1. We Think We Found a Ghost...and We're Talking to Him

Welcome to the Crescent Hotel… full of ghosts and mysteries.  A spirit has something to say to at least one member of our squad.  And thankfully we looked up right when we did.   

Check out videos and photos from our trips to haunted hotels and our Scary Stories!
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Episode 1

People have claimed to see the ghost of Delilah Carrington, who fell from the balcony at America's Most Haunted Hotel.

Just as she did in 1934. 

And y'all get ready for what my kids and I found out.

Because what happened to Deliliah is not as it seems.

She wasn’t alone up there.

She wasn't the only one who died up there.

In the end, this mom here and my two kids brought down a cold blooded killer. 

Met a ghost

And you know what? It's all thanks to a YouTube channel.

Well, hello there. 

I'm Natalie. 

And I'm Alison. 

And I'm Ethan. 

And we are, are you ready for it? The Low Budget Ghost Squad. Now our squad only consists of a mom and her two kids and this really bizarro ghost app that we'll tell you about later, but I do just want to tell you ahead of time, we really don't know what we're doing when it comes to ghost hunting that that'll be very apparent very soon. 

But also, we don't really know what we're doing when it comes to podcasting either. 

We're kind of learning as we go.

But above all else, we just want to have some fun, and we want to share our adventure with you about what happened when we went to a haunted hotel.

You’ll hear about the Crescent, that's in Arkansas and how the Low Budget Ghost Squad solved A decades old murder mystery.

And people didn't even know it was a murder until we showed up.  And maybe it was more than one.

Yeah, we have some crazy ghost stuff to share with you, but we also want to share the history of the hotel, which is fascinating, and the history of the town, which could be a podcast in and of itself.  Ethan, you want to kick us off?

So it's called the Crescent Hotel, and we first saw it on a YouTube channel by the name of Sam and Colby. And somehow, some way, we convince our mom to go there. 

It's in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and it's called America's Most Haunted Hotel. 

Do you agree with that name? After everything I saw there.  I think it is.

It was built in 1886.  It still had old timey keys, creaking doors, and some of the light went off on and off at some points.

Yeah, they put the hotel on top of the mountain overlooking the town of Eureka Springs. Now the town was growing back then because of, well, the springs because they could allegedly supposedly cure you. I mean, if you want to believe that, 

because according to our tour guide, this doctor gets credit for discovering the waters.  And I know people were already on this land when he got here.  But the story goes, the waters from the spring helped cure his son’s eye problem. I'm going to put a big allegedly on that.  And I don't really know what that eye problem was, by the way.

But the doctor wanted to keep the source of the water a secret, and he ended up bottling it and selling it. Of course.

He called it, no joke, Doctor Jackson's eye water. 

Yes, so he's selling this stuff and he lets his buddy in on the secret of where he's getting this water.  And that friend was a judge.  Now the judge used the water and claims hey, it cured me too.  And he told everybody about it and they came from all over to get their own water.

And that's goodbye to Doctor Jackson Secret eye water.

Eventually the railroad came into town and a group got together and decided to build the Crescent so these people would have somewhere fancy to stay. 

They brought in stonemasons from Ireland all the way to Arkansas to build this. And they used limestone from a quarry about 10 miles away. But get this… They're said to be a connection between Limestone and Paranormal Activity.

So limestone is like the flex tape of paranormal activity.

It takes the energy in and it traps it and it doesn't let it go like the commercial says FlexTape does.. 

I personally think that Gorilla Glue sounds better, but you know, do what you want.  Just FYI, just putting it out there. 

Okay Alison, you want to keep going?

So inside the Crescent, the front desk and the big clock behind it have been there since the hotel first opened and the fireplace is old too, like it's older than mom.

Uh, wait a minute.  What?

There's also this carving on the fireplace. We couldn't figure out what it was. We did a scavenger hunt that the hotel gives out.  You had to describe it.  And we said that it looked like an owl with some sort of vulture wings on it. And turns out it is an owl, but those are actually bat wings.

