Sure, okay, I’m not denying that there’s definitely something there. The thing is, egregores are everywhere, and not just in politics. Every church you’ve ever stepped into is practically overflowing with them. It’s all the prayers, intentions, and energies of the people who’ve walked through that door. The same thing happens with individuals—just because someone has an egregore doesn’t mean they’re invincible.
An egregore is essentially a collective thought form, a creation born of the energy and intention of a group of people. It’s an energy parasite if you will—something that feeds on the emotional and mental output of its creators. It doesn’t have to be anything as grandiose as a world leader. Your favorite sports team, your local church, or even a social media trend can be an egregore. Whenever a group of people focuses their energy, especially their emotions, on an idea or entity, they’re feeding that egregore. It gets stronger the more energy it receives, but here’s the thing, it’s not invincible.
Sure, the orange one has a massive egregore, as do many powerful figures, but it’s not like this force can’t be dismantled. Think about history. The mustache guy (you know the one) probably had his own powerful egregore, fed by a massive group of followers and sycophants. But in the end, that egregore couldn’t save him from ending up in a bunker. The egregore fed on power, and the moment it stopped getting fed, it withered. It didn’t keep him in power—it just made him a temporary figurehead, and look where that got him.
Front page news from May 1945. Hilter killed himself in an underground bunker.
Here’s the deal: it’s not about defeating the egregore; it’s about chipping away at it, slowly. Magic isn’t a video game. You’re not trying to wipe out the enemy in one go—you’re strategically dismantling it, piece by piece, until it loses its influence.
In the case of the orange one, a lot of people believe that all the spells and hexes didn’t work the first time around, but I would argue that they did have an impact. After all, we didn’t lose everything. The moment we stopped casting, though, that’s when we saw things shift. Roe v. Wade got overturnedafter we stopped putting our energy into the fight. But that doesn’t mean we’re defeated. It just means we need to keep chipping away.
Stop focusing on fear, because fear only feeds the egregore. The more we focus on fear and defeat, the more energy we give to the very force we’re trying to dismantle. Instead, we need to focus on action and resistance. The goal isn’t to defeat—it’s to disrupt.
This is a great primer on Egregores by Mark Stavish.
If you’re interested in digging deeper into the mechanics of egregores, I highly recommend checking out Mark Stavish’s book, The Egregore: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny. It’s a fantastic resource that dives deep into the history and function of these entities. Stavish talks about how egregores have influenced everything from religious institutions to political regimes, and how they persist even when the people who created them have long since passed. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how collective energy shapes reality.
Now, let’s talk about how the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the constant prayer movements are directly feeding Trump’s egregore. The NAR is a radical Christian movement that believes modern-day apostles and prophets have direct access to God’s will on Earth. They don’t just pray for spiritual guidance—they believe their prayers and spiritual actions can actively shape reality, especially in politics. And this is where it gets particularly dangerous.
The prayer rooms of the NAR, which have been focused on Trump and his political agenda, create a constant influx of energy toward him. These prayer warriors are essentially pouring their intentions into keeping him in power, believing they’re part of a divine plan. Each prayer, each chant, each spiritual ritual adds energy to his egregore, making it stronger. Trump might be the puppet on the stage, but the NAR is likely the source—they are the ones feeding the energy into his egregore, allowing it to thrive and continue its grip on power.
It’s like the NAR has created a feedback loop, where their prayers serve as a power source for his influence. The more they pray, the more energy they put out there, the more they feed the egregore. It’s a cycle that can be difficult to break. But here’s the thing—we can break it, and we don’t have to feel helpless.
This is where resistance magic comes in. A lot of people get caught up in the idea that we have to defeat this massive egregore in one fell swoop, but magic doesn’t work that way. The goal isn’t to obliterate the egregore in a dramatic act—it’s to chip away at it until it becomes weakened enough to lose its power.
To do that, we need to focus on consistent energy work—and that energy needs to go toward resistance. Every time you perform a spell or ritual designed to block or counteract one of his policies, you’re building an egregore of resistance. Think about the executive orders, the defunding of government programs, the ICE raids, and all the other policies that drain the spirit of this country. Every single one of these needs to be targeted with focused energy.
Rituals, prayers, and focused intentions can build their own egregore that weakens the influence of Trump’s egregore. The more we resist, the more we build this opposing force, and the more we redirect the collective energy away from supporting him and back into the resistance. This is how we dismantle the egregore—by strategically focusing energy on specific areas that need to be blocked or neutralized.
Start small, but be consistent. Consistency is key. Use rituals to fight for the things that matter. If every one of us commits to putting energy into these causes on a regular basis—through ritual, through prayer, through direct action—we start to break the hold of that egregore. It’s like cutting off the power source, piece by piece until the light goes out.
A very comprehensive book on magical resistance by David Salisbury.
So don’t get caught up in fear. Don’t buy into the narrative that this egregore is some all-powerful force that can’t be reckoned with. It’s strong because we’ve been feeding it. And we can stop feeding it—piece by piece, spell by spell, action by action. Every time we direct energy toward the resistance, we chip away at its power. Every time we fight back—whether through magic or action—we weaken the foundation of that egregore. And eventually, that egregore will lose its grip.
A tweet from Brian Sims in 2020. Brian is an Award Winning Civil Rights & Equality Policy Expert, CEO, Gov’t Affairs Director, Advocate & Activist, Lecturer/Presenter, Retired PA House (5x)
The haunted Vermont farmhouse at the center of this story wasn’t just rumored to be haunted. According to witnesses, it became the site of poltergeist activity, unexplained photographs, missing time, shadow figures, and a growing sense that something unseen occupied the property.
Like many investigators, Paul didn’t start out looking for the paranormal.
The paranormal found him.
What began as strange childhood events in a Vermont farmhouse slowly unfolded into a long series of eerie encounters involving unexplained shadows, missing time during sleep, mysterious photographs, EVP recordings, and something investigators often describe as a “zone of fear.”
In this conversation, Paul shares the experiences that led him down the paranormal path and the evidence that still makes him question what might actually exist beyond the normal world.
Paul grew up in Holland, Vermont, and says his first real encounter with the unexplained happened when he was in fourth grade. At the time he and his friend Justin were just kids watching paranormal shows like Ghost Hunters. The idea of ghosts was more entertainment than reality.mThat changed when Justin’s family farmhouse suddenly became the center of strange activity.
