What are you scared of? Because Tonopah has it all.
“I
remember thinking to myself on several occasions that if I was in a horror movie, everyone would be yelling at their screen, ‘Don’t stay in that hotel! Don’t go in that cemetery!’” says Mark Steele, the owner of the Restaurant Hospitality Institute in Las Vegas, upon visiting The Clown Motel, a 31-room roadside motel in tiny Tonopah, Nevada, the nightmare-fueling, self-proclaimed “America’s Scariest Motel” with his wife, Cara, and their dog in 2020. The creepy vibes led him to Facebook to ensure that everyone knew where they’d checked in–just in case they never checked out.
“Before heading to bed, I posted, ‘If no one hears from us again…’ And then [proceeded to have] one of the worst nights of sleep in my life–despite a long day of driving and a few drinks in my system. Cara tossed and turned and had vivid nightmares. The dog uncharacteristically barked all night. We were there barely 15 hours, yet it’s left a lifelong impression.
It would have been creepy enough that they were given the room below one where someone was supposedly killed. And that there was Old Tonopah Cemetery next door, a dilapidated old’ miner’s cemetery where tin tombstone plaques on old mostly wood tombstones of miners detail colorful and now uncommon ways to die— “died eating library paste”, “stabbed by her husband with a miner’s candle holder”. But it’s the thousands of clown toys, figurines, marionettes, masks, drawings, and paintings that line shelves, engulf the front desk, fill every nook and cranny and hang from the ceiling of lobby/museum–not to mention the eyeholes that peer out from a secret room—that add a layer of surreality to the upset.
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“We aren’t afraid of clowns and nothing overt happened, but I was sufficiently creeped out,” says Cara of their stay. “And I also enjoyed [The Clown Motel] enough that I bought a T-shirt.”
That equal measure of joy and fear—of which clowns themselves have always been a source—best explains the historical allure of this Tonopah treasure, which sits where the Mojave Desert meets the Great Basin Desert 200 miles from Las Vegas and 240 from Reno. Over the last decade however, fright has been the lure. In 2015, Zak Bagans, the host of 26 seasons of the Travel Channel/Discovery+ series Ghost Adventures and The Haunted Museum founder, filmed an episode at The Clown Motel that included an unexplained dark silhouette, an unaccounted-for voice speaking through a spirit box, and the hand of a giant clown moving by itself. (Said clown is the photo op in the museum.)
After the episode aired, then-motel owner Bob Perchetti said the reservations line lit up, and people from around the world started shipping their clowns to the motel. The dolls often came with tragic backstories and/or claims of curses and possessions. They still arrive quite regularly, according to the new owner Vijay Mehar–the demonic depository now numbers close to 6,000 pieces.
“Hundreds and hundreds of eyes follow you,” rock singer turned London-based paranormal investigator Brocarde recalls of her visit to The Clown Motel. Despite having visited tons of haunt spots for her YouTube channel, she wasn’t quite prepared to come face to face with the heebie-jeebies-inducing horde in oversized shoes. “There is an intense feeling of being watched and a strange heaviness in the museum.”
More pop culture attention followed. Christopher Sebela funded a month-long stay via Kickstarter, which resulted in a supernatural comic book detailing “the dumbest thing [he] ever did.” Director Joseph Kelly shot two Clown Motel horror films on location in 2016 and 2019. An eerily similar “Clown Inn” map appeared in a season of Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
The lore includes modern-day tales of death on the property mixed with legends of Tonopah’s history: mining accidents, drunk shootouts, jilted lovers, and double-crossed thieves (some of which are conveniently buried next door and possibly even under the motel). Meanwhile, reports of unexplained sounds, objects moving autonomously, and run-ins with malevolent entities grew.
Whether the scary stories were true or not didn’t seem to matter. More and more ghost hunters, paranormal enthusiasts, and Youtubers/TikTokkers showed up. Brocarde’s stay made her a believer.
“There was a dark energy in some rooms,” she says. “Throughout filming, I felt something trying to pull me to the floor, and something grabbed my arm [while] I was putting lipstick on. I ended up with [it] all over my face. I felt attacked [by] a malevolent poltergeist who was mocking me. But I loved the experience–not in a hurry to go back [though], and I definitely wouldn’t stay the night ever again.”
The business grew more focused on its wayward spirits and clown menagerie (which ranges from harmless Ronald McDonalds to seriously terrifying tramps and painted-face pop-culture villains like Pennywise and The Joker). When Mehar took over in 2019, he leaned all the way in, telling the Los Angeles Times his customers “want to be scared.”
And who is he to deny the people what they want? To supersize the shock and macabre, Mehar added two-story clown cutouts to the façade, hall murals, a gazebo to picnic with the cemetery’s poltergeists, and themed rooms around It, Clownvis Presley, , Halloween, and The Exorcist. He rents ghost-hunting equipment and quadrupled the gift shop offerings, and . hopes to complete a 900-square-foot museum expansion by the end of 2025. He fantasizes about converting a room into a honeymoon suite and running a year-round haunted house made of shipping containers in the back.
