Why Does This Clown Motel Exist??

Two hundred and ten miles from the Las Vegas strip in the remote city of Tonopah, Nevada is one of the strangest and most awful things I have ever heard of. The Clown Motel is a motel completely dedicated to and decorated with clowns. To make it even better, the motel is adjacent to an allegedly haunted cemetery.

Leroy and Leona Davis are the mad people who opened the motel in 1985 with their late father's clown collection (200 clown pieces at the time). What’s wild is that ownership has changed twice, most recently being purchased for $900,000 in 2017. Today, the motel’s clown collection has grown to over 2,000 items.

The cemetery next door to the motel was actively used for only 10 years, 1901-1911. The majority of the people buried there were victims of the 1905 Tonopah Plague and a massive mine fire in 1911. This naturally leads people to think the hotel is haunted, and the owners most definitely play it up by having many rooms themed after horror movies.

In the 2010s many interesting things happened with the hotel. In 2015, it was featured in an episode of Ghost Adventures. In the same year, Christopher Sebela stayed in the hotel for a month and created a comic book about his experience. In 2016, a short film titled Clown Motel: the film was shot there with a follow-up in 2019.

This is some creepy-ass shit. You'd sleep better at the Mizpah Hotel that’s also allegedly haunted, but who cares, no one’s ever died of a ghost. Tonopah has a bunch of places that are apparently spiritual and supernatural, and it is interesting that this tiny town in the middle of nowhere has developed a distinct culture.