About halfway on the long, dusty drive from Las Vegas to Reno, there\u2019s a wide spot in the road known as Tonopah. And along Main Street in Tonopah stands perhaps the creepiest overnight option in all Nevada.<\/p>\n
Bold claim, I know. But the Clown Motel is special. Owner Vijay Mehar has taken an old motel and filled it with clowns. Paintings, murals, dools, ceramic figures. Many of them frowning or shrieking. <\/p>\n
What guests love, Mehar has learned, is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. To be afraid, basically.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmerica\u2019s Scariest Motel,\u201d say the brochures by the register. \u201cLet fear run down your spine.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 31 guest rooms teem with enough clown imagery to eclipse a Ringling Brothers reunion. The gift shop is vast and troubling. (Clown knife, anyone?)<\/p>\n
And then there are the neighbors. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents.<\/p>\n
Some guests sign up for ghost hunt tours or explore the cemetery after dark. Others settle in with a horror movie, perhaps one of the several made on site, along with countless Youtube videos.<\/p>\n
When I visited in late 2024, Mehar said hundreds of people stop by the motel on busy days, mostly focusing on the gift shop and the crowded, dusty shelves of the lobby-adjacent clown museum. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we came here, there were 800 or 850 clowns,\u201d Mehar said. \u201cRight now, we have close to 6,000.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout the motel\u2019s corridors, walls and no-frills guest rooms (rated at 3.5 stars by Yelp and Trip Advisor), the clowns continue against a color scheme of purple, yellow and red, augmented by polka dots of blue and green. Rates start at $99.<\/p>\n
If you book Room 222, which highlights Clownvis (Elvis as a clown, basically), the motel warns that you may be awakened in the wee hours by a mysterious \u201cmalevolent entity.\u201d <\/p>\n
The hotel also advises all guests that, despite monthly pest-control visits, they may encounter \u201cUFI\u2019s (Unwanted Flying Insects),\u201d because rooms open to the outdoors. (This part of Nevada is known for its many Mormon crickets.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About halfway on the long, dusty drive from Las Vegas to Reno, there\u2019s a wide spot in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6200,6203,6208,6205,6202,1743,6199,6206,1510,6204,6201,995,315,6207],"class_list":["post-5751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-ghost-story","tag-gold-rush","tag-gorgeous-beach","tag-guide","tag-haunted-hotel","tag-hollywood","tag-hotel","tag-intrigue","tag-land","tag-moonless-night","tag-room","tag-tech","tag-time","tag-tragedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}