Looking back now, Paul says he wishes they had documented what happened. At the time, they were just kids trying to make sense of something that felt impossible. Even today, he admits the story sounds unbelievable when he tells it. But the experiences were real. And they stuck with him.
Some of the most unsettling events happened during sleepovers in Justin’s bedroom. One night, three of them fell asleep on a futon placed against the wall beneath a window. When they woke up the next morning, all three were in completely different positions than where they had fallen asleep.
Paul had started the night on the edge of the bed. When he woke up, he was now at the window. Justin had somehow ended up half on the floor and partially under the futon. Justin later remembered waking up half inside his closet. None of them remembered moving. And none of them remembered anyone getting up during the night.
For that to happen normally, someone would have had to:
• throw off the blankets
• crawl past the other two people
• step over them in the dark
• and somehow reposition everyone without waking anyone up
None of them recalls anything like that happening. To this day, none of them can explain it.
Another night in the farmhouse produced something even stranger. Paul and Justin looked out the bedroom window and saw a shadow figure outside. The shape was unusual and didn’t resemble anything they could replicate later. Even more confusing was the lighting. They couldn’t determine what could have been casting the shadow, or where the light source could have come from.
Justin also remembers an incident involving an orange juice container that appeared to suddenly explode or fly across the room and hit the wall. Paul wasn’t present for that particular moment, but it’s one of the memories Justin still talks about. Before the farmhouse events, Paul had already experienced smaller moments that he now looks back on differently.
When he was about seven years old, several deaths in his family happened close together. His grandfather died in 1994. Within 24 hours in June of 1995, he lost another grandfather and an uncle. That was the first time he truly understood death.
Around that same time, something strange happened one night in his childhood bedroom. He woke up in complete darkness and tried to leave the room. But he could not find the doorknob. He searched the wall and door over and over again, feeling for it, but it simply wasn’t there. Eventually, his mother opened the door.
She told him the doorknob had been only a few inches away from where he had been reaching the entire time. But for reasons he still can’t explain, he couldn’t locate it. Another strange detail from that house involved the attic. Some nights, he thought he could hear voices coming from above, almost like people laughing and talking.
Later, he wondered if it could have been the television in another part of the house. But at the time, the voices sounded like people gathered together, almost like a group playing cards or talking. Years later, in 2007, Paul and his band visited an abandoned church to take photos for fun. That night, they heard what sounded like a woman screaming in the distance, almost like someone being attacked. They dismissed it at the time because animals can sometimes produce similar sounds.
But the location would become important later.
In 2011, Paul returned to the same area with friends while exploring local haunted locations. When they stepped out of the vehicle near the abandoned church, something immediately felt wrong. Paul suddenly felt overwhelming nausea, strong enough that he thought he might throw up. One friend heard what sounded like a growl.Another thought he heard chains dragging against the church wall.
All three of them experienced an intense wave of fear at the same time. They quickly returned to the vehicle and left the area. The moment they drove away, the feeling disappeared. Paul describes it as stepping into what investigators sometimes call a “zone of fear.” Something about that specific location triggered a powerful physical reaction. Interestingly, Paul says he has visited the site about seven times, but that experience only happened once.
The road near the abandoned church has its own folklore. One story involves a male hitchhiker ghost that people claim to see walking along the road. Another nearby legend involves a woman in whitewho appears along Marble Street in West Rutland. According to one witness, an older man named Frank saw a glowing woman in a veil standing by the road. He offered her a ride. She entered the car. Then vanished.
Stories like that appear across the country, but the Vermont case follows the same pattern that many investigators recognize.
The hitchhiker gets in the vehicle. And disappears moments later.
The event that truly pushed Paul into paranormal investigation happened on October 28, 2011.
While exploring a cemetery with friends, Paul felt something strange to his left. He asked his friend to take a photo. When they looked at the image, something unusual appeared beside him. The photograph shows Paul’s shoulder and arm. Next to him appears to be a floating form. Some people suggested it could be cigarette smoke.
Paul says that the explanation doesn’t fit.
He was smoking at the time, but the smoke in the image looks completely different from the shape beside him.
To him, the form looks like a female figure floating vertically, almost as if it were demonstrating it could move in ways a human body cannot.
When the image is zoomed and rotated, Paul believes he can see:
• hair
• a face
• a gown
• and possibly a raised hand
Five months later, Paul and his friends returned to the cemetery to see if anything else would happen. They recorded audio while taking photos. At one point, Paul thought he heard a voice whisper:
“What is that?”
The voice seemed to be reacting to the equipment they were holding. He had a voice recorder. His friend had a camera. As if whatever was present had never seen those objects before. Later, they took more photos. One image appeared to show particles or condensation forming unusual shapes in the air.
Another photograph captured something that looked eerily similar to the raised hand from the original image. To Paul, the shape looks like the same hand appearing again, but more clearly formed. Looking at the photos together, we discussed what the shapes might represent.
To Paul, the original image looks like a floating female spirit raising its hand. To me, the shapes in the photo resemble something else entirely. Almost like a creature on all fours, possibly with wings. That raises a fascinating possibility that appears in many paranormal cases.
Multiple witnesses can observe the same phenomenon. But each person perceives it differently. Some investigators believe these entities might not have a fixed form at all. Instead, they may appear differently depending on the person experiencing them. Which raises the bigger question.
Are these beings physical?
Or are they something more like energy that our minds interpret into shapes we recognize?
Reports of poltergeist activity and unexplained encounters aren’t limited to Vermont. You may also enjoy my investigation into the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange events that continue to puzzle researchers decades later.
The Elevator Game is a Korean urban legend that blew up in popularity thanks to the hauntingly bizarre Elisa Lam case. If you’re unfamiliar, Elisa Lam was a twenty-something Canadian woman whose body was found in a water tank on the roof of the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. How she got to the roof—or why—is a mystery that still baffles everyone. To make things even weirder, she somehow managed to lift the tank’s heavy lid, climb inside, and strip off her clothes before her tragic end.
And that’s just the tip of the creeptastic iceberg. If you’re ready to dive into a rabbit hole of eerie details and chilling theories, check out this video series by Brain Scratch. Fair warning: you might not sleep for a few nights because this case will get way under your skin.
