Fooling the experts

Today we consider what happens when you blend Appeal to Authority with the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Appeal to Authority, you probably know, is when someone uses credentials, titles, or educational background -- and no other evidence -- to support a claim.  Put simply, it is the idea that if Stephen Hawking said it, it must be true, regardless of whether the claim has anything to do with Hawking's particular area of expertise.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect, on the other hand, is the idea that people tend to wildly overestimate their abilities, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, which is why we all think we're above average drivers.

Well, David Dunning (of the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger Effect) has teamed up with Cornell University researchers Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig, and come up with the love child of Dunning-Kruger and Appeal to Authority.  And what this new phenomenon -- dubbed, predictably, the Atir-Rosenzweig-Dunning Effect -- shows us is that people who are experts in a particular field tend to think that expertise holds true even for disciplines far outside their chosen area of study.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In one experiment, the three researchers asked people to rate their own knowledge in various academic areas, then asked them to rank their level of understanding of various finance-related terms, such as "pre-rated stocks, fixed-rate deduction and annualized credit."  The problem is, those three finance-related terms actually don't exist -- i.e., they were made up by the researchers to sound plausible.

The test subjects who had the highest confidence level in their own fields were most likely to get suckered.  Simon Oxenham, who described the experiments in Big Think, says it's only natural.  "A possible explanation for this finding," Oxenham writes, "is that the participants with a greater vocabulary in a particular domain were more prone to falsely feeling familiar with nonsense terms in that domain because of the fact that they had simply come across more similar-sounding terms in their lives, providing more material for potential confusion."

Interestingly, subsequent experiments showed that the correlation holds true even if you take away the factor of self-ranking.  Presumably, someone who is cocky and arrogant and ranks his/her ability higher than is justified in one area would be likely to do it in others.  But when they tested the subjects' knowledge of terms from their own field -- i.e., actually measured their expertise -- high scores still correlated with overestimating their knowledge in other areas.

And telling the subjects ahead of time that some of the terms might be made up didn't change the results.  "[E]ven when participants were warned that some of the statements were false, the 'experts' were just as likely as before to claim to know the nonsense statements, while most of the other participants became more likely in this scenario to admit they’d never heard of them," Oxenham writes.

I have a bit of anecdotal evidence supporting this result from my experience in the classroom.  On multiple-choice tests, I have to concoct plausible-sounding wrong answers as distractors.  Every once in a while, I run out of good wrong answers, and just make something up.  (On one AP Biology quiz on plant biochemistry, I threw in the term "photoglycolysis," which sounds pretty fancy until you realize that it doesn't exist.)  What I find was that it was the average to upper-average students who are the most likely to be taken in by the ruse.  The top students don't get fooled because they know what the correct answer is; the lowest students are equally likely to pick any of the wrong answers, because they don't understand the material well.  The mid-range students see something that sounds technical and vaguely familiar -- and figure that if they aren't sure, it must be that they missed learning that particular term.

It's also the mid-range students who are most likely to miss questions where the actual answer seems too simple.  Another botanical question I like to throw at them is "What do all non-vascular land plants have in common?"  There are three wrong answers with appropriately technical-sounding jargon.

The actual answer is, "They're small."

Interestingly, the reason non-vascular land plants are small isn't simple at all.  But the answer itself just looks too easy to merit being the correct choice on an AP Biology quiz.

So Atir, Rosenzweig, and Dunning have given us yet another mental pitfall to watch out for -- our tendency to use our knowledge in one field to overestimate our knowledge in others.  But I really should run along, and make sure that the annualized credit on my pre-rated stocks exceeds the recommended fixed-rate deduction.  I'm sure you can appreciate how important that is.

Advice from the ignorant

I have never been a police officer.  No one in my family is a police officer.  I have not studied criminal justice; most of what I know about the legal system has been gleaned from television shows like Law & Order, which, to be honest, I have watched less than a dozen times total.  I've only visited a police station a handful of times, and each time spent less than a half-hour there.

Now stand by while I tell you everything that is wrong with our justice system, and furthermore, how to fix it.

Did you wince a little?  I hope so.  But this election season has been rife with ignorant self-proclaimed experts who know exactly what to do about everything despite having neither the experience nor the facts to base their opinion on.  And for a sterling example of this, let's look at the speech given by Donald Trump, Jr., two days ago on the final night of the Republican National Convention.

