EUREKA SPRINGS -- Residents of one neighborhood in this Victorian-flavored town say they're being haunted by a ghost tour.
Several nights a week, a 24-seat shuttle bus rumbles up the hill on Mountain Street, stops and disgorges passengers, who walk a half block down Eureka Street to Penn castle.
There, on a city sidewalk, Dakota Buck tells them spooky stories about the house built in 1888 by William Evander Penn, a Baptist evangelist who died there in 1895.
Buck's voice carries so well that Angelique Hurst, who lives next door to Penn castle, said it sounds like he's in her upstairs bedroom.
"I've had to adjust my sleep schedule," said Hurst, who likes to go to bed at 9 p.m., before the tour bus often arrives in her neighborhood. "I can't even open my windows."
Cindy Wolf, who lives across the street from Penn castle, is also annoyed by the tours.
"It's disruptive so late in the evening," she said. "It's a great neighborhood, then here comes this thing lumbering up the hill."
Depending on how many tourists are on the bus, the crowd can spill over into the narrow Eureka Street, which neighbors say was built for carriages, not cars.
Steve Arnold, co-owner of Haunted Eureka Springs, said they've adjusted the tours to try to appease residents in that neighborhood.
The tours started in January. Through May, they ran three or four days a week, sometimes twice a day, at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., depending on demand. Arnold said he hopes the tours are seven days a week for the rest of the summer. The cost is $22 per person, with discounts for some groups.
From Jan. 3 through March 26, Arnold and Charles Mowrey, his business partner, rented three rooms in Penn castle so they could take tourists inside. But they stopped that after Ann Armstrong, the Eureka Springs city clerk, told Arnold that it was illegal to do so unless the building was licensed as a tour home.
Arnold said he could have contested that because there's no definition of "tour home" in the city code.
"We just chose not to fight that battle," he said. "We just chose to drop our lease and tell the ghost stories on the sidewalk and street. And the neighbors weren't happy with that."
Twenty-one residents of the Mountain/Eureka street neighborhood signed a petition asking the city to do something about the ghost tours. Haunted Eureka Springs has a city business license for a "tour vehicle." The petition, dated May 5, states that it's actually a "sightseeing tour" and doesn't have a license for that.
Armstrong said the city ordinance requiring "sightseeing tour" licenses was devised in the 1970s to regulate large tour buses that came through town. She said Haunted Eureka Springs' shuttle bus doesn't really fall into that heavily regulated category.
But Paul Sutherland, who lives on Mountain Street, said it does fall under that category, regardless of the original intent of the ordinance concerning sightseeing tour licenses.
According to the ordinance, a "sightseeing vehicle" is one that has at least seven seats for passengers and travels regular routes at regular times.
"To protect the safety, health and welfare of the tourists who ride on their bus, and the people who live in the area, we believe the city should have required Haunted Eureka Springs to permit as a sightseeing business," Sutherland said via email.
The petition signers don't want ghost-tour passengers disembarking in a residential neighborhood, any residential neighborhood. They want the city to put a three-month moratorium on the tours until all this gets worked out.
But at a City Council meeting Monday, that didn't happen.
Steve Beacham, chairman of the city's Planning Commission, told the council that neighbors have complained about trespassing tourists entering their gated gardens to take photos with their arms around statues.
Arnold said to his knowledge that never happened.
Beacham said there were also complaints about flashlights being shined into windows of houses around Penn castle.
"The neighbors basically would like no one to get off the bus when they're in the neighborhood and just look out the windows and talk about the properties and the ghosts and all that stuff," he told the council.
"The business owners are saying getting off the bus is what makes a big part of their tour a success. The bus is on a city street. The tour is on a public right of way. But the neighborhood is in a noncommercial R-1 zoned area. So that's kind of where we are at loggerheads here."
R1 in Eureka Springs stands for Victorian residential, which is the city's most heavily regulated residential zone.
Tim Weaver, the city attorney, told the council that it didn't sound like any laws were being broken, unless it was the city's noise ordinance, and there was no evidence of that.
In an interview, Thomas Achord, the Eureka Springs police chief, said his department has had calls from neighbors complaining about the ghost tours. He said officers have been dispatched to the scene, but no reports were written because police didn't know of any laws that had been broken.
The City Council took no action Monday on the issue of ghost tours, basically leaving it up to both parties to work it out for themselves.
Arnold said he's talked to only one resident of the neighborhood, and he changed the tour slightly based on a request she made regarding her house. But that was a while back, before Monday's council meeting.
Virginia Hamilton, another Mountain Street resident, said she didn't sign the petition. She said people in Eureka Springs go to great lengths to make their homes and gardens beautiful. If they don't want people admiring those things and taking photos, "then don't be so extravagant," she said.
Meanwhile, Hurst, Wolf and another neighbor said they still weren't happy about the tour bus as it parked Wednesday night, and six tourists walked toward Penn castle, being led by Wyatt Beck, another driver/tour guide for Haunted Eureka Springs.
"This is one of the oldest and most gorgeous architectural areas in Eureka Springs," said Hurst. "We even have shhhhhh signs in the neighborhood."
Beck seemed to be aware of that. As he talked about Penn castle, four tourists stood close by on the sidewalk so they could hear him. A couple smoked cigarettes in the street. Compared with the bass of Buck's voice during the 5 p.m. tour that day, his voice for the late tour was like a whisper in the dark.
Metro on 05/29/2016