The 1886 Crescent Hotel – Eureka Springs, Arkansas

It has been 6.5 years since my first visit. The Crescent remains a timeless and charged place, but not the same to me. I guess I am changed, and there is no going back. Whatever I was looking for passing through this time, it was gone. I am gone. It’s funny the perceptions we hold of the past. We go back to a place, looking to recapture a moment. To capture something that can never be caught. What? It’s a special place, but ultimately it’s just another place along the road of my life. It’s just another stop. Have I seen too much? Have I stayed out too long?

The Crescent is fun, and every bit as crowded as The Stanley. It is best appreciated in retrospect, it seems, as while I was in it all I could hear were the other tourists. But it is fun. To explore the museum on the 4th Floor, and pass others as you roam the hallways. Exchanging smiles of camaraderie and perhaps a bit of embarrassment. Yes, we are all tourists snapping photos in a “haunted” hotel, trying to capture a moment. All looking for something we can’t place, but can almost feel in the air as we go up and down the back staircase.

What is here? I am digging into the corners of my mind trying to remember. But not too much. I don’t really want to know, after all. I just want to tread lightly here on the surface, never getting in too deep. Stay in the shallow end, where the water is warmed by the sun, and your feet can reach the bottom. People can and do drown in the shallow water, but I know how to swim. I am safe swimming here if I stay in my lane. Now, I hear what I want to hear. I see who I want to see. I will mostly just go quietly.

I couldn’t properly process the place until I had many hundreds of miles between us. There is place memory here. It could be the history and all of the death. It could be the geology. Or all of the above, most likely.

I wish I could’ve seen it after the Baker Hospital was cleared out. I wish I could feel it empty, pre-renovation. I wish I could time travel and see it during different periods of the past.

The sheets were fantastic in 401 and dinner in the Crystal Dining Room was great as well. The shower was not great. The foot traffic from the ghost tours might disturb some.