Check out my podcast about the case here:
But the most unsettling piece of evidence? The elevator footage. If you’ve seen it (and if not, what are you even doing—scroll down and watch), you’ll know what I mean. Lam’s erratic behavior—pressing random buttons, stepping in and out of the elevator, and peeking out as if she’s hiding from someone—has fueled countless theories. One of the wildest? That she was playing the Elevator Game at the Cecil Hotel and ended up being lured to her death by some paranormal force.
Personally, I don’t buy the supernatural angle. My take? Someone at the hotel lured her to the roof, killed her, and staged the scene to look like a tragic accident. The Cecil Hotel is no stranger to dark history, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the perpetrator got away scot-free. I think the cops probably had a suspect but didn’t have enough evidence to press charges, so they swept it under the rug and called it a day.
Still, paranormal theories always add an extra layer of intrigue, and the Elevator Game itself is weird enough to make you wonder. The origins of the game are murky at best. The rules first surfaced on a Korean website and seemed to tie into a comic. Thankfully, some intrepid internet sleuths have translated the rules, which you can find hereif you are a purist.
For simplicity, I used Daniel Haye’s Thought Catalog post, which breaks down the steps super clearly. I cross-checked it against the other translations, and it holds up.
HERE ARE THE RULES:
Only one person can play at a time. You can only perform this ritual in a building at least 10 stories high with at least one elevator in it.You cannot proceed otherwise.
Instructions:
Traveling:
Enter the elevator from the first floor by yourself. If anyone else gets on then understand that you cannot continue from the first floor and wait until the elevator can be taken alone.
Press the button for the fourth floor.
Do not get out when the elevator reaches the fourth floor. Stay in the elevator and press the button for the second floor.
Do not get out when you reach the second floor. Stay on the elevator and then press the button for the sixth floor.
Do not get out when you reach the sixth floor, remain in the elevator and press the button for the second floor.
Do not get out when you reach the second floor. Stay on the elevator and press the button for the tenth floor. Some have reported hearing a voice calling to them on the second floor during this middle section of the ritual. Do not reply. Do not answer in any way.
Do not get out once you have reached the tenth floor. Stay on and press the button for the fifth floor.
It has been reported by some that a woman may enter the elevator on floor five. She may appear as a stranger who wishes to engage with you. More importantly, she may appear as someone you know. It is important that you do not acknowledge her in word or glance. If the elevator you are in is reflective then stare at the floor or the buttons only.
Now press the button to head to the first floor. If instead of going towards the first floor, you instead begin to ascend to the tenth, then you have performed the ritual correctly. However, and this is very important, if you instead descend to the first floor, then you have done something wrong. Get off on the first floor immediately. If the woman is on the elevator, then remember not to acknowledge her.
If you reach the tenth floor, you can either stay on the elevator or exit the elevator. Some have reported that upon attempting to leave the elevator, the woman will try one last time to engage with you. She may raise her voice and ask where you are going or “what’s wrong”. She may shriek as you cross the door’s threshold. Keep your wits about you and do not engage or look at her even out of fear.
There is only one way to know whether you have traveled to the Other world for sure. You will know because you will be the only person there.
Traveling Back To Your Home World:
Alternatively, if you do not exit on the 10th floor:
Press the button for the first floor and keep pressing it until the elevator begins to move.
Once you have reached the first floor, exit immediately. Do not exit on any other floors but the first. Do not acknowledge the woman if she is on the elevator. If anyone else gets on then do not speak to them either. Remain silent.
If you do exit the elevator at the tenth floor:
The elevator you used to get there is the only one you can use to return. Remember it.
When you get back on the elevator, press the buttons in the same order you did in steps 2 through 8, which you used to travel. This should take you to the fifth floor.
Once you have reached the fifth floor, press the button for the first floor. Do not be surprised when you instead begin to ascend again to the tenth floor. Do not panic. You can press the button of any floor lower than ten to stop ascending but you have to do it before you again reach the tenth floor. Some have described feeling called not to cancel the elevator’s ascension. You must.
Once you have canceled the ascension and reached the first floor, make sure that everything seems normal to you. If anything seems remotely strange. If you hear anything you should not be hearing. If you smell something you don’t recognize then do not exit the elevator. You have to repeat step two until everything on the first floor seems normal. This is very important.
Once you are satisfied that everything on the first floor is as it should be in your world, then you can exit the elevator.
If you do decide to play, please report back. And if you end up on the “other side,” make sure to let us know what it’s like. Good luck—you’re gonna need it.
The Crescent Hotel Egregore: When Belief Creates a Haunting
Let’s just get this out of the way: The Crescent Hotel is haunted. But if you’re expecting another rehash of the same seven ghost stories told by every ghost tour guide with a lantern and a flair for the dramatic, you can leave now.
This is not that.
This isn’t a Top Ten Haunted Hotels listicle. It’s not about the jump scares, the flickering lights, or the blurry photos someone’s uncle took in 2003 that “totally looks like a Civil War soldier.”
This is an investigation. A reckoning. A psychic autopsy.
This is about what really haunts the Crescent Hotel.
Because while yes, there are spirits here, and yes, there are ghost stories worth telling, the deeper truth is much weirder and much more human. The real haunting isn’t just in the walls. It’s in the repetition. The storytelling. The belief. The constant energetic reinforcement of stories that weren’t ever real to begin with.
This is a story about thoughtforms. About egregores. About ghosts that were never people, and people who never got to become ghosts.
And somewhere in the middle of all that there’s Theodora. There’s the girl in the basement. There’s the jars. And of course, there’s Norman Baker: con artist, monster, and the architect of so many forgotten tragedies.
Built in 1886, the Crescent was supposed to be a palace in the woods. Perched high above Eureka Springs, it was the playground of the elite. The rich, the spoiled, the ones looking to soak in a little Ozark magic and a lot of booze.
It didn’t take long for things to start going sideways. The hotel floundered, changed hands, became a women’s college, shut down, reopened, shut down again. Then in 1937, Norman Baker slithered into town with a paint brush , some purple pain, and a vial of fake cancer cure and turned the Crescent into something darker. Something unholy.
We’ll get to him. Trust me. But first, let’s talk about what keeps people coming back: the ghosts.
