Lore - Episode 103: Disappointment

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Humanity is fueled by hope. We hope for improvement, and dream of a day when things get better than they are right now. And for a very long time, there have been certain people who have taken advantage of that hope. What they deliver instead is an unexpected dose of darkness. * * * The Lore book series: www.theworldoflore.com/books The Lore TV show: www.Amazon.com/Lore Latest Lore news: www.theworldoflore.com/now Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Clark Stanley stood before the crowd and held the burlap sack carefully away from his body. It was the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, and there were thousands upon thousands of people wandering through the city enjoying the sights and sounds, but Clark Stanley had something unique to offer. After opening the bag, he quickly reached inside and pulled out a live rattlesnake. The crowd collectively gasped and then inched backward from the stage. Then, with all eyes watching him, Stanley ran a sharp knife down the length of the snake's body and tossed it into a pot of boiling water.

A moment later, the shimmer of melted fat could be seen on the surface. It was the key ingredient in a homemade remedy he called snake oil. But it wasn't his own invention. We have hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants to thank for that. When they moved to America in the second half of the 19th century, they brought numerous medicines with them, including one made from the fat of the Chinese water snake. It was high in omega-3, and they used it to treat muscle and joint pain. But Stanley only borrowed the name, not the recipe.

Sure, people bought his miracle cure, and they used it for all sorts of ailments. But Stanley's dirty little secret was that his bottles of snake oil didn't have a single drop of actual snake oil in them. Just a lot of mineral water, some red pepper, turpentine, and a touch of beef fat. Clark Stanley was far from the first charlatan to prey on the needs of the sick, and he certainly wouldn't be the last. But he gave us the idiom we now use to classify all those frauds. Snake oil salesmen are as old as time, and their business model has always been incredibly

simple, to offer a false sense of hope to those in need for a price. But that's where things get tricky, because some frauds do more than sell bottles of mineral water placebos. They fool dying people into thinking that a cure is just around the corner, that despite all the closed doors a patient might have faced, they alone can offer a way out of their pain and suffering, and in the process, they harm the people they serve. Some cures aren't just too good to be true. Sometimes, they're worse.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. According to archaeologists, people have been flocking there for thousands of years. Digs have revealed ancient artifacts that point to human activity, and stories among the local indigenous people seem to make it clear why. It was hard to pass up a chance to visit what they considered to be a great healing spring. For a very long time, that's about as far as the story spread. But in the late 1800s, white settlers began to hear rumors about the location, and started moving in on land that had once been sacred to the Native Americans.

And one of the first, as far as we can tell, was Dr. Alva Jackson. Jackson had a reputation as a backwoods pseudo-healer, someone who was willing to try anything that might offer a quick fix to medical ailments. In 1879, he traveled to the Ozark Mountains in northern Arkansas with a group of hunters, one of whom, a man named Judge Saunders, had some unrecorded problem with his legs. When Jackson heard the rumors about the healing waters of the local springs, he suggested that Saunders take a daily soak in the water. According to him, the treatment worked.

After that, words spread rather quickly. You know how people can be when they think they found the miracle cure to whatever ails them, the very notion that there was a spring in the mountains of Arkansas that you could slip into and be cured for free. Well, that was a siren song for thousands of desperate people. The result was an entire community built around these mythical water sources, known as Eureka Springs. It was an obvious solution in the minds of many people.

Fresh, clean water had a sort of magical property to it. In an era when urban sprawl and the growing industrial revolution were turning cities into filthy centers of disease and death. Hydrotherapy, the ancient therapeutic use of water as treatment for illness, had been experiencing a comeback of sorts. We know the Egyptians used it, as did the Romans, who built elaborate bathhouses with complex plumbing and heating systems, all meant to make it easier for people to use water as a healing tool, throw in a growing romanticism around the notion of returning

to nature as a response to urban sprawl, and those springs became magnets for many people. In 1881, two years after Judge Saunders' experience, a man named L. J. Calclosh published a pamphlet that lauded the healing properties of the waters there. Certain diseases, he wrote, known as incurable, had been brought here and the improvement in the general health was so marked that invalids jumped at the conclusion that they were well. Calclosh might have even had his sights set on some sort of business enterprise that would have taken advantage of that documented power, but it seems that another man beat him to the punch.

