Haunted Vacation.

[Mycroft]

My wife and I are about to embark on a little driving getaway that will include a night spent at the famed (for hauntings) Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

We've done things like this before on other vacations, including spending a night at the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, and visiting Atchison Kansas, supposedly a very haunted town.

We didn't see any ghosts in the Lemp Mansion. I had planned to get up in the middle of the night and look around, but I slept too hard. I suppose the spirits knew of my plan and made me sleep extra hard to thwart me. In Atchison we didn't see any ghosts either, but we took the haunted tour, which involved driving around town and having the tour guide point to really old buildings that were supposedly haunted, and we took a tour of a supposedly haunted victorian era home, which I'm pretty sure the owners just made up the ghost stories so they could charge tourists $5 a head and help them pay a mortgage that was maybe a bit more than they could comfortably handle.

For the record, I don't believe in ghosts. My wife is a bit more open to the idea, but has become a lot more skeptical in the years we've been together. Really we just like to drive around, visit little towns, civil war sites, and stupid tourist attractions.

If I find any evidence of the paranormal, I'll certainly post it here.

Oh yeah, we might also visit a site that's frequently visited by UFO's. I forget where that is exactly, the wife is in charge of the travel plans.

 

[philkensebben]

Meh, I dont see anything wrong with paying 5 bucks to tour a historical mansion. I realise its under false pretences, but old mansions are interesting with or without woo.

 

[Mycroft]

Meh, I dont see anything wrong with paying 5 bucks to tour a historical mansion. I realise its under false pretences, but old mansions are interesting with or without woo.

Niether did we, and the tour was mostly exactly as expected.

 

[krelnik]

Be sure to report back, would love to hear about it.

I've long thought that a website that catalogued all these places would be a fun skeptic project. I love to do side-trips when I travel for business, but often don't have time to do a ton of research. It would be cool to be able to look up potential skeptic tourism sites on a site based on where I'm going.

I imagine it would end up being very much like the UK site Nerdy Day Trips, especially the part where they let readers add new sites.

 

[idoubtit]

Paranormal tourism is getting to be a huge deal. Ghost tours and monster festivals are EVERYWHERE. They are great fundraising tools for historic societies.

That said, it's bugging me. Almost ALL sites have manufactured stories of things that happened. I think it does a disservice to society to pass these stories off as real AND connect them to paranormal occurrences. I wish there was a skeptical ghost tour that taught you history and folklore from a skeptical bent. If I lived in Gettysburg, this would make a great side business. However, there are about 15 ghost tours and attractions in that town already...

 

[Craig4]

Paranormal tourism is getting to be a huge deal. Ghost tours and monster festivals are EVERYWHERE. They are great fundraising tools for historic societies.

That said, it's bugging me. Almost ALL sites have manufactured stories of things that happened. I think it does a disservice to society to pass these stories off as real AND connect them to paranormal occurrences. I wish there was a skeptical ghost tour that taught you history and folklore from a skeptical bent. If I lived in Gettysburg, this would make a great side business. However, there are about 15 ghost tours and attractions in that town already...

I'm at a loss as to why you'd need to add a ghost story to Gettysburg to make it interesting. They did the same thing to Williamsburg, VA. It vexed me.

 

[jhunter1163]

I own an original 1849 farmhouse. This place creaks and squeaks like all get-out; doors pop open on their own, candles flicker anywhere in the house (it's SERIOUSLY drafty), and on and on. I could make a fortune doing ghost tours. Damn my ethics...

 

[GregInAustin]

I think the ghost tours would be far more exciting if the hotel owners actually pretended to be haunted by some specter, only to have the ghost unmasked by some pesky kids and their dog at the end of the tour!

 

[Architect]

I spend a lot of time in historic properties dating from the 12th century onwards. When I trained at Historic Scotland (a very, very long time ago) I got to work on chambered cairns and the like.

Never once have I seen anything remotely paranormal and eldritch.

That said, you'll find that most people surveying such buildings on their own listen to their MP3 players, otherwise the mind can play the odd funny trick on you.

 

[Architect]

I own an original 1849 farmhouse. This place creaks and squeaks like all get-out; doors pop open on their own, candles flicker anywhere in the house (it's SERIOUSLY drafty), and on and on. I could make a fortune doing ghost tours. Damn my ethics...

Pah, there are at least 6 houses in my street older than that!

