student who was on the upper terrace and somehow fell to her death in the garden below observers will now sometimes see a falling cloud of mist with a human figure in 1937 a quack and a con man by the name of Norman Baker converted the Crescent into baker's cancer curing hospital many came in hopes of getting treated and many died and it's not every hotel that has its own morgue what's behind me is was originally kind of an ice freezer in the early days before they had real refrigerators and that's what I used to keep stuff for the kitchens upstairs when Baker was here he used this to store his dead bodies this is where he would put him while he was waiting to take him off to the mortuary after they died up in the hotel he would store and in there and he would conduct the autopsies or his surgeons would conduct the autopsies in this room this is probably some kind of a prep table the autopsy table would have been in the middle of the room of course so you can walk all the way around it so it would have been over there somewhere so this is what he called his morgue you know when you think of the more if you think of like white tile and everything beautiful clean and as you can see it kind of gives you an impression of how much he cared about the people who died under his care she's not very much and this is one of the most active places in the building this is where the tour ends the ghost tours that we do every day of the week in a room next to the morgue appropriately called the parts room the deranged Baker kept jars of formaldehyde which contained the organs of patients yeah throughout the years many hotel guests have had their share of unusual experiences about three o'clock this morning I was in the room 425 woke up set around there for about 30 minutes couldn't go back to sleep so I decided to walk out on the balcony on the fourth floor to smoke cigarette so I did I stood out there probably 20-30 minutes and it's give or take around 4:00 a.m. I come walking back down the hallway and there's a breaking point kind of a breaks over here kind of a hump in the floor I come across that hump and when I come to this area it's a kind of a foggy mist in this whole hallway area right here and as I walk into it I think hmm who's smoking and not in the hallway because you're not supposed to hotel you know so I'm Michael left here and go down to my room when I get to my room I put the key in the door one of our open it step inside I just take a glance back and it's all gone so kind of an eerie feeling so I walk in shut the door I don't come back out till daylight and so that was just but it was all clear and this was what they called mr. Theodore's room you know that and supposed to be a real eerie feel in this area I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not but I do know what I saw here and I've not seen it since Theodora was a resident in room four nineteen at the time of Baker's cancer hospital she is sometimes seen outside her door fumbling with her keys hotel employees as well have either seen or heard things well I was staying in room 316 and it was about four o'clock in the morning and heard really loud squeaky wheels like this rusty wheels going right by the door and I got up to see what was going on and when I went out and opened the door there was nothing there and as soon as I open the door the sound stopped and if it was someone playing a trick on me they don't have time to run down and hide around either corner because I was in the middle of the hallway and I would have heard him and seen him going around a corner so I can't debunk it and so I'm convinced I heard a nurse that nurse is the lady in white guests have reportedly spotted on the third floor wearing an old-fashioned nurse's uniform pushing a gurney covered with a sheet then there's the apparition of a little girl either going up or down the stairs apparently in the late 1930s she fell to her death from the fourth floor banisters all the way down to the ground floor the 19:05 basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs is also evidently occupied by haints there's the pretty young girl in a long white dress who still waits for her groom and then the cowboy who roams the halls looking for one last drink he's also terrified guests by walking through walls so check in at the basin or crescent and possibly you two can meet up with someone interesting I can stop crying the 1906 Allen house in Monticello according to a best in worst calm internet poll among 80 homes it has the unique distinction of being the most haunted house in America [Music] paranormal investigators have determined that at least six spirits occupy the home with the main one being the Allen's second daughter Liddell who committed suicide Christmas night in 1948 after her secret love affair went sour that secret wasn't revealed until current owner Mark Spencer discovered love letters in the Attic the the first batch of letters that I discovered were from October of 1948 I opened up one of the white envelopes pulled the letter out and salutation was dearest though it was signed love and then there was the initial P and I realized in that moment that I was looking at a love letter written to Liddell two months prior to his suicide it was in the Attic that Spencer had his first encounter with Liddell at one point in the in the day as I'm reading the letters I actually looked up at the ceiling of the attic and I said Liddell I'm so sorry it was shortly after that that I had looked up again and I saw a woman walking toward me and she looked like a woman out of the 1920s that was my impression and I what sweat out of my eyes and and blinked a few times and and then when I looked again the woman was further back in the attic it was my wife coming up that attic stairs and so it was very strange this woman those approaching me and then she's gone and my wife is coming up the attic stairs so that that was rather odd another Ladell encounter was in the master bedroom where she consumed mercury cyanide at first