Take a room at these haunted hotels, if you can last the night

The flickering flames can't seem to erase the chill that pervades the campfire. The plentiful goose bumps have nothing to do with the temperature. They're the result of the ghost stories being told.

The storyteller swears these aren't far-fetched fables but all-too-true accounts. There are, of course, doubters around the circle. Perhaps a midnight trip to the morgue will change their minds.

In the Arkansas Ozarks, the proprietors don't shy away from the Crescent Hotel's dubious past as a Depression-era hospital for cancer patients hoping for miracle cures. It's fodder for hair-raising, spine-tingling tales sure to delight, and terrify, guests.

For those who don't mind spending the night with one eye open, there are haunted hotels scattered across the country. When checking in, visitors should understand they may be sharing their rooms with spirits that never checked out.

The 1886 Crescent Hotel & Spa (75 Prospect Ave., Eureka Springs, Ark.; 855-725-5720; crescent-hotel.com) bills itself as "America's Most Haunted Hotel" and has built the business by sharing the creepy past of con man Norman Baker's Cancer Curable Hospital. Guides in period costume lead visitors on nightly tours. On the third floor, they learn of how the squeaking wheels of a stretcher have lured guests into the corridor.

"They would see a lady in a starched white nurse's outfit pushing a gurney, with a body covered with a sheet, going down the hallway," recalled Bill Ott, the hotel's marketing director. "And then she would just kind of disappear."

As with the campfire tales, the tours end in the basement, where the morgue was in the 1930s.

"There's a lot more activity down there than other places in the hotel," Ott added of spirited goings-on.

The Otesaga of Cooperstown (60 Lake St., Cooperstown, N.Y.; 607-547-9931; otesaga.com) isn't far from the former home of Louis C. Jones, author of "Things That Go Bump in the Night." Fittingly, the hotel has had plenty of inexplicably eerie happenings, many of them linked to the years when The Otesaga also housed an all-girls school.

"They claim that children are running up and down our hallways, having fun and making noise," director of sales Bob Faller said of his co-workers' experiences.

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Take a room at these haunted hotels, if you can last the night