You know, I kept pushing on that thing because it looked like that owl would be, I don't know, the key to a secret passageway or if you tilt it just right a door would open.

Yeah, I was wondering why you were constantly touching it.

Anyway, the powers that be at the hotel eventually realized, hey, we need a way to make money when it's cold outside, because nobody's coming here to vacation then.

So in 1908, the hotel became a women's college during the offseason, and they did that until 1934 and well, we know what happened then.

Can't tell them that part yet, That'll be a spoiler for later..

So, about this college It was called the Crescent College, and Conservatory for young women. 

And this was a college for the well-to-do families..

One of those families was the Carringtons, and their daughter Delilah went to school there. 

And you'll hear that name again, Delilah Carrington, plus her roommate Alice Faye Warlick.

They are a huge part of our story and you can see their pictures at the hotel today, along with a bunch of other old pictures that they have hanging up in the hallway. There's also this blown up picture of a postcard somebody sent home asking their family to send a Ouija board to her.

So see, there may have been something there for quite a while.

I think now is the perfect time to talk about the cancer doctor, if you want to call him a doctor. 

OK, So we will add quoty fingers to when we say doctor so envision that if you will. 

So Doctor Norman Baker bought this building in 1937 to turn it into a hospital.  So it was a hotel. Then you had a women's college open up and now a hospital. But not just any kind of hospital. A cancer curing hospital. You know how that turned out.

Doctor Baker was this radio star in the 1930s from Iowa, and he came to Arkansas claiming I can cure your cancer, but only if you pay me $5000. 

And of course, he couldn't.

Of course he couldn't. But he did have this homemade elixir that he did inject into people, and it was made-up of things like ground up watermelon seeds, corn silk, carbolic acid.  You know, your typical medical things. And he bought the hotel to set up the Baker Hospital in 1937 after the college closed during the Depression.  He said this place looked like a castle in the air. Like some fairy tale.

Now there is a record of at least 40 deaths in the hospital, but there may have been more and many more may have been sent home to die. And some may still be here.

He didn't want any of the patients who weren't so bad off yet to see the ones who are about to die.  So the story goes, he built an annex that would shut that part of the third floor off from the rest of the building. 

And if you're on that floor around 3:00 AM. You may just hear the sound of a Gurney. And it would be Wheeling out the dead bodies, or rather sneaking them out, because they would wheel  the bodies out in the middle of the night so no one would see them and then take them to the morgue that was in the basement. And you can still go in there today.

We'll never forget what we saw in there.

Not now. Not now. Later, but not now. 

I really want to get to that part of the story but I want to tell some ghost stories first. Or some other ghost stories first.  Ethan, you want to tell yours?

I'll tell them about Michael. He was one of the workers from Ireland that originally built this place.  One day he was on the ladder or something and he saw this really hot lady, so he tried to get her attention, but then he slipped and he actually fell and died. And the place that he fell on and died on was room 218. 

And you can still sleep in there, but I don't think you want to, because a bunch of women that stayed there have said that they've felt something like touching them or pulling their hair, and he doesn't really like guys, so he'll sometimes kick them out of the bed.

So many people want to stay in that room and I mean they are posting videos and pictures from inside and you know, it's always Ohh, did you see that orb in the room? Or ohh, the curtains moved by themselves? I don't know, I wasn't there.  It could have been something. Alison, you up next? 

I'll tell you about Theodora. Now, I've heard conflicting stories. Maybe she was a patient at the hospital.  Maybe she was somebody who worked there.  Either way, she's been known to keep things super tidy in the room that she haunts. 

So people have claimed that, like, when they get out of the shower, when they come back to their room, all their stuff is neatly folded, their shoes are set up by the door, their coins are stacked, their belongings are put away in the closet or in their suitcase.

And there are two doors to that suite. 1 isn't used anymore, but it was the main door when Theodora would have been alive. And she's been seen fumbling with the door trying to get in. And she looks so real that people have actually asked her, “do you need help?” And all she says is, “I'm just looking for my keys” and then she disappears.

Now we stayed catty corner to Theodora's room and I kept looking for her. 

