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.
What guests love, Mehar has learned, is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. To be afraid, basically.
“America’s Scariest Motel,” say the brochures by the register. “Let fear run down your spine.”
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?)
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.
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.
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.
“When we came here, there were 800 or 850 clowns,” Mehar said. “Right now, we have close to 6,000.”
Throughout the motel’s 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.
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 “malevolent entity.”
The hotel also advises all guests that, despite monthly pest-control visits, they may encounter “UFI’s (Unwanted Flying Insects),” because rooms open to the outdoors. (This part of Nevada is known for its many Mormon crickets.)