In northern Arkansas there is a town called Eureka Springs, where no streets meet at a right angle. The town is built into the bedrock, captive to ancient geology, its buildings carved into curving cliffs and its trees erupting through layers of sloping sidewalks. There are no traffic lights in Eureka Springs because there is no clear way to turn, no bearings to get, no center to hold. You can enter the ground floor of a building and walk a straight line out the back door only to discover you have just left that side’s fifth floor. The topography dictates your journey: renames it, replaces it. It’s reassuring in this day and age, such reliable disorientation. No one comes to Eureka Springs for certainty anyway. They come for the magic and the ghosts.
Before the pandemic hit, every December my family would drive from St. Louis, Missouri, to Dallas, Texas, to celebrate Christmas with my sister and her family. Every year we would stop in Arkansas and spend a night in Eureka Springs. The official reason was to break up the ten-hour drive, but the real reason was to stay at the Crescent Hotel, and the reason we wanted to stay at the Crescent Hotel was that it’s haunted. This is not our opinion, but the hotel’s calling card. Since 1886, the Crescent has loomed over Eureka Springs, attracting travelers seeking miracle cures in the town’s waters, which are said to possess magical healing powers. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the famous and infamous passed through as the Ozarks became a gangsters’ paradise and a politicians’ retreat. The hotel changed hands and identities: a luxury resort, a women’s conservatory, a junior college. Then the Great Depression hit and it became a place where people literally died of false hope.
In 1937, a con artist named Norman Baker arrived in Eureka Springs with a new mark in mind. Born in the Mississippi River trade town of Muscatine, Iowa, in 1882, Baker grew up rich and spent his formative years getting wealthier through fraud. In the 1920s, he traveled through a shell-shocked America still reeling from the Spanish Flu, scouring the landscape like a vulture preying on pain. An aspiring politician, former carnival barker, and skilled demagogue, Baker gained a massive audience spouting conspiracy theories through the newly popular medium of radio. He operated a station in Muscatine that he called “KTNT,” which stood for “Know the Naked Truth.” Muscatine was at this time a fledgling Midwestern media mecca. Mark Twain had worked at its newspaper, before being accosted by a local with a knife who insisted he call him the son of the devil or be killed, at which point Twain decided to leave town.
Throughout the late 1920s, Baker warned his audience that evil cabals ruled the United States. He assured his listeners that he could expose the evildoers, so long as they kept on listening. His 10,000-watt broadcasts extended far beyond Muscatine, reaching over one million homes. Off the air, Baker consulted with a team of vicious lawyers he had hired to threaten the public officials and journalists investigating his numerous criminal offenses, which ranged from obscenity to libel to theft.
But Baker’s cruelest crime was making ordinary people believe he could save them. In 1929, as the stock market crashed and America lurched deeper into despair, Baker proclaimed himself a medical genius. In December, he started a print magazine, The Naked Truth, and put a photo of himself on the cover alongside the proclamation cancer is cured. In 1930, he set up a hospital in Muscatine, called it the Baker Institute, and staffed it with people who had minimal medical expertise. He peddled a cancer treatment that consisted of little more than seeds, corn silk, carbolic acid, and water, though he did not tell that to his audience. He branded this tonic “Secret Remedy #5.” Baker’s secrets earned him $444,000 in 1930 alone, the 2021 equivalent of $7.2 million.
Baker was an opponent of vaccines. He told his followers that doctors recommending vaccines were part of a nefarious government plot. He claimed that doctors knew how to cure cancer, but refused to do it because it afforded them no financial gain, unlike his own selfless actions. Baker was vicious in his denunciations, but his audience liked it. In a time of economic misery and political instability, it felt good to have an enemy, and Baker’s confidence was its own lure. Throughout the early 1930s, tens of thousands of desperate Americans gathered together at rallies to hear him speak. Baker assured them that one day cancer would disappear, like a miracle. They drank his treatment down like Kool-Aid-flavored hydroxychloroquine, and thereby sealed their own demise.