Photo renderings of the ghosts of the Crescet Hotel
If you’ve been on the ghost tour, you know the list:
Michael, the horny Irish stonemason who died in Room 218
Breckie, the blonde little boy bouncing his ball
Theodora, the tidy ghost in 419 who packs your bags if she doesn’t like your vibe
The Lady in White, pushing a gurney through the halls
The young woman who jumped to her death over a scandalous affair
They’ve got postcards. Playing cards. Sketches. Gift shop real estate. But here’s the thing: most of them never existed. They’re not spirits. They’re thoughtforms.
A thoughtform is a psychic construct. A manifestation of belief, repetition, and emotional energy. Think of it like a tulpa with better PR. When enough people believe in something, think about it, fear it, or obsess over it, it becomes real. Not flesh-and-blood real, but energy real. Tangible enough to interact. Visible enough to appear. Loud enough to knock on your door at 3 a.m.
Egregores are the collective version. Built by groups. Fed over time. Your church has one. So does your workplace. So does every haunted location that’s ever had a tour guide tell the same story night after night.
At some point, these thoughtforms become self-sustaining. You don’t need belief. They’ve got momentum. They adapt. They respond. They curate their own mythology. And nowhere is this more obvious than the Crescent Hotel.
Members of othe Philip Experiment trying to communicate with Philip.
Case Study: The Philip Experiment
In 1972, a group of Canadian parapsychologists set out to prove this exact thing. They invented a ghost. Gave him a name (Philip Aylesford). A detailed, tragic backstory. A love triangle. A suicide. All fiction.
They meditated. They held seances. They believed. And eventually, Philip responded.
Through knocks. Through table tipping. Through electrical disturbances. The group created something that acted like a ghost but was entirely made up. They didn’t summon Philip. They built him.
And if you think that’s an isolated incident, let me introduce you to Pearl.
In 2007, I ran my own thoughtform experiment at the Glen Tavern Inn in Santa Paula, California. I gathered a team. We invented a ghost named Pearl. Gave her a backstory. Picked her appearance. Anchored her to a specific room.
We even performed a ritual to birth her into the psychic ecosystem of the building. Circle. Invocation. Candle. The whole shebang.
Months later, a random couple who had never heard of Pearl, had no ties to the paranormal community snapped a photo in the inn.
Guess who showed up in the mirror? Green dress. Side profile. Brown hair. Our girl.
Courtesty of www.thepearlexperiment.com
Pearl, our fabricated ghost, had become a tangible part of the inn’s haunting. Other investigators began reporting interactions with her. She gave EVPs. She manipulated lights. She followed the script we wrote for her.
She was never alive. But she was real. Just like the ghosts at the Crescent.
Norman Baker: The Birth of a Monster
Norman Baker wasn’t just a charlatan. He was a stage magician with a god complex, a radio propagandist with a purple fetish, and a pathological liar who turned cancer into currency. The only real magic trick he ever pulled off was convincing hundreds of dying people that watermelon seeds and peppermint oil could cure terminal illness
Most people know the Crescent Hotel because of the ghost tours. But Baker is the rot at the foundation. He’s the reason the basement has a morgue. He’s the reason there are jars. And he’s the reason some of the spirits at the Crescent feel less like individuals and more like trauma loops echoing in the wallpaper.
He didn’t haunt the place by dying there. He haunted it by living there.
A portrait of Norman Baker taken on the fourth floor of the Crescent Hotel.
Norman Baker was born in 1882 in Muscatine, Iowa. A machinist by trade, he dabbled in vaudeville mentalism before inventing the Air Calliaphone , a calliope that used air instead of steam. He made a ton of money selling it, got bored, and pivoted into radio. That’s where the real damage started.
In 1925, he launched KTNT: Know The Naked Truth. It was part medical quackery, part anti-Semitic screed, part anti-AMA crusade, and all propaganda. Baker railed against doctors, vaccines, and anything resembling science while hawking his own miracle cure for cancer, a secret recipe he claimed was handed down from a mysterious healer. Spoiler: it was garbage.
The American Medical Association called him out. He doubled down. He ran ads. Printed magazines. Held rallies. He opened the Baker Institute in Iowa, then took his bullshit act to Mexico when he lost his license. In 1937, he set his sights on Eureka Springs.
The Crescent was floundering. Baker saw an opportunity. He painted it lavender, installed secret passageways, added a morgue, and turned it into the “Baker Cancer Clinic.” For two years, he treated patients with his fake cure, lied to their families, and allegedly dumped bodies under cover of night. He mailed letters from the dead. He sent bills to grieving families. He made over half a million dollars.
And he was never tried for murder. Just mail fraud.
The mugshot of Norman Baker on the fourth floor of the Crescent Hotel.
The Egregore Effect
Here’s the thing. Baker didn’t just ruin lives he imprinted the building with his delusion. He created an egregore. A psychic parasite. A distortion field that still lingers in the lower floors.
You can feel it.
Go into the basement. You’ll feel the density. The manipulation. The nausea. It’s not just ghosts it’s energetic rot. The residue of a man who turned healing into a performance and death into a profit margin.
And now his desk sits on display in the hotel lounge like he was some eccentric uncle instead of a human vulture. Ghost tours tell his story with a wink and a flourish. People laugh at how bizarre he was. How theatrical.
But his victims don’t get names. They don’t get backstories. Most of them didn’t even get proper burials.
When landscapers at the Crescent unearthed a stash of over 100 jars in 2019, the contents weren’t just unsettling they were grotesque. Some were filled with Norman Baker’s infamous cancer “cure,” a homebrewed hellbrew of watermelon seeds, clover, corn silk, and peppermint. Others allegedly contained human tissue. A few even still had visible samples.
The jars in the basement at the Crescent Hotel.
Years passed with no university update, so paranormal researcher Larry Flaxman stepped in. In his video, he describes what happened next:
“Because of the historical significance, the University of Arkansas was called in to conduct a full archeological survey… Three years later, the university unfortunately still had not provided any information about the samples.”
So Flaxman did what any of us would’ve done. He took a few jars and brought them to a surgical pathologist: Dr. Charles M. Quick.
Dr. Quick’s analysis stunned everyone.
