The weather and flooding are still influencing our travel plans and we were now heading up into the Ozarks in order to ensure that Billy Thunder didn't become an unwilling canoe. This gave us the opportunity to visit the single most haunted hotel in America, the Crescent Hotel of Eureka Springs (which used to be a cancer treatment 'hospital' run by a slippery snake-oil salesman). With all of the different hotels we have stayed in, DH does have a disturbing tendency to hear creepy noises in the middle of the night (disturbing tendency because she tends to disturb me), and she takes those noises and extrapolates them to complete a story that usually involves a slightly deranged person (real or ghostly) trying to break into our room to complete a bloodthirsty rampage.

I really wasn’t sure how she was going to manage/sleep in a hotel that has at least eight spirits. These include: a young woman who attended college there in the 1920s or 30s, who is either said to have died by jumping from the roof or being pushed, a nurse who worked in the building when it was a hospital, a man in a hat and tails, believed to be the ghost of Dr. John Freemont Ellis (a staff doctor at the original Crescent Hotel resort in the late 1800s), Michael, an Irish stonemason, who lost his footing while building the hotel and slipped off the roof to his death, Theadora, a cancer victim who foolishly came to Norman Baker's resort for treatment, a ghostly bearded gentleman wearing Victorian clothing and a top hat, Brecky, a boy who often came to the resort in its glory days and died of appendicitis complications, and the evil Norman G. Baker himself. And, of course, DH remains ever vigilant for any Elvis sightings.

The hotel does offer nightly tours using people who take the ghost concept just a little too seriously, and we were taken through dark hallways, a dorm area for the former on-site women’s college, a cordoned-off, sound proof section that housed screaming cancer patients (the notorious 'Dr’ Baker didn’t use any pain killers and the useless mineral water ‘cancer cure’ he offered actually increased the pain), and we ended up in the basement morgue. This was particularly concerning for DH because she now found out that she had earlier completed a spa treatment in a room that used to be part of this morgue (perhaps that’s why the spa had scary prices??).

The nurse-ghost is regularly heard pushing a squeaky-wheeled gurney down the hallway in front of our room and, of course, this was the apparition that DH heard in the middle of the night. My brave Princess managed to resist the urge to wake me up, and even managed to drift off again clutching her garlic and crucifix.

After a brief exorcism of Billy Thunder, we left Eureka Springs and headed to an even scarier site- the very first location of that small business destroying Retail Goliath, Walmart. You can certainly argue the merits or faults of the organization, but the story of how this small-town neighbourhood store came to dominate the retail market was very interesting (to me- DH was still recovering from her close encounter so she waited for me in the attached soda fountain shop).