Nightmares on Main Street: New name, new site for The River Haunt

By Andrea Bruner, White River Now

It’s been almost 25 years since the old Marvin Hotel burned, but the once-empty lot on lower Main Street is teaming with activity as plans for a new River Haunt get underway.

“With all the construction at the water treatment plant and the park expansion project, the city took our building back,” explained Suzanne Magouyrk, who has been one of the volunteers since the haunt’s inception.

“The city had let us use the building for eight years, but then they needed the space, so we’ve been looking ever since March 2024. There’s a group of us that go to St. Louis to a Halloween haunt attraction convention, and when we got back, we started looking for a new place. We thought we might come across an empty building or something, but we had not found a piece of property that was suitable,” she said.

Magouyrk said the group was brainstorming and actively looking for a future home for the haunt.

“We felt sure we might be able to find something that would work and be ready for fall 2024, but nothing panned out,” she said. “We asked people all over town, and we even thought about asking Eddie Lumpkin about buying the lot where the old Marvin Hotel was, but he never wanted to sell before.”

Magouyrk said Bob Carius, who has been a longtime Main Street and Downtown Batesville advocate and volunteer, was in talks with another business owner about a prospective mural and asked about an adjacent empty lot, when the business owner mentioned he’d heard Lumpkin might be ready to sell.

“For some reason he felt like we would take care of it,” Magouyrk said. “We told him we were excited to construct something that would resemble the old Marvin and Arlington Hotel. I think he was pleased with that.”

Scroll down for more information about the history of the Arlington and the Marvin.

The lot is located at the corner of Main and State streets, and plans are to build not just a haunted house but rather, a multipurpose building for all sorts of events – holidays, birthday parties, activities for youth, and more.

“We want to be able to offer a space and a safe environment for things in addition to the haunted house, and we wanted a place where kids and parents feel safe,” Magouyrk said.

Besides Magouyrk and Carius, others involved in the haunt include Tammy and Patrick Arnold, David Thompson, Ashleigh Rogers, Jeanette Gibbs and her son Wesley Gibbs, Luna Moss, Daniel Trail, and several young people who are in high school or even younger.

“We’ve got a great group that’s going to be involved and carry this on for a long time,” Magouyrk said.

She said The River Haunt began in 2015 as a fundraiser for Main Street Batesville.

“Bob, David, and Danny Dozier and I were all on the Main Street board,” Magouyrk said. “David Thompson had been in the Batesville Jaycees, and they did haunted houses for years (known as the Slaughter House, which started in 1992), so he suggested we do one as a fundraiser.”

Magouyrk added with a laugh, “I don’t do scary stuff or watch scary movies. When they said we’re going to do a haunted house, I said, ‘Really?’ I told them, ‘I’ll sit in the concession stand and take money.’”

A location was next on the agenda. Magouyrk said the Barnett Building had just been donated to the Main Street organization and was sitting empty, so that became the first home of the new haunted house.

The former location of “The River Haunt” on Stadium Drive in Batesville / Image: White River Now

“The next year we got to start using the old Jaycees building, and it continued to grow,” Magouyrk said. “Over the last nine years, we got up to 2,200 visitors in the month of October, and we raised over $150,000 for Main Street.”

With a new location, the volunteers have also changed the name of the site to pay homage to the Marvin and Arlington. Now, it is known as The River Haunt Hotel, and construction is underway on the new structure.

She said everyone involved – and on a good night, that could be as many 35 to 40 individuals (although they have “made do” with as few as 25 people) – are all volunteers.

“We just love it so much,” Magouyrk said. “Some people work one or two nights the whole month, and some work every single night. It’s hard work – very physical. We try to shut the line down at 10:30 each night.”

With a new location, the volunteers have also changed the name of the site to pay homage to the Marvin and Arlington. Now, it is known as The River Haunt Hotel, and construction is underway on the new structure.

“We met with the architect last week, and we’re shooting for 2,800 square feet to start with,” Magouyrk said, explaining that the structure is designed for an additional floor, such as for storage, dressing rooms, etc., but for now, one story will serve them well.

The former location of the Arlington/Marvin Hotel on Batesville’s Main Street. Construction will soon start on the new home for “The River Haunt” at the location. / Image: White River Now

“It’s kind of like Batesville Community Theater (another organization where Magouyrk volunteers her time and efforts), we’d be happy to have air conditioning and bathrooms backstage,” she said with a laugh. “So for the new haunt, that will be amazing.”

She continued, “It’s so entertaining and fun to be on the other side because people are so hilarious. I got my husband to work one night in nine years, and he still laughs about it.”

Magouyrk said the plan is to have The River Haunt Hotel ready by October 2025, but recent rains have delayed the dirt work. She said if the structure is not ready by then, they hope to have something for the community, even if it’s “something small.”

