Cresent Hotel
My new husband and I were looking forward to the "perfect honeymoon" stay at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka
Springs, Ark. over July 3 - 4 1995. We arrived, unaware of its reputation for being "haunted" and took up our room
on the third floor. After being there only a few hours, we both felt terribly uncomfortable, as if we were being
watched. It became so bad that neither of us wanted to leave the room, even to get ice. We ignored it with a shrug
and a laugh, and the next day, as we were going down to dinner, I, in typical enthusiastic bridal fashion trotted down
the stairs a full flight ahead of my husband. Perhaps it was only natural that I fell, but I will say that it felt as if I had
been actually pushed. I only nearly missed breaking my neck, and as it was, my ankle was badly sprained.
Maybe it was only an effect of the terrible pain, but all through dinner (we were the only guests eating in the dining
room at the time) I heard music and voices nearby. Partly as a joke, we asked the employees if the place was
haunted. Their sour response made us wonder, "No. This hotel is not haunted. We are not allowed to discuss that
topic." I asked around after we left the next morning, and later did more research at the library. I talked to a few
other people who had had experiences of their own. The people of Eureka Springs itself were quite helpful, though
the employees were not. Apparently a doctor and his wife spent their honeymoon there, and the man, having second
thoughts, pushed his wife down the same set of stairs I fell down. It could have been an accident or merely chance,
but the many other stories I have heard seem to imply that something is going on there. And, hey, nothing feels
quite like getting pushed. You know? She wrote it. I just put it here for you.
Strange Footsteps by Heidi MacLachlan
I do not know if this story holds any interest to you, or if it can be checked out. The occurance happened over 15
years ago, when I was around 10 years old. I was in bed one night, angry about being there because I was not tired. I
suddenly heard footsteps and heavy breathing coming down the hallway and enter my room. I was very frightened,
but believed it to be my older brother. The hall light turned on and I heard my sister call to me from the bottom of
the steps to get in bed. I yelled back that Ken, my brother, was scaring me and she had better make him stop. Amy,
my sister, came upstairs and told me that Ken was babysitting. I did not believe her, but went to bed anyhow. The
next morning my mother confirmed that Ken had indeed been babysitting. I have no explanation for the footsteps,
but shortly after that I started noticing a man looking at me through my perifial vision. Never head on. He stood very
tall, nearly to the top of the door. His dress was from turn of the century. I never mentioned seeing him because I
was often teased for the footsteps incident. I found out about 7 years ago that my younger sister also saw the man
and that once another brother's bed shook for about two minutes as he was trying to sleep. Erika, my younger sister,
said she sometimes heard voices, although I never did. The upstairs always frightened me and I never liked to be
there alone. Although the house is now sold, my mother gets angry with me for saying that I believe the house is, or
was, haunted. Is it possible to check it out? Because of the "doorway spectre" I thought for many years that I was
suffering from mental problems. After we moved away, all my "visions" and uneasiness being alone left. The house is
in Britt, Iowa.
THE OLD STORM HOUSE (STRUM) by Barbara Haas
The old Strum place sat on a hill, 5 miles south of Cornelius, Oregon. Known as the Old Storm Place, it was built by
an old German and his family from the old country. It had clapboard siding, painted white, lots of windows. It had a
huge barn on the place that sat below the house amid huge cedar, firs and pine trees that sighed in the wind like the
pines in a Curwood novel.
I first saw the old house in the last part of 1937. The depression was still rampant in the land and so many were out of
work, but if you could get out of town and back to the land, there were always nuts, fruit, and berries to work in and
put up for the winter at a minimal cost. There was always empty houses or woodcutters shacks, empty because
people had left to go elsewhere, or some farmer had bought or leased land, and didn't need the house that went with
it. Most were not in to bad a shape, usually a stove had been left along with a rough hewn table, some benches, and
orange crates for cupboards, nailed to the walls, one made out pretty well.
