The Crescent Hotel

Built in 1886 by the Eureka Improvement Company and designed by St. Louis architect Isaac Taylor, the Crescent opened to immediate acclaim as "America's most luxurious resort hotel," drawing visitors to Eureka Springs for its promised healing waters. When those claims lost their shine after the turn of the century, the hotel reinvented itself as a women's college from 1908 until the Depression forced it to close in 1933. Its most notorious chapter began in 1937, when con man Norman Baker bought the building and opened a fraudulent cancer treatment hospital there, selling false hope to desperate patients despite having no medical training himself; he was imprisoned in 1940 after defrauding patients out of roughly $10 million, and some say patients who died under his care were never properly accounted for. Guests and staff today report the ghost of an Irishman named Michael, a nurse seen pushing a patient's bed through the halls, a businessman wandering the lobby, and a schoolgirl — tied to the building's years as a women's college — said to have died falling from a window. Baker himself is reported in the basement, and cold, damp gusts felt around guests' legs are sometimes blamed on the two St. Bernard dogs who died at the hotel during his ownership.