Mom, you wanted to ambush the poor dude who was staying there to see if he'd seen anything. You can't just go up to people and be like, “have you seen a ghost?” 

Are you sure about that? I mean, we were at the Crescent.  I mean, everybody was looking for ghosts.

Anyway, we were told by the employee that there used to be a passageway from Theodora's room to the cancer doctor, not doctor's room, but it was damaged in a fire in the 60s. 

And you know, when I first heard of that secret passageway, I wondered, are there more? and can you still use them? Well, that brings us to the balcony woman. And don't worry, Ethan, I'm not going to give too much away because we're going to be going into her story in this podcast. 

But we first heard the story of a woman who appears as a mist on the third floor balcony, and she’s seen falling from there. Now one night a police officer who was kind of a ways away saw her fall and you know, he called for help and more police showed up.  But no one had fallen. There was no one on the ground. He searched the whole area.  And so we're thinking, what could have happened to her? Did she just fall?

You know, with all those shows we watch, we didn't think so. 

Well, all those crime shows we like came in handy because that's where our story began.

I don't know if you've ever been to a place like this, you know, haunted.  But you take a lot of pictures and they tell you to take like a burst of pictures, as many as you can in front of mirrors or really anything reflective. 

So we did that.  We took pictures everywhere. The bathroom, our own room, the elevators, the mirrors, outside, everywhere.

Yeah, that's pretty much a rundown of what we did. And at one point we even got a photo of this weird shadow figure in a mirror. A lot of people have seen this and they're like, ohh, that's nothing.  That's probably just the reflection of somebody in the hallway.  Well, you weren't there. I was, and nobody was standing next to me that looked like a weird shadow figure.

I think it's about time to start talking about the app.

Yeah, that app was a big part of this whole thing.  Um, OK, so it all started when this hotel worker asked us, “Did you bring any ghost hunting tools?” Not really a question I'm asked that often, but I told him, “Ohh, we're not professionals.”

We did bring flashlights that we had to make a quick stop at the dollar store to get because of our name, Low Budget Ghost Squad. We thought we might look around at night and they told us that you can unscrew the top slightly and the spirit can get in and mess with the wiring to communicate with you. 

And I got one message loud and clear.

OK, So what else did we learn about Ohh? Yeah, we learned about cat balls.

Record scratch

Cat balls? Ohh, you met the toys.

I’m sorry (laughing) 

OK, apparently we have to turn this off for a minute because I can't say cat balls without everybody in here laughing. You just hear that?

OK, we're back. I won't be saying those words anymore, Cat balls. I will call them, how about light up ball.  So you know you've got these and if a cat touches it, it lights up and it's, it's, it's a toy so a ghost in theory could also touch it and it would light up.  And I'm seeing people use those in videos that have been taken at Crescent and they would weirdly light up in the middle of the hallway and nobody is touching it. But did we have one? Of course not.

And that hotel worker told us about an app.  Now I can't believe I'm actually gonna tell you this story. OK. It measures EMF fluctuations. And if you're not familiar, EMF stands for electromagnetic field.  And some of those hunters have said there's a correlation with a spike in activity and there being some sort of spirit or what have you thing nearby.  Now on our app these lines go up and down to show the fluctuations and you hear something like this.

Now this is going to sound crazy, and you're going to hear some crazy stuff on this podcast, but the app supposedly transcribes what a spirit may be trying to tell you. So yes, in theory, a ghost could talk to you on your phone.

Mom jumped on it. She for once didn't get the free version of an app. It cost a whole 4.99 just for the app. 

And if you know me, spending any kind of money on an app is a big deal because I'm cheap, like our name.

We took this thing everywhere. 

It was sitting at our table when we were eating dinner at the pizza place in the hotel.  nd here is where the weirdness started.  So I left to go charge my phone. 

When are not charging your phone? It seems like you're doing it every single moment of the day, especially here for some reason.

Would you let me tell my story, please? When I get to the room, I look around to see if you know anything moves while we were away and I was disappointed that nothing did. 