“It did look biologic, which was, both pleasantly surprising and somewhat shocking at the same time… Not sure what was in the bottle but whatever it was, the way that it was preserved actually kept it pretty well.”
Under the microscope, the mystery specimen revealed connective tissue, stroma, even muscle something that would have to be surgically removed.
“We found evidence of gauze within the wound… That’s what was happening even when this theoretical patient was being treated.”
And then came the fecal matter.
“If you can imagine someone very sick with cancer being treated, they’d be bedridden… This is just basic care. Basic care that, if you don’t provide, patients could become septic and die.”
He concluded it was likely a real, diseased human specimen. Removed. Preserved. Displayed. Because Norman Baker was that kind of showman.
Luther J. Baggett: The Letter That Should Have Been the Headline
Everyone wants to talk about Norman Baker’s purple walls and his goddamn desk. But what about the people who actually lived and died inside the Cancer Cure Hospital? The ones who bought the dream and never made it out?
There’s one name we know. Just one.
He was a cancer patient at the Crescent during Baker’s fraudulent reign in 1938. And unlike the dozens possibly hundreds of others who were erased, Luther left us something: a letter. A heartbreaking, mundane, deeply human letter mailed to his family in Arizona from inside that lavender-painted house of false hope.
Friday, 12/9/1938 My Dear Little Bunch, The weather has blowed off nice & has been a pretty day. Me & another old man walked to town this afternoon but I haven’t had any mail from home yet. This is an awful out of way place & mail is slow getting in & out but I will surely get something tomorrow… I sure would like to kiss my wife, Big Girl, Little Girl, & My Sonny Boy. Good night.
Saturday morning, 10th. Castor oil at 6, tonic at 7, shaved, went to breakfast, took needle treatment, back to room on bed with hot pack, just got back from a little walk… They say that all the medicines & food used here are made from vegetables, herbs, roots & bark… They didn’t find much the matter with me, my blood was 30 points low, and my main trouble… It seems that most of them has to stay as much as five weeks… Since the mails seem so slow, you had better let me know soon how you think we are going to get along financially…
This sure has been a long week for me & since I haven’t had a letter & wondering if some of you are bad sick, am going to try to write to Mamie today…
Well, the last mail has come for this week & I didn’t get a letter don’t know what to think & it seems there is nothing I can do about it. Love to all, LJB (Luther J Baggett)
Courtesy of the Crescent Hotel website.
According to Ancestry.com, Luther died on February 24, 1939. Just a couple months after writing that letter. There’s no record of what happened to his body. No detailed obituary. Just a death date, and a note in the Crescent Hotel’s archive that a family member donated his letter years later.
It’s one of the only surviving documents from a patient of the Baker Cancer Clinic.
The Silence Between the Stories
Luther’s letter is the only whisper we have from inside the Baker Cancer Clinic that sounds like a real person. Not a ghost. Not a story. Not a tour stop. Just a man sick, scared, and writing home.
And then… nothing.
No more letters. No obituary with details. No documentation of how he died or where his body ended up. His life ends mid-sentence, sealed inside a folded piece of paper with no return address. He disappears into the same silence that swallowed every other patient who came to the Crescent looking for hope and found something else entirely.
This is the part of the haunting that nobody talks about. Not the EMF hits. Not the shadow figures. The absence.
The gaps in the record. The way people were stripped of identity and folded into the wallpaper of the building. They didn’t get to become ghosts because nobody remembered them long enough to give them names. They didn’t get to be mourned. They just… became part of the floorboards.
And yet, some of them still linger. Not as ghost tour celebrities. Not as playing card characters. As fragments. As echoes. As energy that never got closure and never asked your permission to stay.
That’s where we go next.
To the girl in the basement.
To Theodora on the fourth floor.
To the ones who stayed behind not to scare you, but because no one else ever told their story.
The enterance to the basement at the Crescent Hotel.
The Girl in the Basement
She came through in the hallway outside the morgue. Late at night. Quiet. Not in that over-the-top, dramatic way ghosts are supposed to appear. There were no slamming doors. No cold spots. Just a sudden shift in the air dense and deliberate, like something exhaled from inside the walls.
She made herself known during a spirit communication session. We weren’t looking for her. We didn’t even know she existed. But she stepped forward anyway.
Not a full name. Not a tragic backstory. Just one statement, soft but clear:
“I’m in one of the jars.”
It wasn’t a metaphor.
She wasn’t talking about being emotionally scarred or spiritually tethered to the building. She meant it literally. A part of her was still here preserved, forgotten, sealed in glass somewhere beneath our feet.
She hadn’t died at the Crescent.
That was the part that threw me. She was alive when it was taken. Whatever it was. A tissue sample? A piece of flesh? Something removed and discarded without ceremony. It didn’t kill her. But it separated her.
And that separation was enough to keep her here.
Her presence wasn’t angry. It wasn’t even mournful. It was disoriented. Like someone lost in a place they didn’t recognize anymore but couldn’t leave because a piece of them was still embedded in the structure.
She didn’t ask for help.
She didn’t want to be rescued.
She just wanted to be acknowledged. To be named. To be felt.
There was something unbearably intimate about her energy. It wasn’t the loud kind of haunting. It was small. Still. Pressed into the floor like a breath you can’t quite release.
We didn’t get anything else. No age. No year. Just that one line. I’m in one of the jars.
And then she was gone.
But I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. Because if she’s here, like that, just a piece of her, just enough to remain.
She wasn’t a ghost.
She was a trace.
A girl left hovering just outside the narrative, trying to make herself whole with what little was left behind.
Room 419. Theodora’s Room. Crescent Hotel.
Theodora
Theodora isn’t a single ghost. She’s several ghosts wearing the same name.
Over time, the Crescent Hotel’s stories bled together, facts layered on folklore, and folklore hardened into ritual. Theodora was born out of that confusion, pieced together from the psychic residue of several different women whose histories overlapped and blurred until they fused into one haunting.
That’s what makes her powerful. And that’s what makes her unreal.
She’s a thoughtform, an egregore stitched together by repetition and belief. A story made sentient through the sheer act of being told again and again.
If you listen to the tour guides, Theodora is a tidy spirit who resides in Room 419. She folds clothes. She organizes luggage. She tells guests she’s “checking out in the morning.” They describe her as a kind, orderly presence, a polite houseguest from another era.
