Eureka Springs Crawl: 30 Accounts from the Zombie Crawl

Every October, a few thousand people smear their faces gray, tear their good clothes, and shamble down Spring Street beneath the gaslamps. Tourists call it a party. The old families in Eureka Springs call it something else, and they have called it that since 1879. This book is not a novel. It is a record. For three years, F.K. Sterling collected the testimony of the people who came home from the Crawl changed - bartenders, EMTs, church ushers, hotel night clerks, teenagers on a dare, a woman who has walked that hill her whole life and will not walk it now. Thirty accounts. Thirty voices that do not entirely agree with one another, which is exactly what makes them worth reading. They describe the same handful of things. A stretch of Basin Park where the crowd noise drops out like a needle lifted off a record. Faces in the procession that no camera on that street managed to catch. Costume makeup that peels like sunburn from skin that was never painted. Eyes filmed pearl-gray, pupils drowned like stones under ice. And every year, without fail, a count that comes back wrong - more walking out of the hollow than ever walked in. Eureka Springs was built on healing water, and on ground that was held sacred long before anyone thought to bottle it. The town's founders laid their streets over that ground in 1879. The witnesses in these pages are convinced the Crawl is not a costume event at all, but the observance of something older that was never permitted to lapse - and that the visitors in their thousands have been unwittingly keeping the appointment for over a century. Read the accounts. Compare the details no one could have coordinated. Then decide for yourself what walks down Spring Street on the last Saturday in October. From the author of The Haunted Hallows of Eureka Springs, Eureka After Dark, and The Eureka Incident comes the darkest entry yet in the Ozark Gothic tradition - thirty firsthand accounts of an American town that never stopped burying its dead in the dark.