Powell Clayton was an Arkansas legend. Not only had he served as governor of the state for seven years, but he had also served time as a U.S. senator representing the state in Washington, D.C. and he had an idea. What if they turned Eureka Springs into an elite destination spot? What if they built something so attractive that it would lure in the sorts of people with disposable cash, cash that could trickle down to the entire community? His proposition was ambitious and it required a corporate name behind it, so he set up the Eureka Springs Improvement Company and set his plans in motion.

The goal was to build a Victorian Pleasure Resort. It would be a step up from what the area had been used to for the first few years, rather than making a name for themselves as a destination for the destitute. Clayton aimed higher. In 1886, he began construction on a luxury resort that was meant to turn Eureka Springs into a prime destination for America's wealthy elite, the Crescent Hotel and Spa. St. Louis architect Isaac Taylor was brought in to design the five-story building and limestone was quarried from the nearby White River.

Four masons from Ireland were hired to lay the stones, and plumbing was installed that guided water from a number of the local springs directly into the hotel. It said that guests there could pick from which spring they wanted to drink, almost like a modern soda machine. But it didn't matter how beautiful and extravagant this resort would be. Lurking just around the corner was something darker than he or anyone else could have imagined. Hope springs eternal, as they often say, but so too does death. At first, business was brisk.

Those wealthy elites came to Eureka Springs and spent their money for a while. But as the years wore on, fewer and fewer vacationers showed up, and that made it harder to keep the doors open year-round. After all, resorts are expensive to run, and if the guests weren't showing up, adjustments had to be made. In 1908, roughly two decades after opening their doors, the Crescent Hotel and Spa reduced its season from 12 months to just three and used the remaining nine months to run a college out of the building, the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women.

From what I can tell, the college made money two ways. Wealthier families sent their young women to live and study there nine months each year, while local students could take classes during the day for a smaller fee. That hybrid of resort destination and women's college went on for 16 years, but by 1924, even the college tuition wasn't enough to keep the place staffed and running. The college shut down, and the resort was left with a small three-month window to earn revenue, but the writing was on the wall. And then, the water went bad.

There's a bit of irony there, I know. The entire reason the community of Eureka Springs existed at all was because of the quality of the water. That's why the town was built. But in the mid-1920s, an outbreak of typhoid, a bacterial infection, spread by contaminated water and food, was linked to three of the local healing springs. The party, it seems, was over for a while. In 1937, a stranger arrived in town and started asking questions about the old resort building.

He was a smooth-talking middle-aged man in a white suit, purple shirt, and a lavender tie, and he wanted to buy the resort and turn it into a hospital of sorts. He still believed in the healing powers of the spring waters and had a plan to treat cancer patients through a method he had learned back home in Iowa. The people of Eureka Springs were skeptical. They didn't know who he was, and he was asking them to put their town's reputation and economy right into his hands, and that was a risky endeavor. But at the same time, the Great Depression had devastated their community, and they were

looking for any lifeline they could find, so they eventually said yes. But Norman Baker wasn't the savior he claimed to be. Yes, he bought the Crescent Resort and Spa and began to remodel it. And yes, patients began to come to town, bringing their money with them. But in the long history of snake oil salesmen, Norman Baker was one of the worst, and had a dark past that he hadn't told anyone else about. Born in 1882, Baker had gone through life bouncing from idea to idea, trying to make a fortune for himself.