Spencer thought it was his wife Rebecca the odd thing that I immediately registered was that she didn't seem to have the drapes pulled back so I wasn't it was like she was looking out the window but she would have to be looking through their drapes to be looking out the window so so immediately I thought that was a little bit odd but I step into the room and I walk all the way across the room so I'm looking at her for for several seconds as I'm walking across the room and I get within about three feet of her and I opened my mouth to say hey what what you doing and she vanished then there's the mystery of the ghost children various people who have lived in the house or visited the house have mentioned seeing those children these these small ghostly entities and paranormal investigators have recorded electronic voice phenomena of children's voices we've even had guests in the house record children's voices on a 1908 postcard of the home one can make out the ghostly image of a little boy on the left side of the front steps in 2010 Rebecca Spencer met face to face with a ghost child and as soon as my eyes locked on to it I couldn't look away and I think I was stuck looking at this thing for maybe five ten seconds and if looking at it wasn't scary what was scary or disturbing was the fact that I couldn't control my reaction to seeing it cuz as soon as I saw it I couldn't breathe it was like like my internal organs all wrenched up together and I and I couldn't breath couldn't do anything except stand there and look at it and when I was able to blink and sort of look away then it just it was gone when I looked back and I was perfectly fine then there was the Victrola incident well this Victrola was downstairs in the parlor and we had an event booked the next day in the house I think it was a bridal shower or something so I was in there just sprucing up the room and I turned on the vacuum going right by the Victrola and my I caught movement as I was going walking by it and I noticed that the record inside it was spinning and I just kept vacuuming but in my mind I'm thinking that's really weird or maybe the kids have messed with it maybe that's why it's spinning I just yeah I didn't really know and it just wouldn't leave me alone so I stopped the vacuum and I went back and looked at it and it was still going but it was actually going faster when I went back and the longer I looked at it the faster it went eventually it was going fast enough to play the record so I put the needle down and as soon as the needle touched the record it stopped instantly apparently Liddell's mother would play the Victrola quite often for guests the Ellen House is open for guided tours by appointment and also the last two days in October for special Halloween tours my [Music] the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas military history in Little Rock is known as one of the most haunted places in the south [Music] in 1840 the federal government constructed the Little Rock Arsenal for the storage of munitions and weapons as a frontier military post later it was converted into housing for officers and their families in 1880 General Douglas MacArthur was born here in 1892 the military post was turned into Little Rock's first public part and the tower or Arsenal building was the only structure remaining out of more than 30 buildings in 2001 it opened as the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas military history so what we do is we preserve the building interpret its past its ties to our state's earliest military history it's the birthplace of uh nationally and internationally known military figure and then we use the building and the exhibits to talk about the role that our state played in military conflicts from the Civil War to the present [Music] being one of central Arkansas's oldest structures and the fact that it was vacant for such a long time led up to the haunting of the Arsenal building [Music] as with most old buildings there are stories of ghosts and paranormal activity here in this building most of the stories that I have read date back to events that would have happened here while it was functioning as an Arsenal stories of the sound of chests of ammunition being dragged across the floor there's one story of a young lady who is wanting around looking for a soldier who went off the war never came back a story of an african-american lady who didn't laundry for the soldiers and then a story of two soldiers fighting those are all stories that would date back to the building's use as an Arsenal we get frequent calls by ghost hunting groups who want to do investigations here at the Museum we allow that under some tightly controlled restrictions paranormal investigators who have spent time here are not disappointed it is scary at times especially the tower the tower has a man in it and he's a man spirit and we really don't know who he is and he's still up there and he watches over the museum bento best psychics that he really watches over he does not like the paranormal groups name you know but he watches over all the other people coming in and everything [Music] the oldest reports of hauntings would be the woman in white she's looking she's on the landing in the staircase at the grand staircase landing behind me and she's looking at the window she's waiting for her husband to return from the war and so we really don't know any more than that and that is people of scenar and that's what a psychic has come up with that's who she is that's why she's here she's waiting [Music] you [Music] the Qing Opera House in Van Buren was constructed in 1891 originally as three businesses at then opened as an opera house in 1901 and what happened two years later was the beginning of the legend of the Phantom or ghost if you will [Music] in 1903 Charles Tolson with the Tolson traveling theater group came to Van Buren the group was quite well-known in the area and and even there was a local physician and that used to meet the actor after the shows and they in the saloons