 

[Marduk]

I own an original 1849 farmhouse.

thats a modern building in the UK, just down the road from me there's a building thats almost 6000 years old and is known to have been inhabited by the dead, mind you its a neolithic long barrow. Overnight accomodation is free, if a little draughty

 

[Craig4]

thats a modern building in the UK, just down the road from me there's a building thats almost 6000 years old and is known to have been inhabited by the dead, mind you its a neolithic long barrow. Overnight accomodation is free, if a little draughty

For my recent 40th birthday celebration we went to Salzburg where, in addition to going to the BEST beer haul EVER we also had lunch at Saint Peter's, the oldest operating restaurant in Europe. It's been serving guests since 803. The menu has been updated a few times since then of course. Charlemagne ate there in 807. We asked to be seated at the same table but there was some confusion on that point.

 

[jhunter1163]

Pah, there are at least 6 houses in my street older than that!

Yeah, us colonials and our newfangled gadgets. I've even got indoor plumbing. I know, that's pretty hoity-toity, but what can I say?

 

[Mycroft]

Be sure to report back, would love to hear about it.

Absolutely!

We saw no ghosts. We tried, we looked, we took photographs, nothing happened.

We took the tour. Learned the legends of Michael, the stone mason who fell to his death, the quack-doctor who ran the place as a hospital with a bogus cancer treatment, the ghostly nurse who walked the gurney down the halls sometimes at 3 am. The guide was a friendly fellow, very likable. He talked about "orbs" and explained how they were mostly dust-specks, but he also said were "energy" of some sort. In his opinion you could tell the difference between them by blowing up the photo. "Energy" orbs, he said, had geometric shapes or images in them.

They had a meter, I think it measured some sort of electro-magnetism. It beeped and the lights flashed when you moved it near the wall where you knew there was electric wires. Sometimes it would beep and flash when you moved it near areas where you knew there wasn't wires of any kind. That may be spirit energy of some kind, the guide said. These meters were on sale in the gift shop for $40, but they didn't push them very hard.

We saw the "morgue" from the days when the quack-doctor ran the place and lots of people died there of cancer he couldn't really cure. It's not very morgue-like anymore, but there is still a sink with a large shallow bed that may have been used for dissection purposes, and the cooler where bodies were kept, but these days it's just an empty room, the cooling system no longer functional.

We also saw the locker where the television show "TAPS" filmed a human-like image with their thermal camera that may have been a spiritual energy or may have been a reflection of one of their own people. Nothing unusual in the pictures I took.

The tour ended with sort of a seance, where the tour-guide turned out the lights, turned on his meter with the beeping and flashing lights, set it on the floor, and invited the ghosts to make themselves known. They did not. The tour-guide said sometimes they did.

After the tour some of us got together and eagerly reviewed the photographs we took. They say often you see things in them you don't notice when you take them. We didn't find anything unusual in ours. One person proudly displayed a picture of an "orb" that he took. It looked like a dust-speck to me, but he seemed to think it was something. Another woman got some interesting lights in the sky, but I didn't get to see her picture.

We didn't have any hauntings the night we stayed in the hotel. We joked about it, every time we left the room and came back we'd make comments like, "I'm sure my glasses were on the nightstand, but now they're on the table. Some ghost obviously moved them". We heard no unusual sounds in the night and saw no unusual sights. The showers mysteriously went from hot to cold and hot again in the mornings, which I suppose could have been ghosts stealing energy from the water, or just the effects of odd plumbing in a building more than 125 years old.

The staff were all very friendly. I noticed most of them prefaced comments on the supernatural with things like "I've been told" or "some people believe..." and not actually making specific claims themselves. I wondered if they had been coached to neither encourage or discouraged anyone's belief.

At breakfast one of the warming dishes closed unexpectedly, and my wife joked that it was a ghost that closed it. One server was particularly emphatic saying that particular serving dish had a loose lid and nothing happened except gravity. I got the impression he was a skeptic.

One of the maids at the hotel we stayed the night before told us she worked at the Crescent for a number of years, but she never saw anything unusual or ghostly.

Overall? It's a beautiful old building, and it should be preserved. I suspect the ghost stories help make it economically viable, if it is economically viable, so I have mixed feelings about it. Most of the people we saw as guests were there because of the hauntings, including us, but hopefully it gets more busy with regular tourists at other times.