No one seemed to be on window breaking binges, so the windows were usually intact. With flour sack curtains, a
good floor scrubbing, fire in the stove, and a pot of beans cooking, they were a haven to crawl into, and it felt like
"home". Most everyone took care of the property and left it as neat, or more so than when they moved in. Sure beat
a hole-in-the-wall apartment, or a tar paper, or corrugated shack near the dumps. This district, I believe, was called
the Iowa Hill District, strictly a German Lutheran Community. We sure needed a place to stay, we had a baby girl and
my husband could cut wood if we could find a place to stay. We moved into the old Storm place, after getting
permission from Alex Eischen, who owned another farm about a mile and a half away and farmed this place. We asked
about the amount of rent he wanted, but to our amazement he could hardly keep a grin off his face or the twinkle from
his eyes, like he had some secret, and he said he didn't want any rent, as we wouldn't be there very long anyway. He
said sure we could live there, if we could stand it. Up the road the other way lived a bachelor, a thickset German, who
only laughed when we told him we were moving in, and he wanted to know how long we were staying!!! We couldn't
figure out what the joke was, but shrugged it all off and moved in. Everyone we saw would say incredulously, "You're
moving into the old Storm House?", and look at us as if we were either to young, or to foolish to catch on. We met
many with just open stares, embarrassed grins, or just a shake of the head. Evidently the house was well known!!
There was my husband and I, our little girl and a cousin, or brother who stayed with us, often by turns, who would
come to help cut wood awhile. They used one of the old dragsaws, you now see in museums, and were paid $2.50 a
cord, cut, delivered and stacked. This was divided two and sometimes three ways, but you could keep a few
chickens, and the neighbors gave us milk for milking his cow when he had to be gone. The place looked like a castle
as we sure needed a place to stay with a baby and down to our last "nickel", you might say. My husband's cousin had
an old car put together sometimes with baling wire, so we had transportation. Our water came from an old pump by
the side of the house, which we had to carry in for drinking, washing, scrubbing floors, cooking, canning, and baths.
And of course had to be heated on the cook stove. The well was a deep one and echoed many sounds, like footsteps
walking, that never appeared. We dismissed many sounds as just being the well what it was. We did begin to hear no
one who ever lived there stayed very long. A cousin of my husband and her family stayed a short time before moving
to the North Plains area. Their names were John and Leta Epler. They never would talk about the place, but did say
no one member of the family stayed alone, and one time Leta was bitten by a rat as she laid in the bed with a small
baby. They used the bedroom off the front room. While we were there, we hardly ever used the front door, or even
the front part of the house, as the back door seemed more convenient to the kitchen, woodshed and all. We begin to
hear stories, mostly from our bachelor German neighbor, that the Strums had been bootleggers, a man was killed on
the stairway leading upstairs, and that there were trap doors in some of the rooms. The bloodstains were still visible
on the steps, four or five steps up and also where the blood spilled on the floor. We did find three trap doors that led
to nice dug-out spaces below the floors. We kept being told after we moved, no one would live there ever, but we
were young and brave, and who believed in ghosts anyway???
And who worries when you're young. We moved in with little or no furniture, using what we could find, and besides
we decided after being around, the other part of the house wasn't needed, and it wasn't a very "friendly" part
anyway. For awhile everything went along all right, being early summer, we were out of doors a lot, but as it got on
towards fall, we begin to notice odd noises. The first seemed to be these resounding footsteps that could be heard on
the northside of the house where the pump sat. I would run out to meet whoever was there, glad for any company as
the farms were a long way apart in those days, and no one would be there. Since the farms were two to three miles
apart, we couldn't see how the footsteps could echo so. No one seemed to be walking much anyway. The next
incident was the sound of someone chopping wood in the woodshed, usually in the afternoons. It would be the sound
of measured chopping and I would dash out, thinking my husband had come home early. If the dragsaw was broken
down, often his cousin would go to town for parts and my husband would come home and cut wood for the wood range
and heater stove in the dining room. When I'd get to the woodshed, the chopping would stop, and start up again
when I got back to the house. So I'd think he'd just stepped out side for a minute, and go running out again when the
chopping started up again. This would go on and on until it seemed I would wear my legs out. This would go on for
days, lasting an hour or so every afternoon, and then maybe go weeks before it would start up again, always in the
afternoons only. This went on as long as we lived there. We never did figure out an explanation for this.
