The Crescent Hotel Offers Haunted Packages for Halloween

The lucky couple fluffs their pillows, slips under the comfortable covers and turns off the light there on the nightstand. They smile guardedly knowing this will probably not be like any other night they ever spent in a hotel. Why? They are sleeping in a morgue!

As part of a special “Paranormal Pair Package,” guests can enter to win the opportunity to sleep in the area once used as a morgue when The 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa was operated here as a cancer curing hospital in the late 1930s. The owner of the hotel at that time was Norman Baker, a charlatan and self-degreed “doctor.” The autopsy table he used for experimentation on patients –both living and dead- remains as the focal point of this macabre room.

And the night the winning couple gets to slumber in this eerie, some would say spooky, setting? Halloween 2008. The place? A quaint Arkansas Ozarks community that has become somewhat famous for its reports of ghostly close encounters, Eureka Springs.

Two sites that have probably added more “evidence” to that compendium of spooky speculation are Eureka Springs' landmark historic hotels, The Crescent and its sister hotel, The 1905 Basin Park Hotel. These two properties have now joined together to offer guests the “Paranormal Pair,” a three-day / two night package of ghostly proportions. The package will be available beginning August 1 and will run thru October 20, the day of the morgue drawing.

“Probably when people hear the hotel name Crescent or Basin Park they have questions about two things. They usually ask us about weddings and if we are really haunted,” said Jack Moyer, vice president of operations and development for both properties, “and we have great answers for both. Our weddings are dreams come true and our ghost sightings are sometimes explained away as ‘It must have been a dream.' But when personal report after personal report, eerie photo after eerie photo somewhat substantiate that something mysterious is goin' on you have a tendency to swing toward the side of believability.”

Whether a believer or not guests can now hear the stories, see the sights, and take their own photographs as part of the Paranormal Pair Package. Guests stay one night in the Basin Park, taking their ghost tour; and stay one night at the Crescent, taking that hotel's ghost tour. When not on the tour, guests can stealthfully meander through the halls and public areas of both hotels to do their own “spirited” investigating or do some shopping, dining or gallery hopping in one of America's Dozen Distinctive Destination communities according the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“One of the fun twists we've added is that those who take advantage of our Paranormal Pair Package can also, if they so desire, register in the drawing we are having for overnighting this Halloween night in The Crescent's ‘morgue,'” explained Moyer. “The morgue is where The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) caught a full-bodied apparition on videotape when they were performing an investigation for their Sci-Fi Channel ‘Ghost Hunters' program several years ago.”

“The morgue, a great place to dream on Halloween night, don't ya think?” Moyer concluded.

Information & Image courtesy of The Crescent Hotel