6. Just Like Indiana Jones

We make a huge discovery, but if we only had a ruse to distract somebody…. hmmm

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Episode 6

It’s time for some hidden secrets to be revealed at America's Most Haunted hotel. Deadly secrets and some had hoped they died with Delilah Carrington in 1934 and then with Lucy decades later. But they didn't. And the low budget ghost squad was about to find the answers to this mystery. And when I think back on where we found the key to this whole thing, I mean, why had we not realized it sooner? It had been hiding in front of everybody for decades.

Well, hey, y'all. 

Welcome to episode six of the low budget Ghost Squad. 

I'll say things have been getting a little nutty here at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, AR for our Ghost slash maybe murder investigation. Thanks for coming along on the ride with us. 

I'm Natalie

I'm Allison. 

And I'm Ethan, and we are here to share our ghost adventure at the Crescent with you.

It all started when we saw the ghost of a woman in white fall from the third story balcony. 

Delilah Carrington was her name, and there's a bigger story there than what most people know.

What happened to her right before she went over her balcony? And why did the same thing happen to her great niece Lucy in 1990? Was her death really an accident like they said?

And why do all these spirits keep hanging around our room?

And Oh yeah, we have a friend who's a ghost that we didn't know was a ghost he works here or I guess I should say he worked here.

It's a complicated situation.

 and after everything that happened the night before, we had been up for hours just waiting for the dining room to open so we could go eat breakfast.

Hopefully I wouldn't feel sick this time.  It happened twice already, once the first night and then the next morning around the same spot in the dining room.

And again, I think, like I said, that ghosts are starting to attach themselves to you. 

Yeah, but I didn't have a ghost send a message that said get out. Maybe that was just for you.

So while y'all go back and forth on that, I'm going to move on with our story.  OK, so after a night of the lights going on and off and pretty much not a lot of sleep, we were downstairs waiting on breakfast to start and I kept looking around for Henry, our ghost friend. His post was nearby. Well, I should say his post when he was alive.

And his main job was really to share the history of the place with guests, since he had worked there for so long and so would his dad, Jason.

And you know, I imagine him just sitting, watching the people check in at the old front desk. And that front desk has actually been there since the hotel opened in 1886. 

And so has the big clock that hangs above it. 

And then we saw Henry walking down the stairs that led to the spa.

Now, FYI, those stairs also go to the morgue from when it was the Baker Cancer Hospital in the 1930s.  At this point, the ghost app is going off.

And the words find diary and then ohh God, follow me appear.

This app is the thing we've been using this whole time, and it lets spirits talk to us somehow, someway. Don't ask me how, I’m not that technical. But Henry sees us at this point and was saying he's following something like some spirit, and whatever he's following sounds like the same person or whatever that had been in our room earlier.

But this time, he says, it sounds more like a woman talking. Last time, he couldn't tell.

OK. So again, I'm realized that this is one of those moments that you're probably sitting there listening and you're thinking run. Grab your bags. Better yet, just leave your crap there and get the heck out of there.  Guess what - we didn't. We were all heading down the stairs, passing by the spa, and going toward the long hallway that leads to the morgue.   What was really leading us down there? Then the words hidden and couldn't find came up on the app. Henry then starts telling us that this person or spirit force, whatever,  it was saying, she couldn't find the diary, but it should answer everything. And that Alice Faye told her it could, Alice Faye being Delilah's roommate. 

At that moment, someone who works at the spa came down the hallway asking, can I help you? 

And I quickly just said, - we’re just looking around and definitely not following some spirit down here.

Just then Henry was gone and the app went silent. 

So I think either he followed the ghost girl or the ghost girl followed him.

We know that she said Alice Faye told her about a diary.  And as we ate our breakfast a little while later, we kept asking ourselves, so whose diary is this? Deliliah’s? Because if it is, then that's not her ghost, because she would know what was in the book and really where it was. 

And then I asked, was it Lucy?

I mean, it could be Lucy.  She died in this hotel and she was looking for evidence of what happened but couldn't find it. Like the app said couldn't find. 

Now Alice Faye supposedly sent Lucy a note before she died. I mean, it did make sense, but again, where is that diary? 

For the first time in that dining room, I didn't feel sick. That's a win.

Very true. Thankful for that, and we'll take that as a win. But a small tour was about to begin, so we waited on the couches in front of the old fireplace. It's funny, I do things like this, like I start thinking, you know, all those years ago, Delilah and our friends may have been huddled around this very spot, not even realizing how everything would turn out.

Maybe Charlie would come visit. Maybe she longed to see Jason right here in this lobby, out in the open, but knew she couldn’t.

Yeah. So while my mom was being all Hallmark movie, like.  I started flipping through some of the scrapbooks on the table. One was filled with ghost pictures and another was filled with the history of hotel.  It was cool because one picture shows a mist or something on the 2nd floor near Room 212.  That's where a doctor, John Fremont Ellis, is said to be seen.  

He was a doctor here in the hotel in the late 1800s, about the time this place opened, and as we were looking at it, someone who worked there walked by and told us that she had smelled his cherry pipe tobacco like so many others.

In the history scrapbook there's an image of an old newspaper article of the day that Norman Baker bought the hotel for his cancer hospital even though he had no medical license. 

I just want to pause here for a minute. 

I think the Baker hospital angle, in the whole history part of this, was your favorite and I love it how even if we're not podcasting and this subject comes up every time, you immediately say - and by the way, he had no medical degree slash medical license slash any kind of medical schooling whatsoever.

But we started looking at another image of a newspaper dated May 20th, 1886.  Now the main headline was the Crescent Hotel opens today. 