Trump Jr. spent a lot of his time railing against the public school system, despite the fact that he (1) is neither a teacher nor an administrator, (2) has never studied educational policy, and (3) for fuck's sake, didn't even attend a public school.  Nevertheless, here's what he said about our national educational policy, with a few interjected comments from me:

The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options.

Which party is it, exactly, that has across the nation gutted the public school system by cutting funding to the bone, resulting in loss of teachers, curriculum, and services?   To take just one of many examples, consider Republican Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, who just this year signed legislation that would allow parents to divert 70% of the tax money earmarked for education into religious schools -- and this after he already cut $45 million in funding for public schools in 2015.

Growing up, my siblings and I we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don’t have.  We want all Americans to have those same opportunities. 

You want every American child to attend a well-funded private school?  Paid for how, exactly?

Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor.  They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students.

Bullshit.  Spend any time at all inside a typical public school and you'll find out that's wrong in under five minutes.  In fact, I'll issue an open invitation to Trump Jr., or anyone else for that matter, to spend a day in my classroom this fall.  Let's see if afterwards you think that what happens there is done for my benefit, or for the benefit of the principal and superintendent.

You know why other countries do better on K through 12?  They let parents choose where to send their own children to school. 

Is there a stronger word than bullshit?  Let's look at one example of a country often touted as achieving educational excellence: Finland.  Their success story -- student scores on standardized tests ranking 2nd in the world in science, 3rd in reading, and 6th in math, with a 93% high school graduation rate nationwide -- has zilch to do with "parental choice."  According to an article on the Finnish educational system by LynNell Hancock that appeared in Smithsonian:

There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school.  There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.  Finland’s schools are publicly funded.  The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators, not business people, military leaders or career politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.  The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town.  The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

But do go on, Mr. Trump Jr., as if you actually had the slightest idea what you're talking about:

That’s called competition. It’s called the free market. And it’s what the other party fears.

No, we don't fear competition, and contrary to what people like you would have the public believe, teachers like myself don't fear accountability.  What we want is fair, equitable measures of student success, both to evaluate students and to evaluate teachers.  What we don't need is a bunch of politicians making pronouncements on a subject about which they are completely ignorant.

They fear it because they’re more concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving the students in desperate need of a good education.

I don't know a single teacher who is in favor of tenure protecting substandard teachers.  The tenure rules are there for a reason -- to give protection to teachers from capricious administrators, and to ensure due process.  No one in education is in favor of tenure abuses like the so called "rubber rooms" where poor teachers are corralled because they can't be fired.  But this problem can be fixed without jettisoning the entire system.

They want to run everything top-down from Washington.  They tell us they’re the experts and they know what’s best.

So instead, we're supposed to listen to you because you are an expert and you know what's best?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You want to know how to fix the system?  Adequate funding and fair fund distribution formulas.  Strong curricula that are not beholden to test-for-profit firms like Pearson Education.  Support for teachers in inner cities and other places where poverty, broken families, drugs, and gangs play a role in the failure of schools.  Powerful, dynamic teacher training programs.  Salaries and benefits that are sufficient to attract the best teachers, stopping the bleed-out of talent we're seeing across the United States because of poor working conditions and vilification of the entire profession.

Last -- the one thing you and I might agree on -- put the oversight of education into the hands of the people who know the most about it, and get the know-nothing politicians to keep their noses out of it.

But that includes you, Mr. Trump Jr.

Retreating into science

I try to keep myself informed about what's going on in the world, but lately, what's going on in the world has led me to the unfortunate conclusion that humans are, by and large, crazy.  It's not a comforting thought.  But between the shootings, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, and the Republican National Convention, I seem to have no other option.

Because the news I'm seeing out there is simply too depressing, for today's post I'm retreating to my happy place, better known as science.

Think of it as my answer to flowers, rainbows, and friendly bunnies.

So let's take a look at a few new developments in the scientific world, and take a refreshing break from the irrationality and insanity that is the main course in the media these days.

First, from field biologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge, we have a charming study of a partnership between humans and wild animals -- in this case, between human honey-hunters in Africa and a little brown bird called the Greater Honeyguide.

Honeyguides have been partners with humans for as far back as we have any information.  Honey-hunters in Mozambique call in the birds with a trilling sound, and the birds then lead their human pals to bees' nests.  When the nest is raided, the humans share some of the honeycomb with their guides, so it's a mutually beneficial relationship.