“These folks will scare you – they just need a dark corner,” she said, laughing.

She said although the haunt was closed in 2024, organizers plan for it to be better than ever. “Being able to start from scratch and do our own design, I think it will be easier to create a haunt. The Jaycees building was so big it was hard to fill up the haunt, and we didn’t even use it all. The city was already using it for storage, but the size made it hard to create a streamlined attraction where we were in control (of the whole operation).”

Magouyrk said they tried to add something new every year. “We’d reverse the direction, tear things down and do something new; some rooms we might keep a couple years then switch them out. One room went from being the living room to a swamp to a jungle with cannibals, and it eventually became the clown room, but the clown room changed every year too. … Everything changes.”

She said crews of volunteers typically would start in August to help design, build, and create the upcoming attraction.

“Then we usually have about three or four trainings to teach safety and how to be a great haunter. Patrick and I have our CHAOS certification, that’s Certified Haunted Attraction Operator Safety, through the Haunted Attraction Association,” Magouyrk said. “We are very conscious of being safe and making sure our haunters and visitors are taken care of.”

The River Haunt Hotel is trying to defray some of the building costs by approaching businesses and asking them to support this endeavor. Magouyrk said two lead donors have been secured, with commitments from others for smaller amounts, but in the meantime, people can reach out to Magouyrk at smagouryk@gmail.com or 870-613-3836, Carius at r.carius74@gmail.com or 870-834-7715, or through the Batesville Downtown Foundation, batesvilledowntown.org.

She said the foundation is different from the Main Street Batesville organization. “The foundation was created when they started building Maxfield Park. The mission of the foundation kind of changed after that. They help support the merchants in ways that are different from what Main Street does,” she went on to say. “The foundation is the parent organization (for The River Haunt Hotel), and the funds we raise through the haunt will go back to downtown.”

Magouyrk said the new site would give the haunt greater visibility and community engagement, with participation in downtown events and increased visitors to local businesses from across the state.

“We’re excited to be on Main Street, and we look forward to opening the new River Haunt Hotel,” Magouyrk said.

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What was the Arlington/Marvin?

The first building at the site of the new River Haunt Hotel was actually, as the name implies, a hotel.

Built in 1879, the three-story structure with 12-inch-thick stone walls was called the Arlington. Stories were passed down through the years regarding guests at the hotel. The famous outlaw Jesse James was rumored to have stayed there as had several governors and maybe one president. The late Wilson Powell speculated the president would probably have been Harry Truman, who traveled through Batesville on a special train. Incidentally, Powell also recalled being at the Marvin Hotel covering a Boy Scout meeting when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

Independence County Sheriff Jeff D. Morgan was shot and killed outside the hotel on September 15, 1904. Another reported visitor to the hotel was William Jennings Bryan, an attorney in the “Scopes monkey trial,” as well as a German spy who was captured by authorities in the Arlington during World War I.

The Arlington was billed as Batesville’s luxury hotel. Historians noted that “curtained coaches harnessed to solid steeds” transported patrons and their baggage from the train depot to the hotel, where bellhops carried the luggage to readied rooms.

The hotel had a front lobby and a staircase lined with a walnut banister up to the third floor. Originally, the kitchen was a one-story building attached to the rear of the hotel with a bake-oven, and the hotel also contained a billiard room, which was said to be “fashionable for quality hotels of that day.”

The lot where the Arlington/Marvin Hotel stood and where the new location of “The River Haunt,” a benefit haunted house, will be located.

In 1903, the upper level of the hotel was destroyed by fire. The third floor was removed, and the roof was modified from a gable type to a flat roof. James A. Luster rebuilt the hotel and reopened it.

Winnie Lester Atchison inherited the property from Luster and owned it until 1967 when she sold it to Ed Lumpkin. It was while Atchison owned the property that running water was hooked up to the hotel. Up until that time old iron pumps furnished water to the rooms. Atchison also installed steam heat in the hotel to heat the rooms.

The name of the hotel was changed to the Marvin Hotel when Marvin R. Bailey, a brother of Arkansas Gov. Carl Bailey, leased it.

Once known as the oldest continuously operating hotel in Arkansas, the Marvin closed for good in April 1990 after the northeast corner of the building collapsed. Eddie Lumpkin had hoped to rebuild the hotel, but unfortunately that never happened.

Then, just before midnight on Oct. 25, 2001, the Batesville Fire Department was called to a fire at the Marvin. When they arrived, the structure was fully engulfed.

What was left was eventually torn down, and for a brief time, the Batesville Area Arts Council’s then director, Jim Tucker, wanted to rebuild a center there. However, the Historic Marvin Hotel Phoenix Project proposal never got off the ground, and the lot has been vacant for nearly 25 years.

Except where noted, images from “Up from the River,” a 2016 book regarding the history of a short section of Batesville’s Main Street.