Phantasmagoria Photography Prints 
Instantaneous Photographs of Things Unseen
Captured by S.M. McClure on October 2, 2023.
 
"What Remains" is a haunting fine art photograph of the original Baker Hospital sign, still hanging in the dim, stone-walled basement of the Crescent Hotel—a silent witness to one of America’s darkest chapters in medical fraud. Corroded with age and cloaked in shadows, the rusted sign is a relic that speaks volumes: of suffering, deception, and the ghost stories that have clung to this place for nearly a century.
 
The Crescent Hotel, perched above Eureka Springs, Arkansas, opened in 1886 as a grand luxury resort. By the 1930s, it had fallen into disuse and was purchased by Norman G. Baker, a flamboyant radio showman, self-proclaimed doctor, and convicted conman. Baker transformed the decaying structure into a “health resort” known as the Baker Hospital, claiming to cure cancer with unproven injections and bizarre holistic rituals—none of which had any medical basis.
 
Patients—many terminal and desperate—came seeking hope. What they found was snake oil. Many died under Baker’s care, and their fates remain clouded by records lost or deliberately concealed. The basement of the hotel, where this sign still hangs, once stored medical specimens, operating tables, and the remains of Baker’s failed experiments.
 
In 1940, Baker was finally exposed and imprisoned for mail fraud, but the scars of his crimes still ripple through the halls he once controlled.
 
If you want to learn more about Norman Baker and his various crimes, head over to our Lantern Light blog post here.
 
The basement of the Crescent Hotel is considered one of its most paranormally active areas. Investigators and visitors alike report cold spots, apparitions, unexplained voices, and shadow figures—especially near the morgue. It’s believed that some of Baker’s victims never left, their presence bound to the space where their final moments were spent under false hope and manipulation.