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Northwest Arkansas Pig Trail scenic byway. Photo via The Crescent Hotel and Spa.

Before my two-day road trip through Northwest Arkansas, I had visions of Ma and Pa Kettle-type folks sitting on front porches strumming banjos while drinking moonshine and smoking corncob pipes. No, the Arkansas I experienced was nothing like that.

Off route 23. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

I didn’t meet a single person whose father was also her uncle. And instead of backwoods country bumpkins out of touch with modern culture, there’s a whole lot of cultural refinement going on over yonder in the Ozarks. With its grassy rolling hills sprinkled with farms, traditional southern hospitality, contemporary “high southern” cuisine that could put fancy Manhattan restaurants to shame, and lots of great art, well, Northwest Arkansas totally defied my expectations.

View from the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa rooftop. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton. 

Rolling Hills and Roadside BBQ
I pulled out of Little Rock in our rental car with an itinerary in one hand and a cell phone (thank you, GPS!) in the other. It was a good thing I had an open-minded travel partner willing to venture off the plan. I have a generally poor sense of direction, and even with modern technology, I often get lost. But that does, on occasion, turn out to be a good thing.

Backwoods Barbecue. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

We didn’t get lost during our three-and-a-half-hour drive to our first stop, Eureka Springs, but we did pass some only-in-Arkansas things that warranted spontaneous u-turns and off-itinerary detours–the first at a roadside barbecue place for a home-cooked meal served up by husband and wife team, Anita and Cory. Backwoods Barbecue on Route 23N in St. Paul is worth a detour if only because the owner’s last name happens to be Bacon. For real.

A side of Cory and Anita Bacon. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Some pungent (in a good way) smokey aromas greeted us at the front door. A big blackboard displays the menu of Southern comfort mainstays, which you can order by the plate or by the pound.  We decided on one chicken plate and one pulled pork. The pork was moist, but the chicken required a generous dousing of barbecue sauce, which Anita was ready to offer.

Off-the-wall ordering. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Anita carries on the family culinary tradition, making the restaurant’s sauces just as her kinfolk have for decades. “They sure are homemade,” she says when I ask her. The two plastic squeeze bottles of sauce on the table came with a story, as many things do in Arkansas. “Made from my “grandpappy’s” recipe, been making these for years just like he taught me. “This one here, the Savory Sweet, is mild,” Anita told us, adding, “But if you can take the heat, go for the Ring of Fire.” As much as I wanted to go for the scorching hot stuff just so I could say I tried it, I wimped out and went for the milder one. True to its name, the sauce was sweet but had a little kick.

Chicken Plate, $8.95. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

I really wish I hadn’t overindulged as I did because I really couldn’t eat another bite. That did not, however, stop me from sampling the couple’s homemade coconut cream and banana pies, my faves.  

Judy’s pies, oh my. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

The Pig Trail
We became fast friends with some other diners, locals who started spinning yarns and telling folk tales before we could decide between pulled pork, BBQ chicken, or ribs. That’s when I learned that we’d just passed the scenic “Pig Trail” and how the University of Arkansas Razorbacks got their name. The story goes that after the school won a big game many years ago, the coach described the players as “swarming like a pack of wild Razorback” pigs. There are no Razorback pigs in the area, but the name stuck for the school mascot and became the moniker for the original route to the school, the very twisty and windy Pig Trail.

Music at Backwoods Barbecue. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

I Didn’t See a Ghost In Historic Eureka Springs
Tucked into the Ozark Mountains and sometimes called the “Stairstep Town” for its winding and mostly uphill roads, Eureka Springs’s streets form a five-mile loop without a single stoplight. “Welcome to our quirky little vertical town,” Innkeeper Doug Breitling greeted us as we arrived at our first night’s lodgings, The Arsenic and Old Lace Bed and Breakfast Inn.

Porch time, Arsenic and Old Lace Bed & Breakfast Inn. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

The Inn is just on the edge of the downtown main drag, on a street lined with mostly Victorian-era buildings. The town feels like a cross between Berkeley, California, in the early 70s, and Asheville, North Carolina. I even spotted peace signs and tie-dye.

Arsenic and Old Lace Bed & Breakfast Inn. Photo via Select Registry.

Cuppa Joe for the Road
Desperate for a cup of strong coffee to fuel ourselves for a day of serendipitous wandering, we stopped at Roscoe’s Music and Espresso Café for a strong cup of Joe. The barista confirmed our orders for “expresso” instead of “espresso,” which seemed just right for the place, a down-home coffee spot where you can enjoy your java on a back porch overlooking the woods.

 Roscoe’s. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Patrons can surf the web while sipping coffee at Roscoe’s, or better yet, just chat with Roscoe and his pals, who hang out there shooting the local breeze.

Roscoe Van Jones, owner of Roscoe’s Music and Expresso Café. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Owner Roscoe Van Jones described himself as an old-time country musician who used to jam with the local fiddlers. He no longer plays the strings but serves a decent cup of brew and supports his local artist friends by displaying their works on the cafe’s walls.