“It used to be a real fleabag. Now he has one of the top attractions bringing tourists to our town,” says Tonopah Historic Mining Park guide Jeff Martin, a self-proclaimed skeptic with an asterisk. (In 2012, Martin experienced his own disturbing stay at The Clown Motel when his born-deaf dog woke up suddenly ears alert at 1:30 am, went to the window and stared out at the cemetery with its paws on the sill growling until the sun came up. Martin’s other two hearing dogs peacefully slumbered.)
“Even without the haunted part, the thousands of clowns are interesting,” Martin says. “Clearly the scary element brings more people to his business, so he’s obviously trying to capitalize on that.”
But fear wasn’t always the way. In fact, the motel has kind of a sweet origin story. In 1985, siblings Leona and Leroy David opened The David Motel in honor of their late father, a miner who died tragically and was buried next door. There are differing accounts of which Belmont Mine Fire—in 1911 or 1942—took Clarence David’s life. Undisputed, however is that the elder David collected clown art and figurines, and as a further tribute, his children decorated the motel with his original 150-piece collection.
“It was very different back then, just your average roadside motel,” says town manager Joe Westerlund, a Tonopah native who had just gone off to college when it opened. “Back then, it would have been really strange to be driving by and see someone dressed up like a clown or doing a photo shoot with the sign. Now it is almost stranger when I don’t.”
Westerlund is exaggerating The Clown Motel’s popularity, but only to an extent. Tonopah Main Street executive director Kat Galli says the “one-of-a-kind attraction [with] its quirkiness is most certainly a magnet bringing people of all ages and walks of life to town” en masse.
“It for certain makes for an Instagrammable visit,” Galli says.
Given the pervasiveness of coulrophobia (fear of clowns), it’s a little hard to swallow that all 2,851 residents of a town that dates back to Jim Butler’s 1900 Silver Strike are fine with having a compound full of clowns down the street. But Westerlund says the town views it as a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats situation.
“The town embraces it. They really do, because it brings people in from all over the country and the world almost daily,” Westerlund continues. “And ‘heads in beds,’ as they say in tourism, helps fund the town and keep family businesses open. Even if they are coming specifically for The Clown Motel, they’ll stay in a hotel, eat, get gas, take a tour. Because of where we are, in a remote part of the state in the middle of the high desert, it has to be a team effort to get people to come and make them want to stay and see more.”
The hope is that The Clown Motel will naturally lead visitors to the cemetery, the mining park, or the Central Nevada Museum to learn more about life in a boomtown and mining practices. And it’s extensively creepy history.
“Tonopah has a crazy past—fires, a flood, most of the tunnels in and around town have collapsed with miners in them,” says Bethany Thompson, director of food & beverage at The Mizpah Hotel, once the tallest building in Nevada and arguably Tonopah’s most haunted site. The Mizpah, built in 1907 and remodeled and reopened in 2011, has a couple tours a week in the winter but up to two a night during the busy season on which you might meet Walter the elevator ghost, the third floor’s mischievous child spirits whose prostitute mother locked them in the basement icebox one too many times, the miners murdered by their heist accomplice in their getaway tunnel or the infamous Lady in Red, a 1920s sex worker murdered by a jealous john when he found her with another client. You can even stay in her former “office,” room 504.
“I don’t think there is one building on Main Street that is not haunted,” says Thompson. “Most people in town have [ghost] stories of their own.”
Basically, striking paranormal paydirt in this silver settlement requires very little effort, making it an ideal spot for a spirited getaway. To meet what Galli calls “Tonopah’s eternal residents,” she suggests hitting The Clown Motel, the Tonopah Liquor Company (TLC), the Old Cemetery, the mining park and, of course, The Mizpah.
“TLC’s owner says the ghosts in the bar are friendly and there is a maternal spirit–but there is one angry ghost in the basement that does not like visitors,” Galli says. “I have taken groups down there and people will walk into the back corner and go, ‘Nope,’ and just turn around.”
Though the pandemic-paused town-sponsored ghost tours have yet to resume (rest assured, they are working on bringing them back, as well as ramping up paranormal tourism in general), most supernatural sites offer one-off events like the mining park’s June after-dark ghost investigation with Marie Mason, or tours on request like The Clown Motel.
“Most of [The Mizpah’s] special guests are very nice, unless you wear red to the Lady in Red’s Suite. She does not like that,” warns Thompson, who adds that the ghosts usually stick to moving things around, shaking chandeliers, walking the halls, and opening and closing doors. Occasionally, an unexplained pearl is left on pillows.
Overall, Martin says the locals have pretty much come to terms with the fact that the majority of tourists are drawn to The Clown Motel and the rest of Tonopah for the things that go bump in the night.
“It’s just one of our things now, and anything that draws people to us is a plus,” Martin says. “Tonopah was once the greatest, richest mining camp in the world. People came from everywhere for the work, drilling competitions, casinos, boxing, the opera house. If they came here for a good time, why wouldn’t those who never left not still want to have a good time?”
He adds, “And if looking for and learning about their ghosts is your idea of a good time, I figure we should just have fun with it.”
