Located amid the hills ‘n’ hollers of the Arkansas Ozarks sits a 126-year-old Historic Hotel of America that has been dubbed “America’s Most Haunted Hotel”. And it was not a “self-dubbing”. Just last year the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa, located here high above a community that is -in its entirety- on the National Register of Historic Places, was so recognized by TripAdvisor®and Yahoo! Travel. It is only in recent years that the hotel’s “guests who check out but never leave” have become legendary.
“There have been tales of paranormal experiences in this building for as long as anyone can remember but thanks to worldwide exposure over the past few years on such television programs as NBC’s ‘Today Show’, Syfy’s ‘Ghost Hunters’ and A&E Biography’s ‘My Ghost Story’ , as well as a Money section’s front-page article in USA Today our unexplainable activities and encounters have been given both credibility and notoriety,” said Bill Ott, hotel director of marketing and communications.
“Through August of this year, 13,169 hotel guests have taken our ghost tour. Each believes that the orb or ‘what’s that’ image captured on their digital camera or cell phone, the strange ‘beep’ on their EMF (electromagnetic field) ‘Ghost Meter’, and that breathy EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) recording have brought them ever so close to ‘the other side’,” Ott explained. “That is why this Halloween night we are going to try to cross over and actually take them there.”
The spooky sojourn about which Ott is referring is the midnight séance in the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom where illusionist and medium Sean-Paul of Eureka Springs’ Intrigue Theater will make an effort to contact long-departed grand illusionist, world-famous escape artist and legendary magician Harry Houdini.
Purchase tickets for the Halloween Houdini Seance-10pm.
“To hopefully impress the departed Houdini as well as putting himself into a connective frame of mind and a state of intuitive relationship, Sean-Paul has planned, here at the Crescent, to replicate one of the lamented legend’s most spine-tingling feats, the straitjacket escape,” detailed Ott, “while hanging suspended upside-down from the top floor of this five-story, limestone structure.”
See this first time escape done at the Crescent Hotel on Thursday, October 4th at Noon on the East Lawn. FREE to the public.
Ott concluded by saying, “History has shown that the month of the October stimulates the most interest in our hotel’s ghostly guests. But this year, on Halloween night, we are making room for one more spirit to join our paranormal party. So, Harry, if you read this, please remember that our midnight soiree is come as you are.”
For more information, one may go to americasmosthauntedhotel.com or contact the hotel at 479-253-9766.