Purportedly Haunted Places in Arkansas! | McLarty Daniel Ford

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s natural that a lot of minds are on the mysterious, the spooky and Things That Go Bump in the Night. Arkansas has a long, rich tradition of storytelling, and a big part of those campfire tales is telling stories of roaming spirits and restless ghosts. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, there are several places in Arkansas where tradition and eyewitnesses claim the dead still roam. It’s easy to take those claims with a grain of salt… until you see something yourself. Seen below are a few places in Arkansas which have staked a claim as some of the most haunted locations in the state. In need a car, truck, van or SUV to get you and your fellow ghost hunters there in style and safety? Stop in today at McLarty Daniel Ford, where our great selection and commitment to customer service will make you a customer for life!

THE ALLEN HOUSE
Monticello
Situated in the far Southeast corner of the state, Monticello’s magnificent Allen House was completed in 1906 by prosperous local businessman Joe Lee Allen. One of the state’s most beautiful examples of Queen Anne style architecture, the massive North Main Street mansion house would be host to more than its share of tragedy over the years, including the deaths of several of Allen’s children. This includes daughter LaDell Allen, who poisoned herself with mercury cyanide in the house in 1948 and is rumored to haunt the house. Tenants, including the current owners, have seen and heard strange and unexplainable things there including the vision of a woman in an upstairs window, dark shadows that flit from room to room, and — most disturbingly — dopplegangers that seem to take the form of flesh-and-blood occupants of the house before disappearing. For more information, visit their website at: allenhousemonticello.com

ST. FRANCIS COUNTY MUSEUM
Forrest City
Though it seems fairly unimaginable to us today, there was a time when the best medical help available to most Arkansans came in the form of small-town doctors working with primitive techniques and medicines, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital. The St. Francis County Museum, located in the Rush-Gates House at 603 Front Street in Forrest City, used to be the office and clinic of one of these pioneering physicians: Doctor J.O. Rush, who treated both the local sick and injured, as well as workers along the nearby railroad. Soon after the museum opened in 1997, visitors and workers there started reporting strange and unexplained events in the house, including glimpses of shadowy figures, books that toppled from shelves as if pulled down by unseen hands, and strange noises. Though the building’s long association with suffering and mortality may have had something to do with the paranormal goings-on there, some suggest another culprit may be an unhappy spook or specter associated with the museum’s extensive collection of Native American artifacts, where were gathered from the surrounding countryside by Dr. Rush himself and later donated to the museum.

KING OPERA HOUSE
427 Main Street, Van Buren
Though Van Buren today is a town full of restaurants, parks and quaint shops, there was a time when Van Buren was on the frontier — the last waystation between the relative safety and security of Arkansas and the wild and lawless territories beyond. As such, Van Buren saw plentiful violence and bloodshed in the old days, and its said some of that troubled energy stuck around at Van Buren’s King Opera House. Completed in 1880, the restored Van Buren Opera House once served as one of the town’s prime entertainment venues in the days before movies and television, hosting everything from Shakespeare to vaudeville for the masses. Like a lot of old theaters, King Opera House has developed a reputation for being haunted over the years, with eyewitnesses reporting lights flipped on and off by unseen hands, spectral figures sitting in the audience during rehearsals, and the ghostly apparition of a young man dressed in a Victorian top hat and black silk cape. Though it’s hard to separate fact from folklore these days, some say the young man is the ghost of a travelling vaudevillian who fell in love with the daughter of a local doctor while performing at King Opera House. When he found out his daughter planned to elope with the performer, it’s said the doctor killed the actor in a fit of rage, with his spirit returning to haunt the theater where he and the girl first met.

THE CROSSETT LIGHT
Near Crossett in Ashley County
One of the most enduring legends of the American South are so-called “spooklights” — round, glowing lights that hover in certain places on moonless nights, drawing in the curious while remaining stubbornly out of reach and unexplained. In Arkansas, one of these ghostly glows is the Crossett Light, a hovering ball of light that haunts former railroad tracks just outside Crossett in Southeast Arkansas. Less famous than the Gurdon Light in Clark County, the Crossett Light is no less spectacular and mysterious, with attempts to explain it working out no better than they have in Gurdon. Seemingly the size of a basketball, the Crossett Light hovers two to three feet off the ground along a raised grade where railroad tracks once ran, with the association with trains leading to the familiar explanation that it is the swinging lantern of a ghostly railroad worker who was killed in an accident and is now looking for his head. The Crossett Light has been seen by tens of thousands of witnesses since it was first noticed in the early 1900s, with the color ranging from yellow to blue-green. If a viewer tries to approach the light, it is said that it will disappear, only to reappear a little further away. Explanations over the years have ranged from ignited swamp gas to a trick of the eye caused by the uneven terrain and car headlights in the distance — though the car theory wouldn’t account for how the light was seen before automobiles became common in the area.

Arkansas in the fall is full of strange and mysterious things to see, do and experience, and your friends in the car business at McLarty Daniel Ford can help you get out there and find adventure in a great new or used car, truck, van or SUV! Stop in today and check out our big selection in person, or shop us online for the best deals. We’ll keep the (spook)light on for you! Happy Halloween!

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