"Communication between domesticated species and people is well known, but the fascinating point in the case of the honeyguide is that it describes such a relationship between a wild animal and humans," said behavioral biologist Claudia Wascher of the University of Anglia Ruskin (UK), commenting on Spottiswoode's study.  "This has not been described scientifically before."

Greater Honeyguide [image courtesy of photographer Gisela Gerson Lohman-Braun and the Wikimedia Commons]

"The results show that there is communication between humans and free-living wild animals that the animals understand," Spottiswoode said.  "There is a rich cultural diversity of interaction between humans and honeyguides.  We'd love to try to understand it."

Next, we have a discovery from the world of astronomy.  Two rocky, Earthlike planets have been discovered that lie in the habitable zone -- around the same star.

The star, called TRAPPIST-1, is only 40 light years away.  While it is certain that the two planets, dubbed TRAPPIST-1-b and c, have atmospheres and are not gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, it remains to be seen whether they actually are capable of harboring life.

"Now we can say that these planets are rocky. Now the question is, what kind of atmosphere do they have?" study author Julian de Wit of MIT said.  "The plausible scenarios include something like Venus, where the atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide, or an Earth-like atmosphere with heavy clouds, or even something like Mars with a depleted atmosphere.  The next step is to try to disentangle all these possible scenarios that exist for these terrestrial planets."

However, it must be said that "only 40 light years away" is still far too distant for any conventional spacecraft to reach.  Even communicating via radio waves wouldn't be very interesting, given the forty year transit time (one way) for messages:

Earth scientist: "Hi there, alien civilization!"
*80 year wait*
Alien scientist on TRAPPIST-1-b: "Hi, Earthling! How's it hangin'?"
Earth scientist: "I'm fine, how're the wife and kids?"
*another 80 year wait*
Alien scientist on TRAPPIST-1-b: "They're doing well, and yours?"

 So it doesn't really lend itself to scintillating repartee. But it's still a tremendously exciting discovery, further indicating that habitable planets are probably common in the universe -- and that we might not be alone after all.

From geologists Guilherme Gualda (of Vanderbilt University) and Stephen Sutton (of the University of Chicago) we have a paper that indicates that supervolcanoes might only give a year's warning before a colossal eruption.  They studied the Bishop Tuff, an outcropping in California that formed 760,000 years ago during the massive Long Valley Caldera eruption, and through analysis of quartz crystals deposited there concluded that the decompression gas bubbles that initiate the explosion form really quickly.

"The evolution of a giant, super-eruption-feeding magma body is characterized by events taking place at a variety of time scales," said Gualda.  "Tens of thousands of years are needed to prime the crust to generate sufficient eruptible magma.  Once established, these melt-rich, giant magma bodies are unstable features that last for only centuries to few millennia.  Now we have shown that the onset of the process of decompression, which releases the gas bubbles that power the eruption, starts less than a year before eruption."

When people think of supervolcanoes, they usually come up with Yellowstone, but it bears mention that there are other supervolcanoes in the world -- Campi Flegrei in Italy, Oruanui in New Zealand, and Toba/Tambora in Indonesia, to name three.  So it's a good thing that the geologists are monitoring the situation, although you have to wonder what they'd do if they found that an eruption was imminent.  "Evacuate Italy" doesn't seem like a viable plan.  But because I said that this post was going to be cheerful and uplifting, perhaps I'd better move on.


Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales have just made a discovery that could help the world move to a post-fossil-fuel economy: that using a cheap catalyst and sunlight, hydrogen gas can be made from grass clippings.

The technique is called photocatalysis, and the catalyst is nickel.  (The process also works well using palladium or gold as a catalyst, but that ups the cost significantly.)  Basically, the idea is that using the catalyst and sunlight as an energy source, cellulose in plant matter can be broken down and produce hydrogen, which can then be used to power hydrogen fuel cells.

"Hydrogen is seen as an important future energy carrier as the world moves from fossil fuels to renewable feedstocks, and our research has shown that even garden grass could be a good way of getting hold of it," said Michael Bowker, who headed the study at Cardiff.  "This is significant as it avoids the need to separate and purify cellulose from a sample, which can be both arduous and costly...  Our results show that significant amounts of hydrogen can be produced using this method with the help of a bit of sunlight and a cheap catalyst."

And when you consider the amount of cellulose-rich agricultural waste that is simply discarded -- think rice husks and cornstalks -- it'd be an amazing breakthrough to be able to use it for fuel production.

