
Get your spook on by exploring The Silver State’s haunted hot spots
By Liz Fleming

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue. View the full issue here.
Love a scary movie? Me too. Always up for a haunted house tour? I’m with you. Think a good scream is just what the doctor ordered for stress relief?
Then you want to check out Nevada. Not Transylvania … Nevada. The state is a witch’s cauldron of haunted spots to explore!
We started our ghostly expedition in Las Vegas, where you might have thought all the noise and lights from the casinos would scare the spirits away. But no. Apparently, they love the glitz and glam as much as we enjoyed the Ghost Tour of the Las Vegas Strip.
While no ghosts actually appeared on the crowded sidewalks, our very enthusiastic tour guide was positive they were all around us. As we strolled, her ghost-meter (an electromagnetic field meter or EMF, like the ones you’ve seen on Ghost Hunters) whirred, buzzed, and clicked as green and red lights lit up the screen. She thought we might have encountered Howard Hughes, a famous denizen of the Strip, or perhaps the spirit of the long-ago blue lady who lost so much at the tables that she took a final spin off the roof of one of the big hotels. Who knows?
Regardless of which spirit was providing the energy, it certainly made the tour entertaining and got us in the mood for the next day’s adventure at Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum.
A Spooky Museum
The weather was hot so we were glad to be ushered into the cool, dark, more-than-a-bit-spooky lobby. We knew Zak Bagans, of course, from his Travel Channel show, Ghost Adventures, and were prepared for a Hollywood-style haunted house. What we didn’t expect, however, was the depth and breadth of his collection of creepy artifacts – everything from parts of the car driven by James Dean on his last fateful night, to belongings of Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, to a chest considered so demonically possessed that it’s locked in an impenetrable glass case.
The collection is cleverly divided into rooms through which guests are led by informative tour guides. The whole experience takes well over an hour and if you don’t find your heart racing more than a few times, check your pulse. You might be dead and just not know it.
A Haunting in Tonopah
From Vegas, we headed for the tiny, spooky town of Tonopah, home to the Mizpah Hotel. Now an entirely respectable, rather elegant Victorian-style inn, the Mizpah was once a place where ladies of the evening plied their trade. And the room we stayed in was the scene of the less-than-happy ending of one – the lady in red. Her portrait hangs in the feminine bedroom, where a canopy bed and an elegant dressing table remind visitors of just who lived, and died, here.
To get ourselves warmed up for the eerie night ahead, we visited the hotel’s dark, cob-webby basement. Children, former owners, employees, Civil War soldiers – there seemed to be a whole underground collection of specters waiting for us. We’d been given another EMF that went off regularly, as well as a set of metallic dowsing rods – like those used to find water – that we used to ask the spirits yes and no questions. (If the rods crossed, that meant yes. And they did cross more than a few times.) An app on our guide’s phone detected spirit energy and turned it into small stick figures on the screen. One looked as if he was dancing so maybe being a ghost in the Mizpah Hotel isn’t such a bad thing after all.
We stayed up until midnight in our room, hoping the lady in red would appear, but she disappointed us – perhaps doubting our ghost-hunting qualifications. No worries. We ended up having a great night’s sleep and a delicious breakfast in the charming bar, then headed for the Clown Motel.
A Clownish Encounter
You’d think one famously haunted hotel would be enough for a town like Tonopah (population less than 2,000). But no. They have two.
The Clown Motel is just what you’d expect – a motel filled with clowns of every size and shape, all of them scary in the extreme. (Fear of clowns is a real thing called coulrophobia.) The owners, who can usually be found in the gift shop, are eager to tell you all about the weird events that happen, often in the middle of the night. Why?
Apparently, it’s not all the clown stuff that’s responsible. The real cause seems to be that the place sits next to the Tonopah graveyard, filled with the spirits of all sorts of former Tonopahians who met their ends in a variety of grisly ways. So give the Clown Motel two thumbs up for being high on the creep-o-meter for two reasons.
And do the owners have trouble renting those spooky rooms? Not a bit. In fact, ghost-hunting tourists come from all over the world, so book early if you’re planning a visit.
A Wild West Haunting
Our last stop on our haunted Nevada tour was the old cowboy town of Virginia City. With its wooden boardwalks, saloons and wild west atmosphere, it made us feel that we’d wandered onto the set of Bonanza or City Slickers. We checked into the charming Tahoe House Hotel – itself haunted by the ghost of Laura Fair, a former owner who not only shot a Yankee soldier for raising a flag on her roof, but also did away with a faithless lover.
We arrived just in time for a glass of sarsaparilla (the forerunner of root beer) at the Bucket of Blood Saloon before embarking on our third and perhaps most convincing ghost tour. Led by a woman with years of ghost-hunting experience, the Bats in the Belfry tour took us through back alleyways and into haunted buildings where she used another piece of equipment to turn spectral energy into sounds, as the ghosts answered questions. Did we really hear them? Maybe not, but the chills that ran up and down our spines were very real, and I promise you’ll have the same experience should you take the tour.
Did our visit convince us that ghosts exist? I might not go that far … but I can say that Nevada is filled with a true spirit of fun and is the perfect destination for Hallowe’en. Or really, any time you crave that delicious feeling of being thoroughly creeped out.
This article originally appeared within the Fall 2024 issue. View the full issue here, or browse all back issues in the CRACKYL Library.