There were the sound of men's footsteps that went to the stairs where the bloodspots were, stopped, and walked on
into the living room, we used as our front room. This would go on for some time, and then quite awhile would pass
before he would be back again. He seemed to end his walk at the trap door in the room. That trap door was very
"active" all the time we lived there. I often wondered if someone was buried there. Every afternoon, without fail,
about three o'clock in the afternoon, no matter what you were doing, your head would automatically jerk towards the
corner of that trap door. It was a forced reaction and you couldn't keep from doing it. It became so routine, we just
accepted it. We never told anyone about this, as we like to see if it affected everyone the same way. It would and
they would get a funny look on their face and say they had to be going. No one ever didn't jerk and stare at the trap
door. The trap door was cut in such a way, that if you didn't know about it, you didn't see it, and we didn't bother to
tell anyone about it. We were having a good time with it and thought it was fun. After we moved a few people asked
us about it and being young and full of mischief, sometimes we told them, "No, we didn't notice anything".
About once a month when there was a full moon shinning over the fields and trees, different footsteps walked from
the back door through the kitchen, living room and on into the south bedroom, where they seemed to stand and look
out the window. These were the steps of a young girl who seemed to be barefoot. Like the sound of bare feet
sticking to the floor and then moving on across the room. Was she waiting for a lover who never returned or was
killed? The men used to follow the steps, one by one and they didn't stop until they got to the window. She's the only
one we ever saw, like apparition, barefoot and dressed in a long black cape. we saw her twice. One night one of my
husband's cousins was coming to spend the night. Ruby was to stop at a sisters place down below the hill from us,
have supper and visit and then come up to spend the night. It got later and later and she hadn't arrived so we went to
bed, having told her to just come in and go to bed when she got back. Sometime after midnight, the back door
opened softly, thinking it was Ruby, I didn't get up. The bedroom was long with a cot at the far end. As she seemed
to stop, or pause at the doorway, I whispered, "Come in, Ruby, and crawl in!"
There wasn't any electricity and the moonlight was shining in the window so I didn't light the lamp. She stood in the
doorway in her long black coat or cape, so I whispered again louder, two or three times. Still there was no movement
and I was getting chills up my back. I woke my husband saying, "There's someone standing there and they won't
answer." He saw "her" standing there and swung at her with his fist, she disappeared. Ruby never did come, she had
played cards and talked until so late, she just made a bed on the floor and slept there. We never told the rest about
the barefoot girl. Many footsteps walked to the one trap door, but the other main one never seemed to have any
disturbances. We dried walnuts upstairs in the unfinished part and the rats did roll walnuts across the floor to the
edge and they rolled down between the wall. We know this accounted for some noises we heard, at least the ones
upstairs. Some evenings when we lit the kerosene lamp, a strange wind would come in the house and blow the lamp
out. We'd go outside to see if it were windy and the air would be strangely still. Go back in light the lamp, and the
wind would blow it out time and time again. This would happen for up to an hour at a time, and then back to normal.
My little girl who was a little over two by this time would be playing with her toys or dolls and would stop her play
and jerk around and look intently at "something". I'd watch her so she didn't know it and she would just look for
awhile and then go back to playing. At the time we'd laugh and say "Oscar's" back, with absolutely no fear. We liked
it there with our ghosts. Now I wouldn't stay in that place. One afternoon Mr Eischen said he'd be up to pick up
some of the old prune dryers in the prune drying shed on the place. We told him we'd help load them. We were late
getting back from milking and it was one of the evenings when the "wind" kept blowing out the lamps. Hearing
pounding in the shed, my brother-in-law said he'd go help Mr. Eischen with the dryers, as it was getting pretty dark.
