By nature, I am pretty skeptical when it comes to ghosts but I do love a good spook tour and when you can bring your dog, it’s even better. On our train and trolley tours, we had begun to learn about Norman G Baker who is known in Arkansas as a promoter of alternative medicine. He was clearly a con-artist.
These are photos of Baker.
According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, by 1929, Baker had denounced the American Medical Association (AMA), claiming that he had cures for cancer. Although lacking any training at all, Baker organized the Baker Institute in his home state of Iowa. The 100-bed hospital was staffed largely by chiropractors, osteopaths, and physicians from diploma mills. Besides promising to cure cancer, Baker attacked aluminum pots and pans, fluoridation of the water, and vaccinations.
Below are bottles excavated by a team of archaeologists at the Hotel property.
In July 1937, Baker purchased the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs. This great Victorian landmark, erected in 1886, had faded dramatically. The local chamber of commerce looked to Baker to rejuvenate the town. At the Crescent, Baker painted virtually everything lavender or purple and some still remains. He used the US mail to advertise his miraculous cure for cancer. According to the tour guides, he injected some useless combination of chemicals into the patients. The most horrendous aspect of what he did is that when patients were screaming in pain, he put them into a part of the hotel that had been created to be a sound proof music room during an earlier incarnation of the property as a school for girls. Many patients likely died though no one knows how many. He had the bodies picked up at night and they were stored in the morgue which we toured. It was kind of creepy. He also sent many patients home right as they were about to die and so they passed in transit or just as they arrived home. Eventually, he was convicted of mail fraud and spent some time in Leavenworth although he was released early.
This was a creepy room but upstairs at the start of the tour, both dogs seemed to react before entering one of the rooms.
According to Wikipedia, Norman Baker ran for governor of Iowa in 1932. He received only a few hundred votes, but the campaign kept him in the news and gave him yet another mouthpiece for his rants against local power structures. Baker's platform, to the extent it had coherence, followed the tenets of prairie populism of the time – i.e., asserted that the common people were being exploited by monopolistic conspiracies in various guises. However, Baker also crusaded against local newspapers and other radio stations that reported on his activities He was very anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.
“Norman Baker was not the only unlicensed "radio doctor" of his era but is remembered by the medical profession as one of the most ruthless quacks in American history.” He always had defenders who believed in his stories about the conspiracies of mainstream medicine to suppress his "cure". He was quoted as saying that if he had his radio station back, he could"reap one million dollars out of the suckers in the state."
It seems this kind of con has been going on for a lot of years. What is old is new again.
Aside from all those who perished at the hospital, there were numerous ghost sightings reported at the Crescent Hotel. It has been featured in the TV show Ghost Hunters.