And did you know this was such a big deal that a guy who had been a presidential candidate, a US Secretary of State and Speaker of the House came to the opening? You probably haven't heard of him, but if you're curious, his name is James G Blaine.  Just a little bit of trivia for you.

And I saw Samuel Whiteford’s name sprinkled throughout the article. Remember, he's the grandfather of Delilah's fiance, Charlie.

And I guess based on the pictures and articles, it looks like sightings of what is believed to be Delilah Carrington picked up after Lucy died. Yeah, there was a bunch of stuff written about it and more pictures of when it was a women's college. 

You know when Delilah and Alice Faye went to school there, it was a program from a recital and one from a play that they did.

Mom and I noticed it because it was a Nancy Drew show. Very fitting for what's going on here with us I think. 

And they had done a version of the secret of the old clock.

Mom and I read that together when I was younger. 

That was published, Can you believe in 1930?

And I was just sitting there on my phone the entire time, by the way.

As he always is.

We were looking at the old pictures when we saw that Delilah and Alice Faye's names were on the cast list of that Nancy Drew play. 

Of course they were in it.

Well, the tour started with some of the same stories that we had already heard. It was more of a historical thing versus a bunch of ghost stories.  Like this hotel was designed by a famous Saint Louis architect named Isaac Taylor, just FYI.

He then pointed out all the things that have been renovated, like the front of the hotel that we see today used to be the back entrance. 

The other side was prettier and they didn't really need a parking lot like we do today. 

The guy also pointed out the carving on the fireplace, like the owl bat thing that you guys somehow thought was a vulture. And I still don't know how you did. 

Well, did you see the wings it had? 

Well, I still think it looks like a vulture, but whatever.

And then, of course, he went into the history of the old front desk and the old clock. Always a crowd favorite because they're so old. And y'all, what happened next changed everything. The tour guide said there must be so many secrets in this old hotel.

He's not lying there. 

So Alison, what did we do Then?  we looked at each other and said the secret of the old clock.

I mean, it hit us all at once. The secret of the old clock. The Nancy Drew story.

In that story, something is hidden in the clock hence the title, and Delilah was in that play. 

And we were thinking maybe there was a secret compartment, but it's really high up there above the desk.

And you know we had to check it out.

So I tried to call for Henry to maybe help us and you know, nobody could see him anyway, but he didn't appear. 

I mean when you need a ghost friend, they're never there. 

I mean, how do you call a ghost? 

Apparently I don't know how to do it. 

But you did come up with a genius idea of causing the most dramatic distraction so your youngest child could play Indiana Jones to get to a clock that's 100 years old. 

I picked up that cat that's always asleep on this six sided desk that we told you about in the last episode.  And I put him in the women's restroom and don't worry, he didn't seem to care that much because he just feel kind of back asleep again. 

And I ran up to the woman at the front desk and yelled - The cat just ran out the front door and she took off after him.

Then it all came down to Ethan.

So I climbed up onto the counter behind the desk and was actually able to open the face of the clock. And it was there. We found it. The diary. So when I grabbed the diary, I realized there was something on top of it, like it was in an envelope. If you know me, you know that I really wanted to open it. 

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But I told them to hold off because we had to get upstairs with this thing because I didn't want anybody seeing this with it. 

Yeah. But we needed to get the cat back into the lobby, and after we did that, I yelled from the front porch at the clerk, who was still searching - He came back inside.

I'm sorry, that's exactly the way it sounded too.  So we quickly ran up the stairs with the envelope and the diary, but then we ran into two hotel workers and they looked down at the book and then looked up at us. And just kept walking. That was a close call. So when we finally read the diary, in the beginning it was mostly, you know, just young college girl stuff.  But she also wrote about being torn between Charlie and Jason and it was very dramatic. 

Apparently Charlie was her parents’ choice. Both families are friends. She's known him for years.  You know, the routine and it would have been very good for father's company if the two had married, you know, kind of like a merger.

But then she met Jason one spring day when he was cleaning up after a big picnic. She says she was in love ever since. He would bring her flowers and she would lie about it all to her roommate Alice Faye and say no, I picked them myself.

And it looks like she knew that Alice Faye had a thing for Charlie the whole time, but didn't really care because by that time she was pregnant with Jason's baby. The last entry is the night she died.  It said she was leaving school to run away with Jason.  She sent her bags down. That dumb waiter on the outside of the building that Henry told us about, that they used to haul the sheets and stuff up and down the building.  Jason was to come pick them up, and she probably snuck him in that way, too.  She was writing in this diary, waiting in the lobby for Jason to show up.

But instead of Jason, Samuel Whiteford walked in, At least according to her diary. That's the grandfather of her fiance.  Remember, he's very powerful at this time. And in what looks like very hurried handwriting, she wrote, ‘he knows. he must know.  Alice Faye must have told Charlie.  I have to hide from him and hide this book. I can't let him find me.  And that's it.  She died soon after that.

So did Samuel Whiteford find her and kill her that night?.  Did Jason come and there was a big fight?  And where was her friend Alice Faye during all this? But don't forget about the letter that was found with the diary. I can already tell who wrote it.

Coming up on the low budget Ghost squad - That letter is the key to this whole mystery and it sets off a dangerous and ghostly confrontation in the morgue.

The Low Budget Ghost Squad is part of Spellbound Productions.
This was written, directed, edited, produced and whatever else by the leader of the low budget Good Squad yours truly. 

And thanks of course to Alison and Ethan for their hard work and willingness to play along with this crazy idea.

 And maybe you saw some of awesome graphic art design by Lucinda Peterson.

And if you want to see some of the things you've heard about throughout this podcast, go to our Instagram and YouTube channel that are in the description and that's where we'll have some fun Pictures, videos and behind the scene stuff.

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