EUREKA SPRINGS -- Around every corner, under every bed, in every nook and cranny, more than 200 ghost hunters and wannabes swarmed the Crescet Hotel, hoping to see spirits.
They gathered March 9-10 for the Arkansas Ghost Hunters Conference, the first sponsored by Northwest Arkansas Ghost Connection. The weekend also included talks by a "who's who" of the supernatural world.
"Many people reported things went bump in the night," including his crew, said Scott Lambert with Ghostly Talk, a paranormal talk show on www.ghostlytalk.com.
Ghostly Talk staff stayed in the penthouse of Dr. Baker, an experimental physician who used the Crescent Hotel as a hospital and who is believed to cause many of the hauntings.
They found the door of their room unlocked and wide open, with their broadcast equipment inside, said Lambert.
"Doug (Semig) doesn't do that kind of stuff," said his broadcast partner. "He blew his top."
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But reviewing the situation the next day, the last person to leave the room said he really did lock it, Lambert reported. "Someone or something unlocked that door."
"The door opened by itself, and I went off on everybody," Semig said the next day. "Things do happen here, and I have egg on my face."
Elizabeth Taylor of Fort Smith and her friends visited in that room, and the chain on the door began swinging very fast after someone left, she said. "And it kept swinging.
"One girl said, 'OK, that can stop now,'" Taylor related. "And it stopped immediately, as if someone had put up a hand to stop it. We said, 'Thank you.'"
She said her room remained peaceful. She took a ghost tour and even participated in the more in-depth investigation of the hotel.
"I got some good orb pictures," she said. "But I didn't really see anything scary."
Catherine Taliaferro, an investigator for Northwest Arkansas Ghost Connection, reported she and her husband saw the words "I see you" written on the bathroom mirror fogged from the shower.
"You could only see it when it fogged up," she said. "It was not as wide as a finger. Chris Moon told us it was ectoplasm."
Moon is a paranormal investigator and president and senior editor of Haunted Times Magazine. He spoke at the conference.
The couple stayed in No. 218, renowned for being haunted by "Michael," a stone mason who fell to his death during construction of the hotel. He's known for being a trickster and flirting with the girls.
"We were so scared," Taliaferro said. "We didn't want to stay in that room."
Mindy Hunter of Conway, a member of the Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research, downplayed her encounters, crediting the atmosphere for her sensitivity.
The bathroom door kept opening and closing, she said, which she credited to the age of the building. But she began to reconsider when she was told this was a hallmark of the Crescent's ghosts.
"Well," she continued, "I swore I had turned the TV off, but when we went back in the room, it was blaring through." She also thought she had left a recorder on when she left the room, but found it turned off when she returned. Her friend Jennifer Crosby of Little Rock thought she saw a shadow by their bathroom.
"I thought I was just creeping myself out," Hunter said. "I asked Jennifer if she was messing with me."
"A lot of people are experiencing a lot of things," confirmed Arhangelsky. "They feel the energy floating around."
Arhangelsky thinks the ghosts acted out because a lot of the people at the conference possess the ability to hear them.
"I think the ghosts were attracted to that because spirits got the attention they crave," she said. "That's what's important to the spirits. They don't want to be dismissed."
In addition to sessions designed to educate investigators and prepare them for their work, participants took part in ghost tours led by Carroll Heath, a medium from Eureka Springs, and even investigated the Crescent and its sister, the Basin Park Hotel, in depth.
Dennis Breeding of Pacific, Mo., and other members of Missouri Paranormal Research walked the road behind the hotel to take pictures of the "Grand Lady." Many of their photos showed ghost orbs, he said.
One guest captured a full apparition of a figure, Arhangelsky said, "and we saw a mist rolling back and forth across a hallway in the basement."
Demonologist John Zaffis even reported something moving around in his room, Arhangelsky said.
"Lights turned on and off, and he said he had to get out of there," she reported. "He found it amazing, but very haunted at the same time. The Crescent is very historical and beautiful, but there are things there -- a lot of underlying things -- that not a lot of people know about," she said. "We try as investigators to dismiss a lot of things, but even with the high action, they did not dismiss much (over the weekend)."
http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2007/ ... unters.txt
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