So that's our brief retreat into the cheering world of scientific discovery.  It's nice to know that there are still people who are working toward understanding the universe and bettering humanity, and that they're not all crazed, foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics.  It's a refreshing thought.  Maybe I should sustain the feeling by avoiding the news for a while.  I'll miss hearing the spin about Donald Trump's speech last night at the RNC, which would be an added benefit.

Pokémon no

In the last few weeks, Pokémon Go has been all the rage amongst the gamer crowd, to the extent that a Massachusetts man caused a major traffic pile-up when he stopped in the middle of a busy highway to catch a "Pikachu," an Auburn (NY) man crashed his car into a tree basically trying to do the same thing, two California men who neglected to take into account the fact that Pokémon, being imaginary characters, do not have to worry about gravity, fell off a fifty-foot cliff and sustained serious injuries, and the Bosnian government has issued an official warning for players to be careful not to step on a land mine.

So I suppose it was only a matter of time that the evangelical fringe felt obliged to jump into the fun and declare that Pokémon are creations of Satan.

It will come as no shock to regular readers of this blog that the origin of this jaw-dropping revelation is none other than Skeptophilia frequent flier Rick Wiles, who also thinks that the gays are organizing into an elite band of super-soldiers, that Christians in the United States are soon to be rounded up and executed wholesale, and that President Obama murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

So it's apparent at the outset that we're talking about someone here who has a fairly loose grip on reality.  But this time, what he's saying is so much further outside of the realm of the normal that I can't help but wonder if this guy needs some serious psychological help.

Here's what Wiles had to say:

These Pokémon creatures are like virtual cyber-demons.  Digital demons.  Now, this is where this starts to get weird...  So this morning Doc and Edward and I were in an editorial meeting, we're talking about the topics for today's program, and Pokémon Go was one of the topics.  This is before the police officer showed up.  We're talking about Pokémon Go!  And Edward and Doc said, "Rick, we're going to present to you a really far out idea. about Pokémon Go.  What if this technology is transferred to Islamic jihadists and Islamic jihadists have an app that shows them where Christians are located geographically?"...   

After the police officer told us that this man we saw Friday on our property, riding around our property holding his phone, a grown man, a forty-year-old man on a four-wheeler riding around our building suspiciously holding his phone up like he's photographing our building, the police officer comes back and tells us, "Look, I solved the case, he was playing Pokémon Go."  This is why in the office today we all did a triple-take looking at each other.  Because the theory that Doc and Edward presented to me today before the police officer came here was, what if we find out that the demons, the Pokémon Go demons, are being located primarily inside churches?  Well, guess what?  They downloaded the app, they stood here and downloaded the Pokémon Go app, and lo and behold, there is the TruNews office, there's the outline of our building, there you can see where the exit doors and windows are, and there inside the building is a virtual cyber-demon.  And what this man Friday was trying to find was the Pokémon demon that had been placed inside the TruNews office.   

If this technology got into the hands of the wrong people, it could target the churches, it could target the elders, the deacons, the ministers, the Sunday school teachers, the youth pastors.  You could have an app that would lead you to the homes of these strong Christian leaders.  

Then TruNews co-host Edward Szali chimed in:

We found that the churches in our area were all portals.  They were rally points where you could put down bait.  This is where you can go to find and capture these demons.

Wiles then picked up the thread again:

The enemy, Satan, is targeting churches with virtual, digital, cyber-demons.  I believe this thing is a magnet for demonic powers.  Pokémon masters may soon start telling people to kill people in those buildings so they can capture more of these cyber-demons.  They’re spawning demons inside your church.  They’re targeting your church with demonic activity.  This technology will be used by the enemies of the cross to target, locate and execute Christians.

Righty-o.  Do I need to emphasize that what they're talking about is a game wherein players capture creatures that are imaginary?  I.e., not real?

Of course, given that Satan pretty much falls into the same category, I suppose it's not to be wondered at that Wiles and Szali have some difficulty with the distinction.

Don't be misled by this cheerful smile.  He's reaching out to steal your soul.

Anyhow.  You may want to keep all of this in mind, if you are a Pokémon Go player.  Not only do you have to worry about causing a car pile-up, running your own car into a tree, falling off a cliff, or stepping on a land mine, you now have to fret about your cell phone becoming infested with cyber-demons.