Artist Jack Clancey’s ceramic plate. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

In the heart of the Arkansas Art Trail, Eureka Springs is home to several hundred artists attracted to the town for its mix of art, architecture, music, and nature. The place has a tradition of artistic thought and open ideas. In 1931, two locals built the Artists’ Bridge Studio, a refuge under a bridge that spanned a ravine and connected more than just two sides of land––it also became a meeting and working space for artists and writers.

Shrine Artist Ralph Wilson’s Our Lady of the Springs. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Shrines to ArtRageous Practices
I spotted this colorful shrine above in a small park by the inn. The park has no name, but locals often refer to it as the “Music Park,” referencing the many chimes and gongs hanging from the park’s trees. There’s also a small stage where individuals and groups perform at various times of the year. Contemporary shrine artist Ralph Wilson, aka “Mr. Shrine,” built Our Lady of the Springs as part of The Artist Impression of the Mother, a 2014 art show featuring the works of regional artists interpreting the image of The Mother. 

Wilson, who calls himself the “go-to guy for shrines,” began his shrine-building career while traveling the country and selling art from his motor home, Wally World. “God has a sense of humor, too,” said Wilson, who now teaches art classes and produces shrines on demand.

A stained glass window at Arsenic and Old Lace Inn. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Every May, the ArtRageous Parade marks the opening of Eureka Springs’ month-long arts festival. Freedoms of expression and choice have taken some disparate forms in this eclectic town. Carrie Nation, the leader of the Temperance Movement, lived in Eureka Springs at the end of her life, where she made her last speech on the evils of alcohol and spread her wrath by smashing up bars with a hatchet. In 2014, Eureka Springs became the first city in Arkansas to legalize same-sex marriage. In May 2015, the city passed an anti-discrimination ordinance to protect LGBTQ residents, adding them as a class not already protected by the state’s constitution.

Photo: Dustin Holmes, Flickr.

Healing Waters
Before it was known as Eureka Springs or even as Arkansas, Native Americans spoke of the “Great Healing Spring in the mountains.” Legend has it that the Sioux Indians brought the great Chieftan’s daughter to cure her failing eyesight. Shortly after, when the young Sioux reported she could see, white explorers arrived in droves, searching for its miraculous healing waters.

Eureka Springs. Photo via Arkansas.org

Underground Eureka Springs
There’s a whole underground town beneath the one you see as you pass through the main drag, a street lined with little galleries, funky restaurants and cafes, and cute-as-a-button shops–but refreshingly, no chain stores, not a single one.

Years ago, after developers cut down too many trees, the town was deluged by heavy rains, creating mud sheets so high they rose to the tops of many of Main Street’s first-floor entrances. At a loss for how to remedy the problem, property owners just paved right over the mud, raising the street level up above the buildings’ first floors. Today, you enter many of Eureka Spring’s buildings through what was once the second floor. When you step downstairs at the Mud Street Cafe, the former first floor is now underground like many other spots in town.

 Humpty! Photo: Dustin Holmes, Flickr.

Bandits and Bad Boys
It’s possible to do some historical time travel by going underground in Eureka Springs. Beneath the formerly muddy streets is a string of now disconnected subterranean tunnels, which were once hideouts for Wild West bandits and other bad boys.

 

Notorious outlaw Bill Doolin of the Dalton Gang (aka Wild Bunch, labeled the “most cold-blooded robbers in the West”) purportedly came to Eureka Springs for the waters to nurse the rheumatism he suffered from a gunshot wound in his foot. While there, he hid out from the law below ground before he was captured there in 1896–some say it was underground, some say in a bathhouse–but Doolin escaped with Dynamite Dick Clifton only to meet his demise a few months later by a posse of lawmen in Oklahoma.

1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa. Photo via the hotel.

The 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa
We dined in the Crystal Ballroom at the 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa with Bill Ott, the hotel’s director of marketing and communications. Although I didn’t sample the restaurant’s signature ten or sixteen-ounce steaks as I’m not a die-hard carnivore, I over-indulged on an eight-ounce pan-fried panko grouper filet and avocado risotto as Ott regaled us with stories about the hotel’s unusual history.

 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa Crystal Ballroom restaurant. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Let’s just say that Ott is much more than a good communicator. He’s a quintessential Southern storyteller who is as adept at telling tales as he is at officiating at weddings dressed as Elvis. Ever since he got ordained as a Universal Life Church minister for ten bucks online, he’s been moonlighting weekends, mostly at themed weddings where he dresses for and acts the part.

Bill Ott moonlighting as Elvis. Photo, courtesy of Bill Ott and Elvis.

