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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.
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If you listen closely, you might hear them whisper about the year 1929, about Eunice “Mother” Carpenter, and how the thought of her erecting such a highfalutin structure in such a bush-league town was downright laughable. But that’s what she did. She hired a big-shot architect to design it, and it was the weirdest, topsy-turviest monster he ever created—half department store, half death parlor; a place where you could buy everything from carnival glass to moustache wax, and then have grandpa’s autopsy and funeral performed, all under one roof. “The retail space will be the most modern business block in Northwest Arkansas,” the local rag boasted, “and the mortuary and chapel will include all the up-to-date conveniences. Nothing but the best is sufficient to satisfy.”
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| 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. |
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[Carpenter’s Mortuary Spook House actually IS presented in a building that was once a mortuary. BUT, spirits of the dead are notorious liars. So, to be official: - * The theme of Carpenter's Mortuary Spook House is fictitious. Any implied "history" of the building located at 136 East Main Street in Gentry, Arkansas (known as The Carpenter Building) made by the haunted attraction called "Carpenter's Mortuary Spook House" is a fictional account. There are no portrayals inside Carpenter's Mortuary Spook House, or in any promotional material created by the operators of Carpenter's Mortuary Spook House, of any real person, either living or dead. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. - On that note, the Carpenter Building really was created by prominent architect A.O. Clark, but we understand Mr. Clark was a standup guy who hardly ever designed structures that were weird or topsy-turvy.]
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