Everybody knows about the Crescent Hotel up on the hill. But four blocks down, right in the middle of downtown Eureka Springs, there’s a second hotel with just as many ghost stories and a lot fewer crowds. If you’ve ever wondered whether the Basin Park Hotel is haunted, locals will give you the same answer: yeah, probably. And the place has the history to back it up.
A hotel built on top of a burned-down town
Before the Basin Park, this spot was home to the Perry House, a fancy four-story hotel built around 1880. Eureka Springs was booming back then. People came from all over to “take the waters” from the healing springs the town was named after. Then the fires came. Eureka Springs burned four separate times, and the last fire in 1890 leveled the Perry House along with most of downtown.
The Basin Park Hotel rose from those ashes in 1905, built right into the side of the mountain out of solid limestone. The builders bragged it was fireproof this time, and they gave every floor its own ground-level exit. That quirk got the hotel into Ripley’s Believe It or Not as the building where “every floor is a ground floor.” It’s a fun fact. It’s also a reminder that this place was put up on land that had already burned to the ground more than once.
If you believe energy lingers in places where bad things happened, downtown Eureka Springs is basically the perfect storm: fire after fire, a town rebuilt right on top of its own ruins, and a hotel sitting on the exact ground where the healing springs once drew crowds. That’s a lot of history packed into a few city blocks.
Gangsters, speakeasies, and a cave under the hotel
The Basin Park has always pulled in an interesting crowd. During Prohibition it was a known hangout for gangsters, and there’s a limestone cave tucked into the hillside behind the hotel that once ran as a speakeasy. Local lore even says Al Capone’s sister parked herself here for the better part of a month.
That rough-and-tumble era left its mark. A lot of the ghost stories people tell today trace back to the early 1900s, when the hotel saw plenty of high living, hard drinking, and the occasional shady character who maybe didn’t check out the normal way.
Meet the regulars: the cowboy, the gangster, and the laughing girl
Take a ghost tour at the Basin Park and the guides will introduce you to the hotel’s “regulars” — the spirits people have run into so often they’ve practically earned name tags. There’s the cowboy, the gangster, the musician, the whistler, and the laughing girl on the stairs.
Room 310 gets talked about the most. Guests staying there have reported seeing a ghostly cowboy walk straight through the wall, and more than a few have mentioned a strange smell of livestock hanging in the air with no good explanation. Other guests hear a ball bouncing down empty hallways, catch a young girl laughing on the staircase, or watch shadows drift across the ballroom when nobody’s up there.
Then there’s the whistler — a tune that follows people down the halls when they’re alone. None of it is dramatic, exactly. It’s more the kind of thing that makes you stop, turn around, and decide you’d rather not be on that floor by yourself.
What makes the Basin Park stories stick is how ordinary they sound. Nobody’s claiming a horror movie. It’s footsteps in an empty hall, a cold spot that wasn’t there a second ago, a door that opens on its own. Stack up enough of those small moments from enough different guests over a hundred-plus years and you start to understand why staff and visitors keep coming back with the same kinds of stories.
The vortex thing
Eureka Springs sits on a chunk of land that paranormal folks love, and the Basin Park is supposedly built over an energy vortex — the same story you’ll hear about the Crescent Hotel’s third floor. Whether you buy that or not, the hotel leans into it, running regular ghost tours and overnight paranormal investigations, including time down in that old speakeasy cave. You don’t have to be a true believer to get something out of it. The history alone is worth the walk.
How it stacks up against the Crescent
If you’re planning a spooky trip to town, the easy move is to do both. The 1886 Crescent Hotel up the hill gets all the national attention as “America’s Most Haunted Hotel,” with its old morgue and the cancer-hospital history under Norman Baker. The Basin Park is its scrappier downtown cousin — smaller, right in the middle of the action, and easy to fold into a night of wandering around town.
Honestly, that’s part of the appeal. You can grab dinner downtown, do a ghost tour, and be back at the hotel — or up at the balcony bar — in a few minutes. For more haunted stops around town, check out our roundup of haunted places in Eureka Springs.
Want to see for yourself?
The Basin Park Hotel sits right on Spring Street in downtown Eureka Springs, about an hour from Fayetteville, Bentonville, and Rogers — close enough for a day trip and a great spot for an overnight if you want the full effect. Book a room on an upper floor, take the ghost tour, and see if any of the regulars say hello.
Have you stayed at the Basin Park or had something strange happen on one of those iron catwalks? We want to hear it. Drop your story in the comments — the spookier the better.