While most were failures, he had a couple of successes that he liked to brag about. One was his own radio station, which at the time he arrived in Eureka was the second largest station in North America. But the other was the Baker Institute, a sort of pseudo-hospital in Muscatine, Iowa. He had studied under two separate people who claimed to have discovered a cure for cancer, and had walked away with what he believed to be the perfect treatment, which he put to work inside his Baker Institute. Beginning in 1927, Baker advertised on his own radio station, looking for sick people

who were desperate for a cure. Thousands flocked to him for help, but most left disappointed, if they left alive at all, that is. Baker was eventually kicked out of Iowa when the American Medical Association discovered that he had no medical training at all. But he wasn't about to let a little hiccup like that stop him, so he went searching for a new place, a place where he could start over and make even more money selling cures to the desperate.

He found that place in Eureka Springs. Baker was a natural salesman. Between his radio station sending the message far and wide, and his local mailings that advertised Baker Hospital as the place where sick folks get well, he drew a steady flow of patience to his door. But we need to take every single notion we might have about medical care, and toss it out the window if we're going to get an accurate picture of Norman Baker's methods. This cure for cancer was purely chemical.

From what historians can tell, it was a mixture of glycerin, carbolic acid, alcohol, and an herbal tea brewed from watermelon seeds, corn silk, and clover. He also helped patients with changes to their diet, assorted vitamin supplements, and a regimen of strong laxatives. On the surface, things seemed to have turned around in Eureka Springs. They had been looking for a lifeline to help pull them out from the darkness of an economic depression, and Baker had done that. Everyone was making money again, and because of that, everyone loved him.

Well, almost everyone. There were a few critics in town who didn't believe his slick marketing messages. They had heard far too many stories of patients arriving at Baker's hospital only to leave a short while later just as sick, but also full of disappointment and frustration. And those were the ones that managed to get away. The rumors around town claimed that some patients never survived, but to protect his reputation and marketing efforts, Baker had their bodies incinerated rather than send them back out for public funerals.

Eventually, those rumors and complaints were enough to draw the attention of Baker's old enemy, the American Medical Association. Together with federal authorities, the hospital was investigated and Baker was shut down. Not before he managed to embezzle millions of dollars out of his desperate patients, many of whom tragically died in the process. Baker served a short prison sentence of just four years for his financial crimes and was then released in the mid-1940s. He lived out the rest of his life in relative luxury, passing away in 1958 on board his very

own yacht. But the legacy of that building, built to trade a false sense of hope for a handful of cash, wouldn't pass away with the man who filled it with so much evil. The work that Norman Baker did in the Crescent left a stain that no amount of water, however magical, could ever wash off. And it's still with us today. The building that once held the Crescent Resort in Spa, and eventually Norman Baker's Pseudo Hospital, would change hands for the next few decades, slowly falling apart as

time went by. In 1997, new owners took control and began the slow process of restoring the hotel to its original glory. Today, anyone approaching from a distance will get a glimpse of the old structure as it was in 1886. And that's a good thing. But the new owners didn't just take possession of an old hotel, they also acquired a building that served for decades as an epicenter of desperation and hopelessness.

The modeling might have taken care of the physical decay, but there are still whispers that suggest the old stories haven't gone away. And let's be honest, that's not difficult to believe. Setting aside the days when the wealthy elite walked the halls of the resort, Norman Baker's two-year stay in Eureka Springs did irreparable amounts of damage. There are some reports that he attempted to cure brain cancer by cutting open some patient's skulls and pouring the liquid cure directly onto their brain. A lot of pain, suffering, and death came out of barbaric treatments like that.

Today, guests of the hotel still bump into the past from time to time, as do the staff who serve them. One of those ghostly visitors is lovingly referred to as Theodora. She appears at the front desk from time to time, asking for her room key. And when the staff look away for a moment to check on her room number, she vanishes. That room, number 419, is another place where Theodora can be found. Cleaning staff have spotted her on more than one occasion, and visiting paranormal researchers claim to have captured her voice on tape.