He once showed up as Boris Karloff to marry a Goth couple at 10 pm on Halloween under a faint crescent moon. “I wore my black monk’s robe with the hood up–and actually, I looked more like a medieval executioner,” Ott shared with a big grin. The couple requested a Christian ceremony–which Ott thought was off-theme–but they added some Goth rituals. First, he tied their wrists with a rope, making a Celtic knot, then conducted a bread-eating ritual after which the couple jumped the broom (not the groom.) 

Photo via 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa.

Spirited Former Guests and Residents
As a raconteur, Ott is the perfect representative for the Crescent because the hotel enjoys a multilayered and storied history. Constructed in 1886 for $294,000 by railroad tycoons of the Eureka Springs Improvement Company, the establishment was initially the most exclusive and opulent year-round resort west of the Mississippi.

Garden at 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

With the railroad providing easy accessibility to the town’s renowned healing waters, the Crescent became an invitation-only destination for the “carriage set,” moneyed gentry who could afford to travel by train rather than horseback or wagon.

Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

The property has since been through a number of iterations, once as The Crescent College for Women, then later as the Baker Hospital, a notorious phony “cancer hospital” that con artist Dr. Norman Baker operated for three years until his arrest.

 Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Favorite Haunts
Today, the Crescent is known as America’s most haunted hotel. Legend has it that many of its guests “checked out but never left.” We joined the hotel’s famed ghost tour, where a highly educated and animated guide walked our group through the hotel while creeping me out with stories of famous spirits like Michael, the Irish stonemason who fell to his death in 1885 during the hotel’s construction.

Our ghost tour guide. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

I can’t say I believe this stuff, although I did look over my shoulder a few times. Still, I hoped for a sighting. For one thing, I would have loved to experience and help Theodora, one of Norman Baker’s cancer patients who has supposedly never been able, either alive or dead, to find her room key. Even the fake doctor himself allegedly appears now and then in a white suit and lavender shirt. And purportedly, a mystery patient in a white nightgown shows up at the foot of guests’ beds, but only in the luxury suites for some reason.

A photo with “evidence” of spirits at the Crescent Hotel. Photo via 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa.

As “evidence,” our guide produced photographs showing translucent bodies hovering in areas of the hotel. If you videotape, she told us, you may see an illuminated orb (cast from the ghost’s energy) in your video.

“Spirit orbs” captured on video. Photo via the ghosts of 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa.

People on my tour were gasping, claiming they’d captured an orb on tape, and in the background of one video, you can hear a faint voice–mine–saying, “I don’t see anything but a bunch of people videotaping…and, oh that’s just a shadow…” I wanted to, really wanted to see a ghost or at least the orb of one, but not a single apparition appeared for me. The tour took us to the former hospital’s morgue, and I was grateful to be there while still alive.

Gardens of Saint Elizabeth’s Church. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Other Strange Entrances
As I said, on occasion, getting lost can be a virtue. So, if instead of parking at the hotel’s front entrance, you parked as we did in the wrong parking lot in the back of the hotel, you’d be facing Saint Elizabeth’s Church. It’s worth a visit mainly because it’s listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not as the only church you enter through the bell tower, and it has some fine gardens to boot. 

Saint Elizabeth’s Church. Photo, Robin Plaskoff Horton.

Big Saviors and a Piece of the Berlin Wall
One of Eureka Springs’s primary tourist attractions, The Great Passion Play, an outdoor multimedia sound and light performance, is home to the enormous Christ of the Ozarks statue.

We didn’t make it there, but we could see it clearly from the Crescent’s outdoor Sky Bar, which also boasts panoramic views of the Arkansas Ozarks from the highest point in the county.

 Christ of the Ozarks. Photo via eurekasprings.org

Overlooking the town from the top of a 1500-foot hill, the white mortar statue stands 67 feet tall–that’s seven stories–with a fingertip-to-fingertip arm spread of 65 feet. Every night, the light from Christ of the Ozarks punctuates the landscape in the distance, casting a glow over Eureka Springs.

If a giant Christ statue isn’t enough of a draw, it shares the property with an original ten-foot by ten-foot section of the Berlin Wall. Painted in German on the wall fragment are words from the 23rd Psalm, “Though I walk through the dark valley, I will not fear.”

 Berlin Wall Fragment. Photo: Dustin Holmes, Flickr.

The valley part of the psalm reminds me of a bit of geo-trivia Ott revealed to us during dinner: although they are called the Ozark Mountains, and even though the area is regarded as the most extensive mountainous region between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains, the Ozarks in the geologic and technical sense are not mountains, but a series of plateaus. Nonetheless, “Ozark Plateaus” just doesn’t sound anywhere as formidable as “Ozark Mountains.”

Twenty-four hours in Eureka Springs is only long enough to test the waters a bit, albeit not the healing ones, but even in less than a full day, I could see why Bill Ott said, “Been to six country fairs and two goat ropings and I ain’t seen anything like this.”

Disclosure: The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism sponsored my trip to Arkansas. I was not paid to write this post; all opinions expressed herein are uniquely mine and not indicative of any sponsor opinions or positions.