Hotel De Luna

and what strange goings on that I did see...?

The name of this post is not the actual name of the hotel that this post is about. You can find that at the end of the post, but I implore you to read it before looking for information about it prior to reading. It might spoil the fun a bit.

It is the season of ghosts, bumps in the night, and long dead visitor staring in your window. It is the idea season to share personal stories about inexplicable things, and this month I will share two of those stories.

A long time ago, a formerly famous person name Erik Estrada would appear on late night infomercials selling real estate plots. Much like a timeshare situation, the company would pay for a trip to go see these lots, and sit through the pitch, which of course would be long and pointless, and then a tour of perspective building sites.

Free trip was all we heard. Of course there were limitations and restrictions that they obnoxiously expected you to follow if they took them up on their “generosity”, but the long and the short of it was, free trip with things to get around, not adhere to.

Off to Arkansas we went, with absolutely no intention to buy anything. We know a scam when we see it, and we went into this with a plan in place. My Significant Other would pretend to be the interested driving force, while I played the insufferable bitch that could never be satisfied because it was not where she wanted to be. We went, played our roles, and made the salesman give up in a matter of an hour. He couldn’t make a dent in me, and my SO played the part of the hopeful but now defeated partner to a tee.

One of the rules was, no renting a car. This made very little sense to us. If you want people to buy land in an area, they would first have to see said area, so not allowing car rental and keeping people in one place seemed counterintuitive, unless it was a scam. It was, they were selling plots of land for tens of thousands of dollars more than what they were worth, and the company would hold the title as owners until you paid it off and “met all buyer obligations” which could be anything they wrote into the contract. If you could rent a car, you could see that there were far cheaper, and better plots of land for sale, so they had to be sure you didn’t get that information, and they kept you in the motel.

Nuts to them, Enterprise picks you up, and walking to the Denny’s where we arranged for the pickup was very simple. Now we could go to where we actually wanted to go in Arkansas, and that would be a half an hour away, in a town called Eureka Springs.

Looks charming as hell, right? That’s what we thought too. However, once you arrive there, you realize that while all the things are as charming as they appear in that photo, they are also scrunched together on a hill in a very claustrophobic way

Like this:

Very narrow streets, and very close together buildings. Not somewhere that we were interested in living. Well, so long as we are here, might as well grab lunch, and my SO knew just the place he wanted to take me.

We make our way to the very top of the hill where this beautiful building stood.

Looks amazing, right? A great place to catch a lunch in their restaurant, and that is where we were headed. However, when we got there, and started to walk towards the building, I didn’t want to go inside. There wasn’t a feeling about it, just this knowledge that I didn’t want to go in. He convinced me otherwise, and I finally agreed. It’s possibly a once in a lifetime opportunity after all.

We get inside, and he looks to find someone to direct us to the restaurant, and I found myself walking up the stairs. No reason that I can give you to explain my decision to do so, I just did.

Upon reaching the second floor, I found myself confused as to why there was a nurse walking down the hallway, pushing a medicine cart. I thought… this was a hotel, and since when did nurses still wear dress white uniforms, and not scrubs. Perhaps a private nurse for a guest, but then why the medicine cart?

The whole thing was quite odd to me, and I went back down the stairs to where my SO was. I told him what I saw, an he thought that was pretty strange. Also, he informed me, unfortunately the restaurant already closed for lunch, and they wouldn’t open again until dinner. We didn’t have the option of waiting that long, so the best we could do is explore the bottom floor a bit, and then make our way back to the motel we were supposed to be at.

He started checking out this huge fireplace that was in the lobby:

While I went to look out on the back deck:

When I went out those doors, all along the deck on both sides stretching away from the doors were people, all bundled up, and sitting in chairs sort of like these:

When I stepped out there, on both sides, they all turned to look at me, and there was definitely that air that I was interrupting something. Perhaps they were all there on a retreat, and I was interrupting a class? I wasn’t sure, but I turned back around and went back inside. Whatever they were doing, was not my business.

When I got back inside, my SO had finished looking at the lobby and headed towards the doors like I had. I stopped him and said,

“I think that they are having a class out there or something. There’s a bunch of people on the deck” but he went anyway.

He came back in after a moment and said, “There’s no one out there at all.”

Confused I followed him back out, and he was right. No one was there. Not a single person, no chairs, nothing. All right, that was weird, I thought, and we went back to the motel.

A few months later we were watching Ghost Hunters, and they were exploring a hotel in Eureka Springs. Which one do you think that they were at? The very one that we were at? Congrats! Go get a cookie for that correct guess.

Not only were they exploring it, they were discussing it’s rather storied history. You see, it wasn’t always called what it is today, it used to have a different name.

The Baker Cancer Hospital.

It was run by a man named Normal Baker, and he was not only a charleton, he was a several time prosecuted one. That didn’t stop him from opening this “hospital” that touted a cure for cancer however, and people bought into it. None of his “treatments” did anything, and people still died in droves from the cancer, but they did so in the basement, far away from where anyone could hear them screaming in agony from the pain.

Baker had an incinerator to deal with the bodies of the deceased, but not until after he autopsied the bodies himself in his own makeshift morgue, where he would extricate tumors from his “patients”, and stored them in jars. Other patients died in their rooms, where they stayed until the dead of night and the nurses would quietly remove them, and transport them to the basement so no one ever saw the bodies.

He made millions off this scam, and many people died, alone, in pain, and terrified.

What did I see that day? I have no idea. Was it a bending of time periods, was it an echo from the past, was it people in costumes playacting the events from so long ago for some reason? I don’t know. What I can tell you is that none of the things I saw looked like they were ghostly in ay way. They looked real, solid, and other than the odd scene of the nurse, not that they were out of place.

Interestingly, neither of the things I saw are reported by other people, and the hauntings that other people have seen are not like those that I did. Yes, there are nurse hauntings that people reported, but not on the second floor, but rather the third. She isn’t pushing a medicine cart during the day either, but rather a gurney in the middle of the night. People have reported seeing it, and also hearing it.

No one has reported seeing people out on the back deck in chairs like I saw, so where did they come from, and more importantly, where did they go in the very short period of time? I don’t have an answer for any of those things, but at some point I wouldn’t mind spending the night at The Crescent Hotel to have another look.