Whether she's just a figment of our imagination, or an echo of someone who lived and died in the building, we'll never know. The old hospital morgue is probably one of the most obvious places to go looking for shadows from the past. Legend says that Norman Baker would conduct amateur autopsies there, attempting to better understand the cancer he was claiming to be able to cure. Modern visitors to the space have spoken of cold spots, eerie sounds, and unintelligible voices.

Speaking of Norman Baker, even though he passed away in Florida, some think his spirit has returned to wander the halls he filled with patience. The most frequent sightings have taken place in or near the old recreation room. Others have seen him on the landing between the first and second floors of the hotel, and say that he always seems to look a little lost. Oh, and how do they know it's Norman Baker? His clothing, of course. That white suit, purple shirt, and lavender tie are a dead giveaway.

And let's be honest, I've fully intended that pun. On the third floor, multiple witnesses have seen the vision of a nurse pushing a gurney through the hallway. One guest in 1987 claimed that she watched this nurse move all the way down the hall before pushing her cart directly through the wall at the end. Most haven't seen her, though. Instead, they've only heard sounds that hint at her presence, that telltale squeak of the gurney wheels as she rolls it slowly down the hall.

One of the most common stories, though, is about a man named Michael. Legend says that he was one of the Irish stone masons who helped lay the limestone blocks of the hotel. Michael was a bit of a ladies' man, though, and had a tendency to desert his job in favor of flirting. It was a character flaw that would eventually get him killed. The story tells us that Michael was on the roof one day in 1886, when he noticed a woman far below on the ground.

He stepped closer to the edge to try and get her attention, and lost his footing, falling to a gruesome death below. This legend places the spot of his death as the modern location of Room 218, and if the stories are true, Michael has made quite an impact on the guests there. People who stay in Room 218 have experienced a whole range of unusual happenings. For many, it's as simple as an odd feeling, or unexplainable sounds. For others, though, the sightings have been more intense. And maybe due to Michael's nature as a flirt, most of those experiences have been reported

by women, not men. Some people never change, I guess. But the mark left by his tragic death is still visible from time to time, quite literally. More than a few guests have reported stepping into the room, only to find the walls covered in blood, as if someone, or something, had exploded against them. Each time it happens, the guests have run screaming out of the room and called for hotel staff to come and see. When they arrive, though, the walls are as clean and spotless as before.

Whether the experiences in Room 218 have been nothing more than a series of eerily similar hallucinations by frightened guests, or momentary gaps in the veil between our world and the one beyond, it is difficult to say. But one thing that is clear is that those who have reported seeing the blood never step foot back inside their rooms. And honestly, who could blame them? Sure, walls can be scrubbed or repainted, but who could ever wash that vision from their minds?

Not even the waters of Eureka Springs can do that. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We've heard it said a million times, and yet it never ceases to take us by surprise. People will do extraordinary things for a chance, or a possibility, or hope. Clark Stanley knew that when he boiled rattle snakes in front of audiences, and then sold them bottles of nothing but mineral water. And they bought his miracle cure all by the truckload. In fact, Clark Stanley's snake oil liniment sold for nearly 24 years before federal investigators

stepped in and tested the product. His punishment for fooling all of those desperate people? 20 bucks. In a lot of ways, the people who put Eureka Springs on the map weren't all a whole lot better. Sure, the stories of the healing properties of the local waters had been whispered about for centuries before their arrival. But they still own some of that blame.

After all, they are the ones who marketed the springs as the answer to all our troubles, as the last ray of hope that everyone had been looking for. But clearly, the biggest snake oil salesman of them all, at least in Eureka Springs, was Norman Baker. He was a textbook example of how, if you talk a big enough game and say your lies with enough conviction, some people are bound to assume you know what you're talking about. They'll follow you blindly in a direction of your choosing, even if that path only leads to failure and disappointment.

