The Crescent Hotel and the Cancer Fraud

The grandest building in Eureka Springs sits on the highest hill in town. The Crescent Hotel opened in eighteen eighty-six as a luxury resort for the wealthy visitors drawn by the healing spring waters. Its Victorian towers could be seen for miles across the Ozark ridges, and for a time it was considered one of the finest resort hotels in the American South.

Over the decades it changed hands and changed purposes, serving at different points as a resort, a women's college, and then, in the late nineteen thirties, as the site of one of the most brazen medical frauds in Arkansas history. In nineteen thirty-seven, a man named Norman Baker bought the old hotel and converted it into what he called a cancer hospital. Baker was not a doctor.

He was a radio broadcaster and self-promoter from Iowa who had made money selling dubious health remedies. His cancer treatment consisted largely of watermelon seeds, brown corn silk, and a fluid he refused to identify. He charged patients large sums, promised cures that did not come, and continued drawing the sick and dying until federal authorities intervened.

In nineteen forty, Baker was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to four years in federal prison. After his departure, the hotel changed hands many times and eventually returned to operation as a resort. It is now marketed as America's most haunted hotel, a reputation built partly on its dark history and partly on decades of reported unexplained events.

Whatever one makes of ghost stories, the documented history of what Norman Baker did to desperate, dying patients inside those walls is disturbing enough on its own terms.