and they'd have drinks and and somewhere along the line he had the physician had a daughter that had a lot of interest and well we really can't say for sure that it was just the theatre it very well could have been handsome young actor but some way or the other there was some information that was given her father that last night and so that in the wee hours of the next morning he was at the depot when the young actor come into my tickets and ended up shooting him and killing him because he thought that he was paying you know improper attention to his daughter this is what a someone had told him over the phone about midnight that night decades later after the Qing Opera House closed then was bought by the city of Van Buren during renovations in the 1980s before opening again a worker had a paranormal experience well one of the men that that stayed here late to finish painting the scenery before the show us to open the next day I spotted something out in the auditorium floor he was on an 8 foot ladder painting right up in the corner and he sees this he's like a little whirlwind and he it just certainly drew his attention so he just kind of turned on the ladder and watched it and he said as he watched it that it is it's beginning to span that it grew larger and then at a certain point he said it was like it floated or drifted it it really wasn't quite sure what term to use but that to the stage and when it came down on the stage it began to take this form of a young man in a top hat frock coat and that he just kind of drifted to one side of the stage and then to the other came back to the center and turned towards the back of the stage and as he walked back the the scene painter is high enough on the ladder that he can see both sides of the scenery and so he sees him as he reaches the scenery and then doesn't see anything comes through on the other side so from the way that he was stressed I think that's then where we began to pull in but remember the young actor that had that had been murdered at the Depot and I think that's kind of how he became our Opera House goes there's also been some difficulty in keeping the lights turned off I started working here in 98 and I still occasionally even though I have it down to a routine I know I've turned every one of those lights out occasionally I still will come in and there will be a light on and someone had an experience with the seat yes there was a couple reported they came in they were running a little bit late they got here just not too long before curtain time and they went in they sit down there the seats next to her were empty and she said just as the lights dimmed that the seat next to her just goes down as if someone were sitting in it and she kind of nudges her husband and you know did you see no so she said then right before intermission before the lights come up the seat comes up as if you know someone had been sitting there dr. Parchman by the way was acquitted in 1904 of murdering Tolson a murder that was committed in cold blood and so the Phantom of the Qing Opera House remains Restless in 1875 Colonel Samuel West Peale built a beautiful villa tower Italianate mansion in what was then the outskirts of Bentonville the Peale mansion was a working farm stead surrounded by 180 acres of apple orchards instead of the current gardens Peale fought in the Civil War and was the first native-born Arkansas elected to the US Congress together with his wife Mary Emmeline they raised nine children here 1875 and when they restored the house now had been restored once I would say in 1980 but then when the pill Compton Foundation got it and I think they opened it up for tours of 1992 well they went that extra step they took core samples and they knew that the this was the very similar wallpaper of course it's not original but it was very similar so they they went that extra step to bring it back to life but they may have brought it back to life a little too much [Music] tour guides tell stories of the piano and the parlor playing all by itself [Music] I've heard it play when there's no one here yes and their stories all the peel girls there were five girls and well six girls and three boys and all the girls play the piano so we just assumed it's possibly one of the daughters doing her piano practice during the month of October sometimes we'll have tours and teach people about the mourning customs of the Victorians and it ties in to this house because Mary Emeline actually fell ill on Christmas Eve and passed away in this house and her funeral was actually held here her wake was actually held here in the parlor and so we like to tell people about the customs of Victorians because when Prince Albert died Queen Victoria raised the mourning mourning for people to a high elevation and poor people feared dying not because of death but for not being able to mourn their relatives so I would be representing a lady who was in deep or heavy morning and I would have to wear all black I could only wear a bonnet not a hat and I would cover my face with crepe and you would never see me without it and the crepe was to protect me from your prying eyes and you from the tears that that I was shedding but it also they believed that the spirit of my loved one would hover around me and if you looked into my tear-stained eyes you might actually attract my loved one and that person might be attached to you so you avoided that at all cost [Music] there's also the apparent apparition of mini Bell one of the peeled daughters who suffered from melancholy or depression as we know it according to Colonel peels letters if she would constantly be running up the stairs and then sit up in the tower looking out the window so venture if you dare and experience for yourself the Peale mansion and all the other hauntings of Arkansas [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Arkansas PBS

Views: 816,944

Rating: 4.69765 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Dlb4xsdJhoY

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019