When he got there, there wasn't anyone there. When he got back to the house, you could hear the trays being lifted,
pounding and footsteps. Each time they went down, the noise stopped and no one there. Come back to the house and
it all started again. This and the lamps blowing out went on for about an hour. All at once, the wind and noises were
gone and everything was normal. The next day we asked Mr. Eischen if he'd come to get the dryer trays and he said
no, he had found enough at his place and didn't need them. Again we didn't tell anyone of this. It was one time I was
uneasy there. One time we had party with food and drinks and company. It wasn't long until the guests all came and
told us they were leaving, if we wanted to stay in such a weird place, go ahead, but they were leaving. We asked them
what was the matter, no one would say anything. We were surprised as we had told our "occupants" to behave
themselves as we were having company, but the party broke up early and their parting shot was "If we ever moved,
invite them again, but not to that place ever. " We were surprised as we never told anything to anyone, partly
because we were afraid they'd think we were ready for the funny farm and partly because we enjoyed our secrets.
Being young and dumb, we thought it was hilarious and drank to "Oscar" and all the other shady men who lived
there with us.
I never heard of a Mrs. Strum, but there were signs of a garden plot, a grape patch and clothesline. The barn was the
only place I was afraid of. It was a beautiful big barn and I loved barns. Since I had read and heard about Hobo's or
other homeless people scaring intruders away from the place they wanted to occupy, I went to look and see if this
was the case with the barn. On a calm sunny day if I entered the barn, gates and partitions would slam shut with such
force they would almost hit me. It was such force it would scare the living daylights out of me. There were no spring
hinges, or anything like that that would make them do this. No matter when I went down there, this would happen.
The pines were so sad sounding, they signed and sobbed in the breeze. Since the men were away a lot, I put up with
the ghosts more than they did. I did stay alone a few times at night, but wasn't afraid, except at the barn.>BR>
The summer of 1939 I had a baby boy and there seemed to be less ghostly goings-on. Maybe we were just happy
with the baby and I was so busy with both children and lots of washing, to do on the wash board, and did it mainly
outside during the summer. Toward fall my husband went to work for Arnold Gnos and since he had a woodcutters
cabin on the place he came up the hill and insisted we get out of the Storm place. He seemed really concerned. Again
no explanation and we gave none. As we drove away I looked back and thought I saw a movement at the window.
One day a neighbor came by on horseback and said he was going to go look around the old Storm place and asked if
we'd lived there. He came back in a couple of hours, hair unruly and visibly shaken. He asked if we'd "really lived in
that place"? He had spent some time looking at some of the old magazines in the upstairs, but wouldn't say anything
else except "he'd never live there, in fact, he'd never so much as set foot in there again!" Playing dumb I asked why
as I wanted to hear someone else's version of the place, but all he'd do is shake his head as he rode on.
And what happened to the Old Storm Place? A great blaze appeared one day on top of the lonely hill and the old
house, and perhaps all the ghosts, went up in smoke, or did they all go live in the barn? The house didn't burn
accidentally, the men of the neighborhood community got together and burned it down. They seemed to know a good
deal about the strange going-on that went on in that old house, but none would really speak of it, maybe feeling a
little foolish it were voiced aloud, and would tolerate no more of that place. I never went back after the house burnt
just couldn't. We "all" got along fine in the house together and lived together quite well. They tolerated us, but no
one else could manage them. Perhaps they liked us, who knows? Being older and looking back, I couldn't or
wouldn't have stayed there now as I'd have been scared to death. I've never talked about it much and now have
written it down. My daughter remembers it very faintly, she was three when we left and remembers the good things,
a puppy, a pet pig, going for walks and picking the wildflowers, and who knows what friends she had with "Oscar and
troop?"
The Haunted House by Allison Cecil
My ex-husband owns a large parcel of land in rural Western Virginia and when we were married we used to go out to
the land and fiddle around and hike. He bought the land when he was much younger and he bought it from an old man
who had grown up on the land. Adjacent to the land that my ex owns, there is another parcel with a house on it. The
house had always been referred to as the "haunted house". The old man that sold my ex-husband the property said
that it had been haunted as long as he had known (at that time he was in his late 80's). We went out to the property
one day and I told my husband that I wanted to go see the house. He said that no one lived in it and the people who
owned it lived in a mobile home next to the house and they maintained the land, but they wouldn't live in the house.