But you know, it's only the beginning.

So I go into the bathroom to charge, to charge my phone, and while I'm in there I fix my hair because why not? And when I go to leave the room, I hit my leg on the door frame and I say several words that I shall not repeat at the moment. And when I go back to the restaurant and I tell mom and Ethan what happened, they looked like shocked. 

See what Alison didn't know… that app had been going off when she was gone and words like leg and hair had popped up on the screen and even the word Crescent because remember the name of the hotel is the Crescent.

Now, after that, we ended up in the darkened dining room to ghost hunt a little bit.  I know it sounds crazy, but it really wasn't If you were there. 

There were ghost hunters I think about in every corner of the entire hotel at like 3:00 AM.

We were holding the phone up to the walls around the tables and this thing is making that noise.

And words are popping out and sometimes it was random, but then things changed.

So the lines started to get big and they turned red while we were walking around and words like ‘help’ appeared and ‘push.’

And then while we were hovering around one table, it said the name Jason. So I decided with my bright ideas, I'm going to talk to him. I don't know if this is real.  The app was 4.99. We'll see what happens. When I got close enough to the table, I started to get nauseous.  And when I say nauseous, I mean like my head was killing me and I felt like I was going to vomit at any minute.

I need to tell you why Alison feeling nauseous is so notable.  When my husband and I went to Savannah, GA a few years back, we went on a tour of a supposedly haunted house.  And if you know anything about Savannah, they claim to have a lot of those there.  Well, the tour guide at this one said people had complained of nausea in two particular spots. And I have to say, my husband claimed he felt funny even before we were told that story.  And then what was going on here? We're at the supposed haunted hotel, we have this app that's blowing up, and now my daughter feels sick.

We got out of there and I felt much better.

And it's all because I said we maybe should go outside and get some fresh air. 

Yeah, I think that was a good thing, because if we hadn't gone outside, we would have missed everything.

Yeah, So we're outside on the bench looking at our phones. 

Yeah, that's something we do a lot in this family, look at our phones. But in this case, that EMF reader started to go crazy again. But this time the phrase stop him was there.

OK, let me stop here, because I know this is the point in a horror movie, when you're yelling at the TV, why are y'all still sitting there? Well, we were. We were still sitting there.  And the same words, just kept coming on the app over and over, and the lines are bright red at this point. 

Are you actually going to tell them what happened next? 

Well, that's why we're here, so I might as well keep going. I mean, everything else I felt could be explained away. But then Ethan saw her, and then Alison did. And then I saw her. 

She was on the balcony, the third story, and for the first part she just looked like white mist for a while.

And she went right through the iron bars across the porch. Then she started looking more like a real person. 

She had one of those white old timey dresses on, but then she just started falling. 

I started screaming my lungs out.

But we were all screaming.  Because all of a sudden she was gone.

People came running out. They were looking out the window and I'm wondering, did they see her? I mean, everybody had heard the story of the woman on the balcony and maybe they hoped it would happen again and they'd see her, but that was enough for us. At least we thought so.

When something like this happens, you're constantly saying to yourself, it's not real, right? It's a show. It's gotta be. Or you could say, you know, it's all in the mind.  Yes, all three of us saw her. Or we saw something, at least. And I'll be honest, we walked into this hotel hoping something crazy might happen. And it's about to get crazier.

I was recording that whole ghost thing.

And something or someone else was up there on that balcony.

Join us for our next episode of Lost Budget Ghost Squad when we reveal what was seen on that balcony and what was found buried in the back of the Hotel.

The low budget Ghost Squad is part of Spellbound Productions.   Written, directed, produced, edited and anything else that needed to be done by yours truly.  And thank you to Alison and Ethan for agreeing to tell our story and going along with this crazy idea.  And awesome graphic art design you may have seen by Lucinda Peterson.  We'd love to have you subscribe to the Low Budget Ghost Squad so you can check out our next  adventure.  And if you want to see some of the things we discussed in this podcast, go to our Instagram and YouTube channel in the description for some fun pictures, videos, and behind-the-scene stuff.