Sprite-seeing

LITTLE ROCK — Halloween is full of make-believe creeps, but some people go looking for the real thing - real history, anyway, in places said to be haunted.

Arkansas has ghost stories lurking in every corner, and almost as many guides who swear to know exactly where to brush away the cobwebs for a better look.

LITTLE ROCK, BIG SHOCK

Here are some ways to go sprite-seeing tonight, and on Halloween and other times:

The Little Rock Haunted History Tour departs from the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History for a creep through Little Rock’s Quapaw Quarter, Mount Holly Cemetery and North Little Rock’s Argenta Historic District.

“Almost everything on Main Street in North Little Rock is haunted,” tour guide Linda Howell says.

Howell says she has believed in ghosts ever since she began greeting tourists at Little Rock’s visitor’s center in Curran Hall, another stop on the tour. A man who claimed he could sense ghosts told her she was being followed by one.

Researching the prospects, Howell settled on Mary Eliza Walters as the ghost’s likeliest identity. Walters and her husband, Ebenezer, built the Greek Revival manse in 1843, Howell says. The would-be lady of the house died be-fore she could move in. Maybe she moved in, anyway.

Rocking chairs rock for no apparent reason, Howell says. Once, a coffeepot turned on by itself, filled with water that nobody put in, she testifies. A search of YouTube for “Curran Hall” turns up a video that appears to show lights moving in a curio cabinet.

“I always tell people to bring a camera” on the tour, Howell says. They might see “orbs and misty images.”

“But I tell everybody this is really a history tour,” she says. “It’s not a Halloween attraction - not a bump-inthe-night for thrills, it’s not that. We’re talking about the real thing.”

Strange laughter sounds from the poker room in the Hornibrook Mansion, now the Empress of Little Rock bed and breakfast, she says.Ask her, it’s the sound of high-rolling, extravagant saloon keeper James H. Hornibrook and his cronies, even though Hornibrook died more than a century ago.

The question she ponders is how could this be? Why does a ghost linger?

“It’s kind of a surreal experience,” Howell says, “to look at something that can’t happen, but it’s happening.

“That’s what we talk about.”

Howell’s 2 1/2-hour driving and walking tours start at 7 p.m. beginning Friday through Nov. 25. Tickets are $40. More information is available at hauntedtoursoflittlerock.com or by calling (501) 681-3857.

DIRGE! DIRGE! DIRGE!

WENT THE TROLLEY

The Fort Smith Museum of History adds “Toast the Ghost” - cocktails and hors d’oeuvres - to its Murder and Mayhem Trolley tour of places where foul deeds may have spawned ghosts. The night’s affairs include the tale of a “bloody love triangle” in Fort Smith’s historic Belle Grove District.

“We have scary stories and lots of haunted houses,” museum director Leisa Gramlich says. “Some of the stories are pretty gruesome.”

One such lurid account tells how an early-day mayor of Fort Smith died, shot by his wife from her hiding place in the bedroom closet. The bullet caught him in midcampaign with a 19-year-old, wedded vixen.

Another spooky yarn involves a murdered woman whose missing head turned up in church. These things really happened, Gramlich says, or at least something happened that people never forgot.

Actors portraying Judge and Mrs. Isaac Parker narrate the tour, the famous “hangin’ judge” himself having made sure that Fort Smith had plenty of departed souls - those who came to the end of their rope.

New this year, the tour will stop for cocktails at each of several haunted sites, Gramlich says, “and we’ll toast the ghost.”

Bottled spirits and bloody anecdotes are why the tour is limited to ghost-toasters 21 and older. The tour leaves by old-time, electric trolley from the museum at 6:30 p.m.Halloween, Monday. Tickets are $25. More information is available at fortsmithmuseum.com or by calling (479) 783-7841.

EEK-A-EUREKA

Ghosts from several periods linger in the 125-year history of the elegant Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, especially from when the building was a hospital. Desperatepatients came to the Baker Hospital and Health Spa for a miracle cure that didn’t work.

Back then, the 1930s, the lobby was bright purple. If the ghosts could stand the lobby, it’s no wonder nothing else ever chased them away.

The Crescent backs up its claim of being “America’s most haunted hotel” with reported sightings of “Michael,” a stonemason who fell to his death during the hotel’s construction, and more including the latest report - the ghost of the early 20th-century ballroom dancer Irene Castle, who died as a resident of Eureka Springs in 1969.

Her spirit is said to visit in the form of a young girl in a princess costume, talking in dance terms of “pirouette” and “tango,” according to hotel spokesman Bill Ott.

Tours leave at 8 nightly. Tickets are $18 for adults, $7 for children. More information is available at crescenthotel.com or by calling (877) 342-9766.

The Basin Park Hotel in twisty downtown Eureka Springs offers nightly tours in search of more ghosts than a spiritualist could shake a dowsing stick at.

The hotel claims ghostly ballroom dancers, a girl in a wedding dress, the sound of slot machines from 60 years ago ... and “you may even see the cowboy who still roams silently through the roomsand halls of the hotel, perhaps looking for one last drink to wash away the trail dust.”

Tours are at 8 p.m. daily through November. Admission is $15 for adults, $7 for children. More information is available at basinpark.com or by calling (800) 643-4972.