So we stopped at the house and the people were there. My husband got out of the truck and spoke to the man and
told him that we were his neighbors and we had heard about the house and we would like a tour if it was alright.
The man took us in and as soon as we were in the house I could feel a presence. I felt that it was a young boy around
8 or 9. I felt that he was still young enough to be playful but old enough to be fairly responsible. My husband looked
at me, because he felt it too. We walked all through the house and it was fully furnished, each room was furnished but
it was all covered with sheets. We walked through the house and the presence followed us. It was almost as though
he were giving us the tour. As we were coming up the hall from the back of the house to the front (we entered the
back door), we came toward the front stairs and I could feel him waiting for us. He just stood there on the landing
waiting. As soon as we got there, he went up the stairs ahead of us and went into each room we did. I never saw him,
but I could feel him very strongly. The last bedroom we went in was in a upstairs back corner. The bedroom was
totally bare except for a baby crib that was full of stuffed animals. All the other rooms had all the bedroom furniture
except this one. It was odd, and the room felt odd. It seemed sad and I felt that that room had either been the child's
room or he had died in it or something strongly tied him to it.
We left and thanked the people who owned the house and I could feel the child wanted us to stay. He was very nice
and not threatening at all, but I was still a little spooked. As we left we took a good look at the old house. All the
windows had shades in them that were always pulled shut except one. The window of the room with the baby crib
never had a blind pulled in the window.
It was very interesting and I am planning to go back and take some pictures of the house and maybe get some
images on film!
The Terre Haute by Kenneth L. Steidle
I have a strong interest of the Paranormal. I have lived in two homes that I consider haunted, the first in Peru,
Nebraska and the second in Terre Haute, Indiana. The house in Peru I lived in when I was young, around 6 or 8, it
was an old square house built in the 1860's. The first time I realized it was haunted was while I was trying to go to
sleep. For some reason I looked up and saw a boy, about 10 or 12, looking at me from the doorway. He was wearing
clothes from the period, I guess, and they were worn and somewhat tattered, especially around knees and calves. He
walked up to me and looked down at my bed, and then turned and walked into the closet. After that night I saw him
16 more times in the three years I lived there. I was never frightened after the first time, except for the one time a
voice kept calling my name. It only happened once but scared me so bad I had nightmares about for years after.
The house in Terre Haute was newer, built in the 1940's and rather large. This Haunting involves my immediate
family. We noticed it soon after we moved in, the sliding doors of the closet in the dinete would be shut then open by
themselves minutes later. The door from the garage to the laundry room would be left unlocked only to come home
and find the door bolt locked from the inside. For some reason the stairs to the second always feels as if someone is
walking up or down them with you, but only in the evening. The stairs to the basement, furnished and well lighted,
gave you a chill when on the top two or three steps. I know that doesn't mean a house is haunted but the next part of
"Story" sure convinced me. In my junior and senior years of High School I noticed a "presence" follow me up the
stairs and into my bedroom. This started to happen regularly and I came to accept it. Shortly after this started
happening I would see someone out of the corner of my eye. Just enough for me to tell that it was there, but not
enough for me to see it. When I entered college, at the local University, this presence grew stronger, to the point
were I could feel it. It was as if the presence was groing into the room. One evening I had a girlfriend over and we
were sitting in my room I went downstairs to get a drink from the kitchen and when I got back my girlfriend was
almost hysterical. I took her home and on the drive back she wouldn't tell me what happened.
After some careful pushing and prodding she finally told me what happened. She said that while I was gone a
serpitine like creature came out of the floor and told her to leave, that I was his and no one elses. This sounds crazy
even to me but as I know she wasn't into drugs or anything like that I had to believe her. After that incedent the
room always felt cold and ominous, no matter what the weather (something my mother commented on a few times). I
took to spending as little time there as possible and frequently sleeping on the fold out bed in the basement.