NATURAL STATE HAUNTS

Legends, paranormal activity enchant the minds of Arkansas travelers

Arkansas is riddled with historic lore, and with that history comes mystery. From specters trapped in space and time to strange beasts in the woods and waterways, Arkansas has no shortage of supernatural tales. “As far as haunted places go, most every place is occupied,” paranormal investigator Linda Howell said. “If you look around where you live, you never know. Something might appear … unusual.” Howell is the author of Haunted Little Rock and the owner of Haunted Tours of Little Rock, which conducts ghost tours in October. She begins the tours at the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History, which once served as the Little Rock Arsenal. The museum is also the location of the Arkansas Paranormal Expo, which will occur Oct. 5. The expo connects visitors with a wide variety of paranormal investigators, psychics, cryptozoologists and UFO researchers, Howell said. After leaving the museum, the tour continues at the Empress of Little Rock, Mount Holly Cemetery and the Visitor Center at Historic Curran Hall, where Howell first became interested in ghosts. She was working there when a guest told her she was being followed by the spirit of Mary Eliza Starbuck, whose husband built the house in 1842. “I started trying to check into all this stuff. What does all this mean?” Howell asked. “Then the first surreal things started to happen.” After watching a coffee pot brew java on its own with no water or coffee grounds, she said she began using tools such as dousing rods and electromagnetic field detectors to find and communicate with spirits. Her tours are part history and part paranormal, she said, adding that unexplained happenings have occurred at all the sites on the tour. Other paranormal hot spots she has investigated include the Jacksonville Museum of Military History, Reed’s Bridge Battlefield Heritage Park in Jacksonville and Woodson Lateral Road in southern Pulaski County. Here are a few other unusual occurrences reported in Arkansas.

ALLEN HOUSE

Located in Monticello, Allen House has been featured on several television shows for its purported hauntings. According to the home’s website, Joe Lee Allen built the house in 1905. In the years that followed, the family suffered a number of tragic deaths. Most notably, his daughter, Ladell, died in 1949 after consuming mercury cyanide in the master suite. Her mother then sealed the suite, leaving it untouched for 37 years. The home remains a private residence, but the owners allow visitors into the house for scheduled tours, dinners and private tea parties, in addition to annual tours from 6-11 p.m. Oct. 30 and 31. The website, allenhousemonticello.com, lists a few rules for visitors, including this chilling warning: “If you feel that witnessing paranormal activity of any sort would be detrimental to your mental or physical health, we ask that you do not enter the house.”

MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS

Strange floating lights with no discernible source are frequent fodder for urban legends, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture sheds light on some local phenomena. One of the state’s most famous spooklights is the Gurdon Light, which was first reported near the city’s railroad tracks in the 1930s. In addition, people have reported seeing the Crossett Light at the former railroad tracks near Crossett since the early 20th century. While no proven cause exists for the lights, people have attributed their existence to a variety of mundane occurrences, including swamp gas and reflections from headlights on nearby highways. However, the ghost stories that commonly capture the public’s imagination speak of railroad workers who were decapitated in an accident and now walk the tracks with lanterns, searching for their heads.

MONSTER LORE

Cryptids — mysterious animals that have been reported, but not proven, to exist — are another frequent feature of urban legends. Arkansas rose to B-movie fame with The Legend of Boggy Creek, a 1972 film about the Fouke Monster. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Bobby Ford said he was attacked in Fouke by a large hairy humanoid creature in 1971, and several friends and family members spotted the beast as well. The local sheriff’s office searched for the monster, but officers found only unusual tracks and claw marks on the porch of the home where the incident occurred. While the White River Monster has not garnered a movie, it has become a local celebrity. People around Newport began noticing the creature in 1915, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas states, but the first clear report took place in 1937, when plantation-owner Bramlett Batemen described a humongous gray beast on

an eddy of the river. Locals constructed a huge net to capture the creature, but their efforts were fruitless. Interest rose again in 1971, when witnesses reported a gray horned animal with a long spiky back, and a trail of large three-toed footprints was found in the area. In 1973, the state Legislature created the White River Monster Refuge to protect the creature from harm on that stretch of the river, and few sightings have been reported in the years since.

EUREKA SPRINGS

The natural beauty and Victorian charm of Eureka Springs has long drawn people to its hilly streets, including some who allegedly never left. Steve Arnold, proprietor of Haunted Eureka Springs Ghost Tours, said he was fascinated by the local lore when he moved there seven years ago. “We have our big buildings with the famous ghosts in them, but just ordinary people where they work, where they live, have these ghost stories,” he said. “It was odd. I kind of wondered, are we just crazy here, or is there something to this?” He said the area was considered sacred by members of the Osage tribe, who are thought to have operated a healing spring in the vicinity. They were forced out of the state following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the area was vacant until 1856, when Dr. Alvah Jackson of Berryville rediscovered the springs and used them to cure his son of an eye condition. Jackson kept the site secret until one of his patients, Judge Levi Best Saunders, leaked the location of the springs, which became a boom town of 10,000 people within the year, Arnold said. “There were a tremendous amount of reports of people getting miraculous healing, which drove even more sick and terminally ill people into town, but a lot of people didn’t make it, so our death rate was off the charts,” he added. “That’s part of the equation for a haunted town. If you have a lot of dead people, that seems to correlate with it.” Soon after the town was incorporated, workers improved the mountainous roads by adding a series of retainer walls that left tunnels under the city. Many businesses had access to the tunnels, which may have been used by bootleggers and for the transportation of corpses, Arnold said. “We like to point out that there’s really no good reason for an upstanding citizen of Eureka Springs to really use them,” he added. The company’s nightly tours begin at the former site of Blocksom & Co. Undertakers and Embalmers, across from Basin Park, before taking groups to several spooky locations while discussing the more sinister aspects of the city’s history. While the Crescent Hotel and Spa is perhaps the most famous haunted location in Eureka Springs, Arnold said, his tours only touch on the legends of the hotel, which offers its own tours. According to the hotel’s website, the building opened as a resort hotel in 1886. However, the structure played its most terrifying role under Norman Baker, a doctor who claimed to have the cure for cancer but instead exploited his patients and their families for his own monetary gain. Baker, his patients, hotel workers and various other ghosts are said to wander the hotel and its grounds as spectral reminders of bygone days. Those interested in further exploring the ghostly history of Eureka Springs can book a Crescent Ghost Tour at americasmosthauntedhotel.com or a Haunted Eureka Springs Ghost Tour at hauntedeurekasprings.com. “I think curiosity, the sense of wanting to figure things out, is what draws people, and I think we’re an attraction in town. We fully understand that our role in what we do is for entertainment,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you have to laugh. It doesn’t mean you have to cry, but there’s a recipe there that’s a little bit history, a little bit hauntings, a little bit humor and connecting with people, so that’s what we try to do.”