Within a year, the American Medical Association had caught on to Baker and sought to shut down his operation, seeing him as a merchant of death. “The viciousness of Mr. Baker’s broadcasting lies not in what he says about the American Medical Association but in the fact that he induces sufferers from cancer who might have some chance for their lives, if seen early and properly treated, to resort to his nostrum,” they wrote in 1931. Baker responded by claiming that the American Medical Association had sent armed assassins to kill him. He then unsuccessfully sued the AMA for defamation.
These were classic Baker tactics—accuse your opponents of an outrageous crime and sue them early and aggressively. But this time, he failed. He lost his radio license and his institute and gained an arrest warrant. He fled to Mexico, where he purchased a border radio station and broadcast to his audience that he would continue to live above the law. After a few years of lying relatively low, he returned to the United States in 1937. He served one day of prison time in Iowa, for practicing medicine without a license, and set off for Eureka Springs.
You can make a lot of money peddling lies on the road. But you can make even more when you settle in one place, forcing your victims to pay to come to you. By the time Baker arrived in northern Arkansas in July, the local economy had collapsed. The Crescent Hotel was a vacant Victorian behemoth from which one could gaze down at the town’s past glory and current decay. Eureka Springs officials welcomed the flamboyant radio star, hoping his prowess for publicity would reverse their misfortune. And so, the scam, and the deaths, began anew.
Under Baker’s management, the Crescent Hotel was transformed into the Baker Hospital and Health Resort. His descriptions of his medical ingenuity became as outrageous as the hotel’s décor, which now included purple hallways (to match his trademark lavender tie) and a calliope mounted on the roof. Baker posted ads in newspapers throughout the United States claiming his cancer cure required no operations, radium, or x-rays, but could be achieved by a simple injection of his special serum. He photographed rows of jars of tumors he claimed were removed from cured patients and announced: “We have hundreds of specimens like these. Actual cancer specimens and laboratory data proves all. All specimens are preserved in alcohol.”
Americans read Baker’s advertisements and believed them. They sent their sick to the Crescent Hotel to be cured by the famous doctor, so charismatic in his white suit, so full of confidence in his followers, and so full of condemnation for all who questioned him. They wanted to believe, and clearly there was nothing to fear—if there were, someone would have stopped him by now, right? Americans showed up riddled with disease and swallowed Norman Baker’s cures and lies.
In June 2018, in another life, I drove with my husband and children from Missouri to Rocky Mountain National Park. We traveled freely and blithely, stopping at restaurants and tourist traps on a whim. The phrase “Mask up, kids, we’re going to the gas station!” had not yet entered our vocabulary. We were unconcerned with pandemics and were contending only with the usual problems of economic decline, rising autocracy, rampant gun violence, disinformation warfare, climate catastrophes, systemic racism, and endemic corruption. This time is what we refer to now as the good old days.
The summer of 2018 felt like a hinge on which the country swayed between democracy and autocracy, a demarcation as precipitous as a knife’s edge. I lived on that edge, as a journalist who spent every day documenting the downfall but also dealing with its practical ramifications as a mother and as an American. In 2018, the respectable thing for journalists to do was deny the possibility of authoritarianism in America, but I was never very good at being respectable.
It is very bad in America to be right too early. It is considered a sin in journalism to tell the public what you have learned in real time, both because you are going against the tide of profit motive, but mostly because it destroys plausible deniability for the corrupt and powerful. My dire warnings were echoed by political officials only when it was too late for them to act. In 2015, I warned that Donald Trump would win the presidential election. In 2016, I warned that Trump was a career criminal who would rule the United States like a Central Asian kleptocrat. In 2017, I warned that if action was not taken immediately, Trump would purge institutions and pack courts so that the damage to America would last decades—if America lasted at all.
I was growing weary of my own unheeded warnings. I worried about the inability of people in my country to discern between a “conspiracy theory,” in the pejorative sense, and an actual ongoing conspiracy.