But Baker's actions in his Eureka Springs hospital go beyond misdirection. If the stories are even remotely true, his patients faced much more suffering than mineral water or lies. Some of them handed over their life savings in hopes that Baker would cure them of their illness, and then they were allowed to die. So it's no wonder that people today feel as though pieces of the past have stuck around. How could it not? But even in death, we aren't immune to disappointment, as one final story from the Crescent Hotel

and Resort illustrates so well. As the story goes, a former hotel owner was closing down the bar one night when one of the guests came in hoping for a drink before bed. The owner agreed, pouring him what he asked for, and then slid the glass over to him. A couple of seats down the bar, there was another man, just sitting in silence as the owner went about his closing duties. Looking for a conversation, the newcomer called out a greeting, but the silent stranger didn't reply.

He tried again, but no matter how loud or friendly he was, the silent man refused to answer or even turn his head to acknowledge him. Assuming the man was too drunk to talk, the newcomer left him alone and carried on his conversation with the hotel owner. They made small talk and he slowly finished his drink, but when he was ready to leave, he was surprised to see that the silent man had already left. He couldn't remember seeing, let alone hearing, the man leave the bar. It was unsettling, to say the least.

Back out in the hotel lobby, the man glanced up toward the staircase, probably deciding if he was going to take the elevator or make the long climb up to his room. And that's when he saw the silent stranger again, just standing on the stairs, looking down toward him. Finally letting his curiosity get the better of him, the hotel guest began to climb the steps to confront the stranger. But that's when something unexpected happened. As he approached, this hotel guest claimed he felt invisible hands stop him, as if a

powerful force had placed itself between him and the silent man. This force then guided him backwards, slowly but firmly, until he was left standing at the bottom of the steps where he started. When he glanced back up, the stranger was gone. Sometimes the past is eager to brush up against the present and make itself known, and sometimes it isn't. If you're the sort of person who keeps their eyes peeled for a glimpse of the unexplainable, for a shimmer of ghostly evidence or the whisper of an otherworldly voice, you might get exactly

what you're looking for in the Crescent Hotel. Then again, you might walk away, disappointed. But considering the dark history of the place, that's nothing new. The history of the Crescent Hotel is one of frustration and disappointment. That much is obviously clear. Thousands of people flock to Eureka Springs looking for a cure, but left empty-handed. And if one final story is true, some of them might still be calling for help. Click around after this short sponsor break to hear all about it.

The Crescent Hotel is an old building. Anything that was built in the 1880s and is still standing today has little reminders of just how old it is, and the hotel is no exception. Things that are no longer used, technology that has been replaced by more modern alternatives, architecture often acts like a time capsule by preserving areas of an older era. In the Crescent, one of those relics is the recreation room. In its heyday, it was a favorite destination for hotel guests. Norman Baker was even said to go there every day during his ownership of the building.

But in modern times, the recreation room has been locked and off limits to the general public. It's unoccupied. But if you ask the staff at the hotel switchboard, they might have a different opinion about that, because they are the ones who keep receiving the mysterious phone calls. Every now and then, they say, at completely random times, the phone inside the recreation room will call the switchboard. Assuming someone had managed to break into the off-limits room, staff would go down and

investigate. They would take their key, unlock the door, and flip on the lights, only to find no one inside waiting by the phone. Each time, they would leave just a little bit frustrated, locking the door behind them as they went. Once though, a member of the staff got a bit more than he bargained for. After receiving yet another call from the unoccupied room, he grabbed the key and headed down to see what might be causing it.

This time, he asked one of the other staff members to keep the mysterious call on the line. Perhaps, if the call is still ongoing, they might catch the culprit in the act. When he arrived outside the room, he silently inserted his key into the lock. And then, after taking a deep breath, twisted the key and opened the door. Inside though, was just a bit more disappointment for him. The room was still empty, and the phone, the one that had placed a call to the switchboard and was still active, was sitting firmly on the receiver.

While their experiment didn't offer the answers they had been looking for, it certainly did cause them to consider a more frightening alternative to a prank or a wandering guest. Maybe, just maybe. The room wasn't as unoccupied as they thought. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Taylor Haggardorn, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season

of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both of them. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn more about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one place.

TheWorldOfLore.com slash now. And you can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.