F.K. Sterling
Eureka Springs does not lie flat. The streets turn because the hill turns, and the hill keeps what the streets were built to sell. F. K. Sterling walks that ground in The Haunted Hollows of Eureka Springs: Creepy Hotels, Forest Spirits and the Paranormal- the bowl at Basin Spring, the crown on Prospect, the brick hotel on the street, the timber after the trolley has quit, and the night road west toward the lake.The water is older than the resort. The book begins there, with the healing springs, the pedigree the town likes to tell, and the warning a local bookseller left on the sentence. Then it climbs. The Crescent is treated as limestone cut from its own ridge: a resort, a school, an empty hull, and, in the Baker years, a clinic whose jars came up out of the dirt in 2019. The saw stays a saw. The shadow in the lower hall stays the house’s later speech. Basin Park keeps the doll, the agreement about the girl in yellow, the sheriff called the Weasel, and the rope at the bottom of the stair.North of the hotel the light fails first. A step learns yours and then stops. A knock comes from inside a bluff where no mouth shows. Sterling does not put horns on it. On Highway 62 a figure is a person for one second and then a scale. At Leatherwood and on Beaver Lake the files have dates and no body. On a roof on the east side, in May 2003, a jet passes with a contrail and something beside it does not. Five minutes. Then the tool. A meeting that has sat in this town since 1988 is a microphone, not a light in the sky.The grass people, the moon-eyed, and the warm circle in the corn are carried back to the county before dusk. The hollow south of the forest road is the exception, and the book says so: do not go looking. What remains is the rail, the porch, the page left under a lamp, and the drive out that does not pass the slope.This is Eureka Springs as Sterling kept it - creepy hotels, forest spirits, and the paranormal on one hill - told without a menu, and without an invitation past the line.