On television, the news alternated between Trump’s firehose of lies and a parade of feel-good institutionalists whose reputations for justice were buoyed by anticipation instead of deed: the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s James Comey and Robert Mueller, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “the intelligence community,” “the steady state,” “the players behind the scenes.” The descriptions of the heroes in wait became more amorphous as the crimes became clearer and the punishments smaller. Liberal pundits declared that secret saviors would rescue America from Trump. Trump crowed that he would rescue America from a cast of rotating villains. On each side, everyone told everyone else to shut up and “trust the plan.”
The severity of that from which Americans needed to be rescued—deep, entrenched corruption; the unchecked dismantling of our most basic civic protections; the cavalcade of catastrophes that awaited us in the form of climate change if action were not taken—was ignored or cloaked in spectacle. That Trump’s illicit actions obviously required enablers from the very institutions he proclaimed his enemies—the FBI, Wall Street, the Democrats, the media—made for awkward discussions. It was easy for liberals to designate Trump as an anomalous villain, an American exception to American exceptionalism. It was easy for right-wingers to designate Trump an anomalous hero, a restorer of America’s unmanifested destiny.
It was harder for all of them to explain how this con artist had risen to establishment glory despite his decades of documented criminal acts and illicit foreign ties. On the whole they ignored the darkness that lay behind that “Teflon Don” moniker and continued to cover up his crimes with his scandals. It was easier not to think about it—safer, too. Whether you are the criminal or the captive, there are few things more disconcerting than learning that the rescue crew is in on the plot.
By the summer of 2018, I was worn from the hype and dreading the day when my own conclusion—that this was a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government—would be accepted, because it is the kind of concession elites make only when the expiration date for democracy has passed.
I decided to hit the road: not so much for my own sake, but for my children’s, to show them proof of life in a dying nation and that not all big American ideas are bad. That year, my children were ten and seven years old and had not known any America other than one of looming threats and broken promises. A nation that adults cloaked in a veneer of “exceptionalism” but that they, as children, could see clearly, because they had not been trained to avert their eyes. My children knew their homeland was on the decline but didn’t dwell on it. Like other kids, they preferred the world-building game Minecraft, where they veered, much as I did in day-to-day life, between “survival mode” and “creative mode.” They did not see the Trump era as any more aberrant than I had seen the Reagan era as a child of the 1980s. Decline was America’s natural trajectory, paved during their parents’ childhoods and passed down to their own. The president was a liar and no one had a steady job and the earth was on fire and it had never been otherwise. My children learned early that the world keeps turning as it burns.
I wanted them to see that America had beauty as well, and that people had sought to preserve it—for their generation and any that followed. I wanted them to see mountains and wildlife and conservation in action, and I wanted them to watch other Americans enjoying these sights too, regardless of from where they came or for whom they voted. The national parks were both a break from America and its finest embodiment, a liminal space of past and possibility.
But I had additional fixations, and when it came time to choose a place to stay in Estes Park, I made a reservation at the Stanley Hotel, the place that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining when he stayed there in the 1970s. I couldn’t help myself: I was a sucker for King and a sucker for a horror story, and so we wandered the floors and took pictures of the fabled room 217 (237 in the movie, but I was a purist). I made the kids pose like the doomed ghost sisters at the end of a hallway and they rolled their eyes and laughed. The Stanley capitalized on The Shining and advertises itself as haunted, but nothing about it felt scary. We were play-acting, a family of four on a last-chance road trip, contemplating buying a big wheel tricycle and seeing if the staff would let my son ride it down the halls. (We asked; they would not.) When we went to the bar to drink like Jack Torrance the radio was playing “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. The only thing this hotel killed was the mood.
We fell asleep in a clean and unremarkable room, and when I woke up, the sky had turned red. There were wildfires sweeping through Colorado. You could see them coming down the mountains, you could smell the smoke choking the air, you could hear the alerts from your phone, warning you to get out, to run from this place, because death was coming. America is a ghost story, I thought as we packed our bags. And we are the ghosts.
From They Knew by Sarah Kendzior. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books.
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