But she’s not in any records. There’s no Theodora in Baker’s patient lists. No nurse by that name. No obituary. No verifiable death.
Theodora was assembled from fragments, bits of memory, rumor, and psychic impression, until she became a single, functioning identity.
The First Layer: The Nurse. A woman said to have worked during the Baker Hospital years. Some say she was kind, others say she couldn’t take it anymore. No record of her exists, but people swear they feel her on the fourth floo.
The Second Layer: The Patient. There’s the story of a woman who told everyone she was “leaving tomorrow.” She never did. She died in her bed waiting for someone to come get her. The phrase stuck. Every guide repeats it. “I’m checking out in the morning.” That line is hers, but now it belongs to Theodora.
The Third Layer: The Housekeeper. A spectral maid rumored to straighten belongings, fold clothes, and pack suitcases. A residual haunting made of habit and repetition folded into Theodora’s identity because it fits the script.
The Fourth Layer: The Lost Patient. One of Baker’s victims,possibly nameless, possibly buried under false records, who lingers on the fourth floor. Her scent, her sorrow, her energy all absorbed into the pattern until she, too, became part of Theodora.
And that’s how it happened. Four lives. Four energies. One name.
Each new telling reanimates the myth. Each ghost tour, each EVP session, each whispered story in the dark gives the egregore more mass. Theodora behaves exactly like a sentient spirit because she’s been fed like one. The details shift to suit the teller, but the structure stays the same: the polite woman, the organized ghost, the caretaker of the dead.
She’s become the Crescent’s most reliable haunting precisely because she’s not one person.
Theodora fills a gap. The Crescent’s history is brutal, chaotic, and grief-soaked. Baker’s patients were stripped of their dignity, their records, and their names. Theodora is what happens when the human mind tries to restore order to that chaos.
She’s the tidy ghost in a house built on disorder. The archetype of calm. The psychic housekeeper standing between the living and the unbearable.
And like any good thoughtform, she reflects what people need her to be.
To the tourists, she’s comforting. To the investigators, she’s proof. To the dead, she’s structure. To the building, she’s maintenance.
Theodora isn’t trapped. She’s assigned.
If you strip the myth back to its bones, Theodora is the product of collective authorship, a living haunting made from recycled grief. The ghost tour repeats her name. Guests feel something. Recordings catch her voice. The energy accumulates. The idea becomes real.
She’s a story that learned how to talk back.
And she’s not going anywhere, because she doesn’t have to. She was never meant to cross over. She’s the guardian of everything that couldn’t.
The Crescent has other ghosts, sure. But Theodora is the one the building made for itself, a psychic custodian, built from memory, myth, and repetition.
A haunting born of housekeeping.
And after all these years, she’s still doing her job.
The Crescent Hotel at Night.
The Haunting We Built
By the time I finished tracing the stories through fragments of letters, faded pathology records, unreliable tour guide scripts, and the voices of the spirits themselves, I wasn’t thinking about classic ghost stories anymore. I wasn’t trying to validate EVPs or debunk cold spots.
I was thinking about all the peoplewho were turned into placeholders. All the women without names. All the grief repackaged for entertainment. All the trauma that got woven into a story we could sell.
The girl in the basement who never left because a piece of her was sealed in a jar. The man who wrote one letter home and then disappeared into the records. The housekeeper who just wanted things neat. The patient who waited for her brother. The nurse who saw too much.
And Theodora, who isn’t any one of them but somehow became all of them.
The Crescent Hotel is full of ghosts, yes. But more than that, it’s full of conflation.
Real people turned into characters. Voices turned into marketing material. Hauntings flattened into digestible tour content.
The more I sat with it, the more it felt like the building itself had agency. Like it takes stray energy, tragedy, memory, leftover grief, and stitches it into something usable. It makes ghosts the same way it made Baker’s cancer cure: out of desperation and performance.
And maybe that’s why it still feels so charged. So active. So haunted.
Not because spirits are stuck. But because the stories are. Because belief doesn’t just honor the dead, it animates them. Over and over and over again.
Theodora exists because we need her to. Because someone has to fold the clothes and whisper in the night. Because someone has to make the fourth floor feel less empty. Because someone has to give shape to all the suffering that’s still floating in the walls.
That’s the danger of a place like this. Not that it’s haunted, but that it’s alive. Not sentient, but responsive. Not malevolent, but hungry.
It absorbs. It adapts. It reassigns.
It takes the raw psychic fallout of trauma and memory and grief and turns it into something you can put on a brochure. And it’ll keep doing that as long as people keep coming.
And we do. Over and over.
Because we want answers. Because we want to feel something. Because we want ghosts to mean something.
But if you spend enough time in a place like the Crescent, you realize: The stories that comfort us are rarely true. And the ones that are true? They don’t comfort us at all.
Author’s Note: This article is a rewritten and expanded version of the Crescent Hotel chapter from my book Ghost Towns and Forgotten Places: Arkansas. It includes new psychic impressions, deeper research, and material that didn’t make it into the final print edition.
I’ve been to enough paranormal conferences to know the drill. Big names. Big claims. Hallway gossip. Someone selling starseed DNA activations next to a table of alien plushies.
That’s part of the charm. But the real magic at these events usually isn’t on stage. It’s in the weird side conversations. The people doing fascinating work under the radar.
The paranormal field has a propaganda problem. Not necessarily in the cartoon-villain sense. More in the “good luck figuring out what’s signal versus noise” sense. If you’ve spent any time in UFO circles, you already know this.
Narratives shift. Stories evolve.
People who once said one thing suddenly say something completely different ten years later. Government agencies muddy the waters. The media dramatizes everything. Researchers develop pet theories and then start seeing those theories everywhere. So when I go to conferences, I’m often less interested in the celebrity speakers and more interested in the people quietly doing strange, thoughtful work without a PR machine attached.
That’s where things tend to get interesting.
If you’ve never been to Eureka Springs, it’s hard to explain. Imagine Sedona’s weirder cousin who drinks moon water, talks to trees, and definitely knows where the portal is. Water runs under the town. Quartz is everywhere. The terrain feels layered. Dense. Charged. It’s one of those places that doesn’t feel passive. It feels interactive.
Remote viewing fascinates me because it operates very differently from how I naturally work.