POLTERGEIST SMACKDOWN Smackover Ghost Tours scare up “a tour like no other.” Participants not only visit five sites claimed to be haunted, but snoop into a couple of places with ghost-hunting gear to detect spirits.

“You don’t just walk around the buildings and listen to stories,” tour leader Tommie Fleming says at the Smackover Chamber of Commerce. “You go in, and we have all the equipment you see on Ghost Hunters, the TV series - meters and laser lights and infrared things. You do your own investigation.”

Smackover has but 2,005 living souls. Why so manyghosts?

“I’m sure the past is why it’s so active here,” Fleming says. Smackover was an oil boom town. In 1922, the population gushed from less than 100 to 25,000.

“Men came to work in the oil fields,” she says. “There was gambling and shooting and murder.

“It was a rough little place to be,” she says, known as “hell town,” and it seems the ghosts are still having a devil of a time.

People come from all overto see for themselves, she says, “from New York, Georgia, California, Louisiana ....”

“Sometimes, it’s scary,” she says. “Sometimes, it starts out scary and turns hilarious. People get scared and run and then they get tickled and it’s a lot of fun.”

Tours are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday all year, lasting generally two hours, all depending on how flighty the ghosts are. Admission is $15. More information is available at smackoverarkansasghosttours.com or by calling (870) 944-0221.

BOO TO YOU IN DREW (COUNTY)

The 105-year-old Allen House in Monticello is haunted by the death of troubled Ladell Allen Bonner, 54, who poisoned herself with a swallow of mercury cyanide-laced punch in 1949. Her mother closed off the master suite where the suicide happened, and the room stayed shut foralmost 40 years.

Today, the home is open for such events as weddings as well as Halloween tours on the chance of an encounter with Bonner and other ghosts.

“The house isn’t scary,” owner Rebecca Spencer insists. “It’s just a big, beautiful house that happens to be haunted.

“We have seen full-bodied apparitions,” she says of herself and husband Mark. “We have heard footsteps in the attic. We have seen doorknobs turn ....”

But still, “it’s not like you see in the movies,” she says, and the Spencers don’t want people to feel disappointed for lack of shrieks and shudders. New this year is the “nightmare maze” behind the house to provide a field of screams.

Tours of the house are 6-11 p.m. today and Halloween. Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for children under 10. More information is available at allenhousetours.com, which links to several videos that record strange if indistinct scenes and sounds, or by calling (870) 224-2271.

Mark Spencer’s history book, A Haunted Love Story: The Ghosts of Allen House- based on letters the Spencers found in the attic - is due on or before Jan. 8 from book-selling sources.

CREEPING UP WITH THE JONESES IN JONESBORO

Edward L. Underwood, magician and author of the newly released Haunted Jonesboro, leads the Jonesboro Ghost Tour. The walk through downtown is a chance to consider the guide’s question: “Just what is the ghost of a chance that there could, in fact, be the chance of a ghost?”

The 90-minute tour starts in front of Jonesboro’s performing arts center, the Forum Civic Center, and proceeds through the streets and pages of Underwood’s book on what haunts the home of Arkansas State University.

The Forum is Jonesboro’s most-haunted spot, Underwood says - thanks to a ghost known as “Charlie,” an odd apparition by even the oddest standards. Charlie is “not ghostly looking,” the guide says: He is a normallooking, partly balding character in tidy dress, wearing a 1950s-style white shirt and narrow tie. Charlie favors the balcony, where he has been known to shush teenagers.

Jonesboro’s shades of shadier characters include the 1920s bank robber Frank “Jelly” Nash. The tough guy grew up in Paragould and Jonesboro en route to his career of 200 holdups. He is buried in Paragould, but his spirit, by some accounts, remains on the lam.

“There’s some scary stuff,” tour coordinator Emma Valentine tells prospective ghost hunters, “but it’s not scary-scary. It’s history meets ghosts.”

Tours will be conducted at 7 and 9 p.m. today and Halloween. Admission is $15 to hear about “a doomed hotel” and “a twisted tale of murderous church folk.” More information is at specialoccasionsentertainment.net and by calling (870) 243-5156.

Underwood’s study of magic includes the history of spiritualism. Belief in spirits comes and goes, he says. Psychics and mediums did a boo!-m business in magician Harry Houdini’s time, the 1920s.

Houdini set out to expose the fakes. The great escape artist died on Halloween 1926 vowing to communicate from beyond his own grave, if it were possible. Even his widow gave up waiting for him to break the final lock.

But now, ghosts are on the fly again.

Ghost shows haunt television: Ghost Hunters, Ghost Detectives, Ghost Adventures, Celebrity Ghost Stories, Haunted History, Most Terrifying Places ....

People look to ghosts for answers in hard times, Underwood says. Ghosts might know which way the economy is headed; how long a person’s job is going to last; what to brace for; be able to say life goes on; be able to promise things ultimately happen for the best.

“Right now, it’s riding a pop-cultural wave,” Underwood says. But people will keep wondering about ghosts, he expects, as long the mysteries of life and death remain mysteries.

“When you’re talking about ghosts,” he says, “you’re talking about the big questions.”