HOT SPRINGS — Screaming in the night, vanishings, ghost murderers on the prowl, the spirits of corpses left to rot in a mental hospital and the stench of burning flesh. These are the bone-chilling tales relived each night in downtown Hot Springs.
On a recent evening at a nondescript address on Bath House Row, wanderers wishing to delve into the darker side of the Spa City assembled around a ghoulish sign advertising Hot Springs Haunted Tours. All anxious chatter stopped as a mysterious character entered the scene.
A cross between a hippy butler and a turn-of-the-last-century mortician, founder Terry Riciano greeted the crowd. Well, “greet” might be too strong a description. His cool reception forced the tourists into a huddle to hear his every word.
After a short description of the places they would visit on their hour-long walk, he issued tags to the members of his group.
“We have to make sure we can tell who’s living,” he told the group.
After dispensing with business, he briskly turned the men, women and teens around and talked as he walked, talked when he stopped at a wrought iron gate and talked as he pointed to the courtyard and balcony at the rear of what was once a bordello, where unfortunate occurrences resulted in unforgettable consequences (OK, people died). In fact, Riciano was a veritable font, spewing macabre and sinister facts.
“This was the deadliest nightclub during Prohibition,” he told the gawkers. “Over 60 murders occurred here.”
“Look, I have goose bumps,” Gwen Hannon of Fort Worth said to her husband, Sean.
Riciano first fell in love with the area as a photographer, but the strangest thing happened on his way through the city.
“I started finding things in my photos that weren’t there,” he said.
His curiosity led him on a massive hunt through old police records, death certificates and newspaper files to find the history of the places he’d photographed. What he found led him to believe that others with curiosity and an adventurous spirit would pay him to tell them the little down-and-dirty secrets of a town fascinated with its past.
Up a steep street on the side of a bluff, the tourists stopped in front of three manicured Victorian row houses presently known as the Andrea Rose Day Spa and The Rose Cottage Bed and Breakfast, but everything in Hot Springs has a story behind it, and nothing is as it appears.
So is the case with the three houses built by a judge for his daughters, where Riciano cautions onlookers to look at their photos carefully when they get home.
“See that rocking chair over there?” he asked. “Folks often see a woman sitting there in their photos, but we can’t see her now.”
Riciano has verified 18 haunted buildings, but he only features six during the tours.
“I have a couple of other ones that are close enough to visit, like the old opera house, and I sometimes swap one or two locations,” he said.
“Most hauntings on the tour date back to 1836 and usually revolve around a death,” he said. “One of the spookiest experiences I’ve had giving the tour is when I warned the tourists about a young man who appeared on the side of the road on the way up West Mountain. People swore that the man disappeared from sight if they looked in their rear view mirrors after passing him. Here’s where it went spooky: A man in my group started crying and told us that his son had gone insane when he was sent to prison for murder, and when he died, the father spread his ashes all around the mountain because it had been his favorite place to visit.”
The Arkansas Rehabilitation Center, originally built as the Army-Navy Hospital, is a Hot Springs landmark and served as a stop on the tour. There are a great many tales in that great building, he said.
“Many of them emanate from the days when it served as a mental hospital for the criminally insane.”
Suffice it to say that a lot of patients died — so many that the corpses were lined against the walls of a particular floor, and screams from empty rooms would taunt the nurses, leading to a bevy of nervous break downs and suicides. Eventually, the entire floor was sealed off, and the souls were entombed. To this day, the elevator doesn’t stop on that floor.
What Lurch is to Gomez, Jeff Arnold is to Riciano. Retired from the telephone company, Arnold, who stands more than 6 feet tall, attended the first tour and dozens of tours afterward.
“I was just fascinated with the research Terry had done,” Arnold said. “He’s put a lot of time and energy into this, and I think Hot Springs is the perfect town for this. It’s always been a little bit creepy.”
Passing the wax museum is creepy enough. When the troop stopped in a parking lot, Riciano tells the story of a little girl who was crushed by a landslide. Her screams can still be heard today, he said.
The Hannons, from Fort Worth, are regular visitors to Hot Springs. This was their first haunted tour, however.
“This type of tourist attraction fits right in with the feel of the town,” said Sean, an aerospace engineer. “We could definitely retire here one day.”
All in all, the tour covered hauntings at The Poet’s Loft, Andrea Rose, the Malco Theater, the Army-Navy Hospital, Heritage Designs, Adair Park, the Arlington Hotel, and the Howe Hotel, which Riciano claimed as one of the most haunted spots in town.
“I love this job,” the long-haired tour director said. “I owned several art galleries in the past, but this really is fun.”
Riciano is so taken with the aura of the area that he has compiled his black-and-white photographs into a coffee table book, Haunted Hot Springs: The Crossroads of Past and Present, soon to be released.
His wife, Lacey, has been his partner in research.
“I’ve always liked scary stuff, and we’ve done everything together. He needs me there in case something happens,” she said.
“Once I investigated a couple of these stories, I was even more intrigued,” he said. “The bulk of the other scenarios came to me.”
Folks from beyond the immediate tourist industry are taking note. The Discovery Channel’s “Ghost Lab” crew spent an incredible three nights locked in the Poet’s Loft doing research for an upcoming show.
“They took EMF readings, tapings, the whole thing,” Riciano said. “They’d never spent more than one night in any one location, but they were amazed at how much they received while they were here.”
Perhaps the spirits were breathing a sigh of relief that somebody was finally paying attention to them.
To find out more, call Riciano at (501) 339-3751 or log onto www.hotspringshauntedtours.com. Discounted tickets are available by visiting the “extra” page.