Tarot…. Easy.
Channeling….Fine.
Psychic impressions…. Sure.
Remote viewing….
That’s where my brain starts flipping tables because remote viewing requires precision. Discipline. Neutral observation. No interpretation. No symbolic riffing. Which sounds great in theory. Until your brain is basically a raccoon with a crystal addiction.
During her talk, PrinCess discussed what she described as soul traps. I nearly levitated out of my chair. Because thirteen years earlier, I had an experience I’ve never fully explained. I was in Arizona. Something happened in that weird liminal state between sleep and not-sleep. A metallic spinning sound. The sensation of time collapsing.
Then my floor opened. Below me was what looked like a mass of screaming, energetic beings reaching upward. Not metaphorically. Viscerally. Terrifyingly. I never forgot it. And suddenly this woman was describing something eerily similar. At the end of the session, we did a target exercise. I focused. Meditated.Did the thing. And what did I see?
Aliens.
A cluster of weird alien figures gathered around a black chair like they were auditioning for the Mos Eisley cantina band.
The actual target: The pyramids.
So obviously, I assumed I had completely blown it.
Spoiler: apparently not.
Later, after a series of delays, missed timing, and random meandering through the vendor area, I finally sat down to talk with PrinCess. And right there in front of her? Alien head stickers. Clustered around her chair.Almost exactly like what I had seen.
Cue record scratch.
Instead of remote viewing the assigned target, I may have physically picked up a future interaction. Which is deeply on-brand for me. She even agreed that what happened was bizarre. Because technically, I did focus on her. Just maybe too literally. A month later, at another paranormal event in the exact same venue, I met someone involved in CE5 and alien contact work.
Behind him? Artwork showing alien beings gathered around a chair.
Again.
Same energy. Same visual theme.
Then a guided meditation brought through imagery involving Orion. Later, his presentation centered on Orion. And then I discovered the Orion-pyramid connection. Which meant my “wrong” remote viewing session may have looped back into the original target after all. If that sounds like a conspiracy corkboard with red string, congratulations, you’ve understood the assignment.
That’s the question.
Was it remote viewing?
Precognition?
Pattern recognition?
Synchronicity?
Psychic leakage?
A very elaborate subconscious narrative structure? I’m not here to hand you a neat answer in a gift bag. I’m here because weird things happened, they formed a coherent pattern, and that pattern became impossible to ignore.
That’s what this episode explores. The conference itself. The politics of paranormal information. Remote viewing. Alien contact theory.The slipperiness of perception. And the strange way certain experiences seem to build on each other until you’re forced to ask whether reality is more interactive than we’ve been taught.
Listen to the full episode. Then tell me if you think I missed the target. Or if the target was never what I thought it was.
If you’re interested in the strange connections that emerged during the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference, you may also enjoy my article on the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter, where folklore, UFOs, and high strangeness collide in one of America’s most enduring mysteries.
When you grow up in chaos, your idea of love gets shaped by who neglects you the least and who mirrors your desperation the best. You don’t look for safety. You look for someone who makes the pain feel familiar.
That ache in your chest? That burning in your gut? You think it means you’re home. You think it’s fate. You think it’s your Twin Flame.
It’s not.
It’s trauma, repackaged in cosmic gift wrap, stamped with spiritual jargon, and delivered straight to your nervous system like a karmic Amazon package you never meant to order.
In the thick of it, you swear the connection is destiny. You tell yourself the way they feel like home must be divine. You think the visions, the synchronicities, the overwhelming intensity has to mean something bigger. You think the fact that you can’t stop thinking about them is proof. The fact that you always come back to each other is proof. That the pain is part of the plan, that suffering is sacred.
You Google the stages. You find them all.
Recognition.
Awakening.
Separation.
Runner.
Chaser.
You start seeing angel numbers on receipts and hearing songs on the radio that make you cry in your car. You tell your friends it’s not about being with them, it’s about the journey. You write journal entries like they’re scripture, and you call it fate.
But deep down, you’re waiting. Always waiting. For a text. For a change. For them to finally get it. For the next portal. For the reunion. For your reward.
You start excusing behavior that should’ve ended the story at chapter two. You stay because you saw it in a dream. You stay because you pulled The Lovers. You stay because you cast a spell, and you’re waiting for it to work. You stay because he called you his mirror once while high on your energy, and that was the closest thing to intimacy he could give you. You stay because you want it to mean something.
But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud.
Intensity is not intimacy.
Chemistry is not compatibility.
Spiritual signs are not receipts.
Love is a verb. It’s consistent. It shows up. It texts back. It doesn’t breadcrumb you between breakups and blame the moon. It doesn’t dip in and out of your life like you’re a spiritual rest stop. It doesn’t require you to break into a thousand pieces just to prove you’re whole.
Twin flames as a concept didn’t always mean this. The original idea had more to do with soul integration than codependent longing. But somewhere along the way, it became a way to spiritualize dysfunction.
It became a way to keep chasing people who don’t want to be caught. It became a way to avoid grief. Because if he’s your twin flame, then it’s not rejection. It’s the separation phase. If he ghosted you, it’s because he’s your runner. If you’re sobbing alone for the fifth time this month, it’s because you’re the awakened one, and he just hasn’t done the work yet.
But he’s not doing the work.
And you’re not awakening.
You’re looping.
I believed it too. I thought that anytime I had a vision, anytime I felt something psychic, anytime the energy was intense, it had to be something important. I used to say things like, “I want to climb inside your body and dissolve into our frequencies, becoming one.”
I thought I was being poetic. I was just dissociating through intimacy. It took me a long time to figure out I wasn’t in love with him. I was in love with the version of him I made up. The myth I built. The narrative I nourished.
I thought if I felt deeply, it had to be real. If I hurt, it had to be true. If it kept repeating, it had to be fated.
But cycles aren’t sacred. They’re just cycles.
And if the connection only exists when you do all the work, if he only shows up when his life is burning down, if he calls you cosmic but never calls you back, that’s not a twin flame. That’s a person who benefits from your belief in magic more than they benefit from your actual presence.
You are not here to be love’s unpaid intern, hoping to get promoted to Girlfriend 1.0 in the next lifetime. You are not here to be someone’s psychic rehab. You are not here to turn red flags into prayer flags.
You are here to heal.
