EUREKA SPRINGS - Rarely do people who “sleep” in a morgue have an option to get up and leave, but it’s supposed to happen next week in Eureka Springs.
Last year, the 1886 Crescent Hotel and Spa developed a Halloween package that would include a night in a suite and a night in the part of the hotel that served as a morgue back when the Crescent was run by a quack who promised cancer cures in the 1930s.
There were no takers for the morgue beds.
This year, the hotel held a drawing for the package. The winners, chosen Oct. 20, are from St. Louis.
The couple will stay the weekend and take along a couple of family members, said Bill Ott, marketing director for the Crescent and its sister hotel, the Basin.
The Crescent is known for supposedly having ghosts, and the morgue area is where a television crew claimed to have captured an image of one.
Nightly ghost tours that take visitors around the city finish up in the former morgue, which today is a maintenance room.
There are still some touches from Norman Baker’s time, when the former vaudeville performer turned the hotel into a den of false hope for cancer patients.
Baker’s autopsy table is still in the room, as is the former cooler where Baker stored corpses and body parts he used in experiments.
A few steps away is the closet where he kept body parts preserved in jars, the shelves now home to light bulbs and paint cans.
The sink still works on the autopsy table, which is now put to a more constructive use.
To the right of the sink on a recent day was a jug of Gojo hand washing cream for the workers. A coffee maker to the left had a fresh pot.
Ott said the staff will move furniture into the room for the big night.
“The couple will have all the comforts of home: a bed, night stands and an autopsy table,” Ott said. “They can always exit and go back in their luxury suite.”
Baker cleared out of the hotel when he was charged with mail fraud, which led to a four-year prison sentence.
Prosecutors caught him sending phony letters to relatives of patients saying the treatments were going well and instructing them to send more money. Some of the patients were dead when Baker mailed the letters.
The hotel remained vacant through the end of World War II, Ott said, and then passed through a series of owners. Marty and Elise Roenigk bought the Crescent and the Basin in 1997 and have spend $6 million to renovate the buildings.
Ott said the hotel has been featured on ghost-hunting television shows, and that has helped spread the lore.
Ott said last year’s Halloween promotion drew a lot of interest.
He was called for radio interviews from across the country and from Australia, Canada and Great Britain.
“We had great, super interest in it,” but no one ever bought the package that includes the morgue stay, he said.
Just after Halloween last year, someone booked for 2008, Ott said.
This article was published Monday, October 27, 2008 in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
written by Chuch Bartels
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 10/27/2008
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