Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Stranger than fiction
Artist discusses book on Crescent Hotel, infamous Norman Baker
BELLA VISTA — Artist Sean Fitzgibbon of Fayetteville spoke Oct. 18 at the Bella Vista Public Library about his book “What Follows is True: Crescent Hotel.”
The book is a graphic nonfiction, he said, rather than a graphic novel. He said he has been fascinated with the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs since his parents brought him and his sister there as children.
Fitzgibbon is an art professor at Northwest Arkansas Community College. He spoke of his influences, including his father, who was also an art teacher, and film, especially Hitchcock films. He shared slides of some of his own artwork, some of which he called “eerie,” and he discussed how he worked on some documentaries, which led to the project on the Crescent Hotel.
Fitzgibbon worked on the book for a decade, finishing in 2019. About that time, a story came out in the news about a landscaper inadvertently digging up old jars at the hotel that appeared to have human tissue in them, along with medical instruments and film. He said the items were from the 1930s when the hotel was Baker Hospital.
“I knew all about those jars,” he said.
He explained the Crescent Hotel was built as a state-ofthe-art luxury hotel in 1886, but because it was difficult to get to the remote town, it became a girls’ school during the offseason in 1904 to make up for lagging winter hours. Early in the Great Depression, both the hotel and the girls’ school shut down.
In 1937, a man claiming to have the “cure for cancer” came to town to turn the hotel into a hospital, promising to pull the town out of the slump from the Depression.
Fitzgibbon said he did research at Eureka Springs and at Muscatine, Iowa, where the infamous Norman Baker was from.
Baker, he said, was the son of a machinist and worked in that trade for a time and then became a mentalist who would hypnotize people and con them out of money. Baker married his assistant and began working with his wife’s father on calliopes and created an air-powered calliope that made him millions. Following that, he started a radio station and a magazine and made lots of enemies by making false accusations about people, Fitzgibbon said.
During this time, Baker learned about a quack doctor who claimed to have the cure for cancer, had the doctor on his radio show and then stole the “cure,” Fitzgibbon said. He set up a hospital in Iowa but got run out of town because the conditions were terrible, then he tried again in Mexico. Eventually, he ended up in Eureka Springs at the Crescent Hotel for two years, but fatalities climbed and law enforcement caught on, Fitzgibbon said.
He told his audience they would have to read the book to find out what else happened.
“I had to do a lot of research and met a lot of wonderful people, both in Eureka and Muscatine, Iowa,” Fitzgibbon said. “I was kind of amazed no one had ever written anything about this before.”
He said the illustrations in the book are 99% hand-painted, with a little bit of digital work for lighting.
His main goal is for people to read the book and then go to Eureka Springs, he said.
“It’s so much more interesting after reading something like that,” he said.
He added that “What Follows is True” is an umbrella for more stories, and he is now working on a story about Toltec Mounds.
Visit seanfitzgibbon.com to see Fitzgibbon’s work or purchase the book.