You are here to name what was never love.
You are here to stop calling the wound a soulmate.
I’ve burned journals over this. Literal flame. Literal tears. I’ve sat in liminal spaces asking the universe for signs, begging it to prove I wasn’t wrong. That he would come back. That I didn’t waste years of my life believing in something that was never real. But the only sign I ever needed was my own body. My own heart, screaming at me that I was doing too much, asking too little, and calling it divine.
This post isn’t just about one man. It’s about every avoidant, emotionally constipated, spirit-anointed placeholder I ever mistook for the one. It’s about every time I thought longing was love. Every time I ignored my gut in favor of a tarot spread. Every time, I convinced myself that someone was sent by the universe when, really they were just available enough to trigger my inner child and distant enough to keep the fantasy alive.
He’s not your twin flame.
He’s probably just trauma.
And even if he was your twin flame, so what? You still deserve peace. You still deserve joy. You still deserve love that doesn’t make you beg.
Burn the script. Burn the journal. Burn the spell.
Build an altar for your healing, not your fantasy.
Let it go.
Let you go.
Because that’s where the real magic is.
Still waiting for a text that never comes? Still pulling The Lovers and calling it “a sign” when he’s really just allergic to accountability?
Let’s get brutally clear: If he only shows up during Mercury retrograde, if your intuition is screaming but you keep lighting candles “just in case,” if you’re stuck in a loop of waiting, hurting, and calling it spiritual growth…
He’s not your Twin Flame. He’s just emotionally unavailable.
✨ Grab my “Is He Coming Back?” 3-Card Tarot Spreadfor brutal clarity, closure (or chaos), and a reality check your guides have been trying to deliver. This spread cuts through the karmic noise and tells you exactly where he stands—energetically, emotionally, and spiritually.
If you’re navigating relationships, spiritual awakening, or confusing connection patterns, explore more articles on my Blog or book a tarot reading for personal insight.
We attended a CE5 event in Berryville, Arkansas to see firsthand what happens when a group gathers with the intention of making contact. Part meditation circle, part UFO watch, and part social experiment, the evening produced some interesting experiences and raised a few questions about the nature of contact itself.
If you’ve ever been to a CE5 event, you know the vibe. It’s not “we’re hunting aliens.” It’s more “we’re raising the room’s frequency, asking the sky politely, and hoping something answers.”
The facilitator’s approach was gentle. Very love-and-connection focused. That worked for the newbies and for the people who need a safe container to open up. Sarah actually liked that part. It felt sweet, grounded, and human.
I’m not built for the soft opening credits. I’m already plugged into the ether before my shoes are off. I don’t need the warmup. And I definitely don’t want anything touching me. Consent-only paranormal. Always.
We started inside with a guided meditation in a circle. Not everybody “sees” visuals during meditation, so there was a lot of discussion about how people receive things differently. Some people feel. Some people see. Some people just get knocked sideways by an energy shift and spend the rest of the time wondering if their nervous system is glitching.
There was an energy shift.
A few people felt something move through the room, like a presence checking everyone in the circle. Sarah felt a distinct touch and immediately did the correct thing, which is basically “get off me” in shoulder-shake form.
There was also a heavy feeling near the door. That quiet “something is standing there” sensation. The kind that doesn’t need a spotlight to be obvious.
Then we went outside.
Skywatching, weird lights, and the red thing
Outside, we did more meditation and skywatching. There were planes, and you could tell they were planes because they sounded like planes and behaved like planes. Then there were other things. There were intermittent flashes. Brief. Sharp. Gone before you can make your brain cooperate.
And there was the red hovering thing.
A hovering red light that had multiple people tracking it. At one point, a smaller group of us started walking toward it across an open field, which is objectively how you end up as a Dateline special. It hovered. It held. Then it drifted off and disappeared.
There were also reports of military jets overhead, which stood out because that isn’t normal for that area at that time of night. Planes had sound. The hovering thing didn’t.
You could feel the difference. And when you’ve lived near bases, and you know what jets look and sound like at night, you don’t confuse that with a silent hovering light. The contact event itself stayed pretty gentle.
What got intense was everything it stirred up around it.
The conversation slid from aliens into memory gaps, sleep paralysis, astral projection, and that familiar question that always shows up at the worst possible time: what the hell is consciousness anyway?
We talked about missing time from a teenage night near Rocketdyne, a big light in the sky, and the weird blank space after it. About how multiple people remember the light but not the in-between. About how curiosity is sometimes the exact thing that gets you into trouble.
We ended up circling an old thread I forgot existed.
Sarah remembered a “greaser” type figure from my teen years. A presence, an invisible friend, a guide, a whatever-the-hell-it-was. I didn’t remember him at all until she described him, and my brain went cold and clicked.
Then I remembered dreams. Pegged black pants, leather jacket, the Outsiders vibe. A sense of familiarity so strong it feels like emotional fraud. And the creepiest detail: eyes flashing green, then red.
If that sounds like a spirit guide, a thoughtform, an old astral ally, a trauma-born protector, or a straight-up glitch in the simulation… welcome to the episode. One of the things we kept circling back to is how different people react to the same invisible world.
I lean in. Always have.
As a kid, I heard the pacing in the kitchen, stared into the dark like “who are you and what do you want?” and treated it like research.
Sarah got hit with the physical realism. The bearded man. The dead cat she could feel purring until she remembered it was dead. The Ouija board chaos in a house where the vibe already felt wrong. That kind of thing doesn’t make you curious. It makes you build a brick wall and set it on fire.
So when we go to something like a contact event, we’re not starting from the same nervous system.
That matters.
It doesn’t make one of us “more open” or “more blocked.” It means our bodies learned different safety rules. The takeaway: The Berryville contact night was a good experience. Gentle. Weird in the right ways. Interesting without turning into chaos.
But the real story isn’t “did we see aliens?”
It’s this:
When you intentionally open the door, even a crack, you don’t always get what you asked for. Sometimes you get the sky. Sometimes you get your own timeline. Sometimes you get the ghost of a boy you forgot you ever knew, tapping the glass from the inside like, hey… remember me?
If you’re interested in contact experiences and UFO phenomena, you may also enjoy my article on the Hopkinsville Goblins encounter and the strange patterns that continue to appear throughout UFO research.
