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ABOUTthis Northwest ARkansaS haunted housE atTractiOn -
To learn more, watch "The Ghosts of Carpenter's Mortuary" ~ a series of 10 haunting short-films that detail the ghosts who roam the halls of Carpenter's Mortuary . . .
Yes, every haunted house has a story.
And if you ask the phantoms who hang out in Gentry's old mortuary, they might tell you theirs. It’s true that most encounters with them have been described as little more than hellish screaming followed by the sensation of having flesh pealed from bone. But on rare, quiet nights, they’ve been known to flit around the place, gibbering about the past, about the Carpenter Building . . . and what happened there.
If you listen closely, you might hear them whisper about the year 1929, about Eunice “Mother” Carpenter and her weird, topsy-turvy building—half department store, half death parlor; a place where you could buy everything from carnival glass to mustache wax, and then have grandpa’s autopsy and funeral performed, all under one roof.
They laid the final brick in October, the same month Wall Street’s crash kicked off the Great Depression. This lousy bit of timing threatened to doom Mother’s big plans to stillbirth; because even though her undertakers stayed busy (poverty and malnutrition in rural Benton County guaranteed a steady flow embalming fluid), nobody could afford to shop in her store. The retail operation was dead on arrival. And yet she hung on, even thrived.
The ghosts claim to know how she did it; they say she made a secret deal with the State to house children from its overcrowded orphanage in the vacant parts of her building, that she embezzled the money meant for their care and let them starve and freeze. They accuse her morticians of torture, experimentation . . . murder.
In the fall of 1950, Mother Carpenter suddenly and mysteriously sold out and vanished. The building sat empty, neglected. Maybe that’s when the ghosts started yapping. Who knows. They murmur about their final living moments in that decrepit, awful place; the night when, out of fear of an impending investigation, Mother and her goons cremated the remaining children.
Some of the ghosts say they were still alive when they started burning.
It was Halloween night.
haunting confirmed.
It's officIal . . .
In 1990, local artists began to occupy the building that was once Gentry’s mortuary and funeral chapel. They transformed the space into a project studio devoted to music, film, and many other art forms. Over the years, visitors have reported strange phenomena there. They’ve seen unexplained lights and noises. They’ve had the feeling that someone, or something, was breathing down their necks.
In 2022, investigators from the acclaimed YouTube channel "Haunting History" spent a night in the Carpenter Building, and the contact they made with its ghostly inhabitants was truly unnerving. ~ The group was lead by veteran ghost hunter David Glidden and was joined by Travel Channel's Justin Spurrier (from shows such as 'Ghost Adventures') and regional country music celebrity Johnny Dale Roberts {Johnny Dale Roberts Music} who recounts his own horrifying experiences of actually LIVING inside our building as a kid in the 80s.
Watch Parts 1 and 2 of their Carpenter's Mortuary episode below: