Snake Oil Salesmen
While in Eureka Springs this fall with Mom and the aunts we took the ghost tour at the Crescent Hotel.
A bunch of wooo, really, but the actual history of the place is full of interesting tidbits. It started life as a hotel, became a “cancer hospital”, a women’s college and finally a hotel again. One resident in particular interested me. Dr. Norman Baker. He was a charlatan who started his first “cancer hospital” in Muscatine, IA. He suckered the locals in with broadcasts on his private radio station and performed a live “surgery” for a crowd to prove the veracity of his cancer cure. He went to to make tons of money bilking sick people. Eventually, he went to jail for mail fraud – signing his letters “Dr. Norman Baker” when he wasn’t a doctor at all. He died of… liver cancer.
Of course, the ghost tour hyped it up quite a bit, linking him with pre-Nazi Germany doctors, talking about live autopsies, etc. Regardless, I’m interested enough that I’m going to order a book about him. I’m pretty sure the more exciting parts of the ghost tour history won’t be in the book but it should be interesting nonetheless.