Me, I think I'll stick with birdwatching, which a student of mine aptly characterized as "Pokémon for adults."  You wander around for interminable periods outdoors in all sorts of weather, become obsessed with seeing species you've never seen before, and flock to places where other players have seen something interesting or unusual.  There's still the potential of accidents, but at least you don't have to worry about birds being demons, although I have to admit I wonder sometimes about starlings.

Sweet transvestite

Because the world has so much to worry about -- terrorism, climate change, governmental instability in too many countries to list -- today we're going to consider the following question:

Is London ex-Mayor Boris Johnson a time-traveling transvestite?

This is the claim of an I-hope-this-isn't-serious article in The Mirror, wherein we see the photographic evidence, to wit:

Photograph of a British man in drag, circa 1896

Here, for comparison purposes, is a photograph of Johnson, standing next to ex-Prime Minister David Cameron:

I'll admit that there is some resemblance.  But before you say, "Somebody notify Stephen Hawking!  Apparently time travel is real!" allow me to point out that the same article claims that Cameron is actually Catherine the Great of Russia:

And again, I have to say that there's a similarity.  Of course, there is good historical evidence that Catherine had several children, which kind of precludes her from being David Cameron in drag.  But someone should insist that Cameron model a low-cut dress and frizzy gray wig just to make sure.  

While I suspect that the article in The Mirror was tongue-in-cheek, it bears mention that there are people who believe stuff like this.  Regular readers may recall that I did a piece a while back about the claim that Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves are immortal, based on the discovery of a couple of historical photos and/or paintings that resemble the two actors.  And this one isn't just a for-laughs, "Hey, look how similar these two people are!" sort of thing.  These people are serious.  There are articles all over woo-woo sites about how Cage and Reeves are undead who have been around for hundreds of years, never aging, simply switching identities ever fifty years are so, and somehow still never mastering more than a single facial expression each.

The fact is, there are random similarities in the facial features between unrelated people, and it's nothing more than a coincidence.  Just last week, a woman at the writers' conference I attended grinned every time she saw me, and eventually felt obliged to explain that she wasn't flirting with me, I look exactly like her favorite nephew.  "You even dress like him," she said.  (I spent the entire week in a t-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals, and she said that's his summer uniform, too.)

But it's not really surprising that there's another guy out there who shares my rather unfortunate face.   There are only so many possible combinations of facial features, so somewhere there'll be someone who looks like you.  Similar, after all, doesn't mean identical.  (And my mom was adamant that I wasn't one of a pair of twins separated at birth.)  So any claim about one famous person being the same as a long-dead historical figure is kind of a non-starter.

I'm still in favor of the dress-and-wig idea for David Cameron, however.

Close encounter of the weird kind

If there's one thing I've said over and over about this presidential election, it's, "This really can't get any weirder, can it?"  (Of course, I've also said "What the fuck?" more than once, but I suspect I'm not alone in that.)  Yesterday was the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Democratic National Convention is next week in Philadelphia.  I'm fully expecting to use both of those phrases several times over the next couple of weeks

Starting with the fact that Karl Rove was stopped while trying to board his plane to the RNC by none other than Alex Jones.  Jones is well known to those of us who like to keep our pulse on the lunatic fringe.  He runs the "news" outlet InfoWars, which mostly seems devoted to proving that President Obama is an America-hating Muslim, when it's not claiming that every damn thing that happens in the world is a "false flag."  ("False flags," you probably know, are government-staged riots and so on designed to distract us from the real news.  Given the recent spate of terrorist attacks and police shootings, we're distracted enough, okay?  You can lay the hell off.)

Rove, on the other hand, was one of President George W. Bush's chief strategists, and distinguished himself mostly on the basis of (1) looking like a huge mutant baby with an enormous forehead, and (2) somehow, inexplicably, meriting the nickname of "Turd Blossom" from the Commander in Chief himself.  Other than that, he mostly involved himself with smearing politicians he didn't like (such as his trash-talking the military service record of Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who is a triple amputee due to injuries in the line of duty).

So any meeting between these two would have to be epic.  Jones launched into some hard questions right away, such as asking if Rove was going to support Trump or if he was "siphoning money off of him to make sure Hillary wins."  Rove declined to answer, only saying that as he was now working for Fox News, he was not interested in appearing on the Alex Jones Show.

Need I mention that the whole time, one of Jones's operatives was filming the encounter?

So Rove started to get pissed off, with Jones crowing that this just proves his point.  Whatever "his point," actually was, something I've had a hard time identifying myself whenever my blood pressure is too low and I listen to his latest rant on InfoWars.  By this time Rove realized that arguing with Alex Jones is about as fruitful an occupation as discussing philosophy with a chicken, so he tried to get away to safety.  Jones, unsurprisingly, followed him, considering any kind of retreat a victory for his side.

