A Tonopah, Nevada motel packed with thousands of clowns sits beside a cemetery and markets itself as America’s scariest overnight, yet guests keep coming.
Along the long desert stretch between Reno and Las Vegas, the Clown Motel has turned clown statues, horror-themed rooms, and a graveyard next door into a steady draw for travelers who want a night they will talk about later.
Its own website calls it “America’s Scariest Motel.” That pitch rests on clown memorabilia floor to ceiling, reported hauntings, and a location few other lodgings can match: right beside the cemetery where the collection’s original owner is buried.
Mental Floss traced the place to a family story that began with Clarence David, a man who built a clown collection and died in a 1942 fire. His children, Leona and Leroy, later opened the motel next to the cemetery where he was buried, framing the stop as a tribute rather than a gimmick. First guests checked in in 1985.
Bob and Deborah Perchetti bought the property in 1995. For years it stayed relatively quiet on the map. That changed after a 2015 Ghost Adventures shoot, when the crew recorded what it presented as mysterious shadows, disembodied voices, and a clown statue that appeared to move on its own. Visitors have chased that reputation ever since.
Vijay Mehar purchased the motel in 2019 and leaned hard into the brand. The collection grew from about 600 statues to more than 4,000 clown-themed items. Rooms now nod to horror films such as It, Halloween, and The Exorcist. Guests can rent ghost-hunting gear on site. Mehar has also talked about eventually adding a haunted house and a museum.
Local legend assigns a spirit called “The Trickster” to room 108 and claims it has been seen walking in from the cemetery in clown form. One visitor account described waking up to a seven-foot clown hovering over the bed. Those stories sit in the same category as other Tonopah lore: visitor claims, TV segments, and town talk, not court findings or lab proof.
Musician and paranormal investigator Brocarde filmed there and left with a vivid report of the museum floor and several rooms.
Brocarde said:
"Hundreds and hundreds of eyes follow you. There is an intense feeling of being watched and a strange heaviness in the museum... There was a dark energy in some rooms. 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."
She called the visit memorable and still drew a hard line at sleeping over.
The town itself supplies the backdrop. In the early 1900s Tonopah boomed as a mining community. Local retellings include a 1905 plague said, in legend, to have hit only grown men, and a 1911 Belmont Mine fire that killed 17 miners. Later decades brought more area fires. That history of sudden death sits a short walk from the motel’s clown-filled lobby.
A few minutes away on Main Street, the Mizpah Hotel offers another haunted stop. A 2018 USA Today survey ranked it the top haunted hotel in America. Staff there sell ghost tours and point to a woman said to have been strangled and stabbed on the fifth floor, plus other spirits. Bethany Thompson, the Mizpah’s food and beverages director, put the town’s mood in plain terms.
Thompson said:
"I don’t think there is one building on Main Street that is not haunted."
She added that most people in town have ghost stories of their own. The same feature notes the Mizpah has not reported clown sightings to match the motel next to the graves.
Daytime visitors can still tour a mining park and the Central Nevada Museum. Not far off sits the Tonopah Test Range, a sprawling ballistics site used for nuclear weapon stockpile reliability testing and sometimes called Area 52. The motel’s pitch stacks all of it, clowns, graves, mine disasters, and desert isolation, into one overnight stop on the Reno-to-Las Vegas drive.
None of that requires a customer to believe in poltergeists. It does require a owner willing to buy a odd property, multiply the clown count by nearly seven, theme the rooms to horror films, and rent EMF meters to people who want a scare with their key card. Mehar did that work in open view. Guests who want ordinary sheets and a quiet parking lot can keep driving. The ones who pull in know the cemetery is part of the product.
In a country that still lets small operators sell a strange night’s sleep without a federal vibe check, the Clown Motel is doing exactly what the market asks: give willing adults a story worth telling when they get home.