Until, that is, it became apparent that Rove wasn't just trying to flee, he was going to a Customer Service desk to ask them to summon security.  Jones at that point decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and did what the Knights of the Round Table did when confronted with the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog.

I strongly encourage you to watch the entire thing, because it's hilarious in a scary sort of way.  You can watch the whole encounter on the link I posted above.

Anyhow, the next couple of weeks should be pretty interesting, if this incident is any indication.  Myself, I'm content to watch from a distance, and if I lived in Cleveland, I'd probably do whatever I could to make sure I was gone for the next week.  (Considering it's Cleveland, I'd probably do whatever I could to make sure I was gone permanently, but that's beside the point.)

So keep your eye on the news, especially given that at the RNC large numbers of the attendees are expected to be armed.  Because there's no way that that could end badly, right?

Of course right.

The ghostly hotel

I'm back home after a very productive week of writing, networking, and general schmoozing with a bunch of my fellow fiction authors at the Storytellers of America Conference in Winslow, Arkansas.  The publisher who handles my books -- Oghma Creative Media -- was well-represented, as they're headquartered in Bentonville, right nearby.

Among the writers I got to meet was another Oghma author, J. C. Crumpton, and (most fun of all) I got to hear an excerpt from his fantastic upcoming release Silence in the Garden.  Silence is about an (allegedly) true tale of the supernatural that I had never heard about -- the story of the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

The Crescent bills itself as "the most haunted hotel in America," and every year has hundreds of visitors motivated to visit solely by its reputation.  To be sure, there are lots of other reasons; the Crescent is a beautiful and historically important building, has 78 luxurious rooms, and is smack-dab in the middle of the Ozarks, which (I found) is stunningly beautiful even though it's prone to thunderstorms that'd knock your socks off.

Hopefully only in a figurative sense.

The Crescent Hotel was opened in May of 1886, mostly to accommodate visitors who had come to partake in Eureka Springs' "healing waters."  This kept it going for about fifteen years, until people figured out that the "healing waters" were actually just "plain old water," and the tourists began to go elsewhere.  After that it became for a time the Crescent College and Conservatory for Young Women.    That, too, turned out to be a financial failure; it was abandoned for a time, had a brief return to its heyday of sham cures in the 1930s (ended when the proprietor was convicted of defrauding cancer patients and was sent to Leavenworth Prison), and returned to being a hotel in the 1950s.

The Crescent Hotel, circa 1900 [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There was a fire that caused extensive damage in 1967, but due to its historical value and beauty, it was rebuilt and is now once again the gorgeous landmark and tourist destination that it was in its early days.

A building with such a checkered past, however, is bound to have some sketchy stories attached to it, and very early on the Crescent gained a reputation for being haunted.  The oldest ghost people see is called "Michael" and is said to be the spirit of a red-haired Irish stonemason who was working on the roof shortly before its grand opening in 1886, lost his balance, and fell to his death.  From the days of its serving as a cancer hospital there are the ghosts of a nurse and several patients, all dressed in white, that have been seen on multiple occasions.

What is interesting about these accounts is that unlike most ghost stories, the specters that supposedly populate the Crescent seem pretty benign.  The dining room has been visited by an elderly gentleman in fine 19th century dress clothes, who if approached, will explain to you that he "saw the most beautiful woman here last night and is waiting for her to return."  Which, honestly, is kind of sweet.  About the only truly frightening apparition -- except insofar as any ghost would probably scare me to the pants-wetting stage, because I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a great big wuss -- is the spirit of a teenage girl who, according to the legend, lived in the hotel during its time as a Conservatory for Young Women, and fell (some say she was pushed) to her death from a balcony.  People see her falling, hear her scream -- and when they rush to the sidewalk to see who has taken such a dreadful plunge, they find... no one.

(This is, in fact, a central piece of Crumpton's novel.  Trust me, in his hands, it is way creepy, and when this book is published, you should all read it.)

I'm a little disappointed at not having had time on this trip to go see the place.  Considering my fascination with tales of the paranormal, it's frustrating to have come so close to the "most haunted hotel in America" and not allowed the ghosts a shot at convincing me of their existence.  But given that my publisher is not far away from there, I'm sure there will be other opportunities.

So many hauntings, so little time.