Warning: If you don’t like clowns, run. RUN FAST! This whole post is about sleeping in a clown motel, next to a graveyard, that is possibly haunted, in the middle of the desert, where no one will hear your screams.
But, if like me, the idea of the high possibility of starring in a real life horror movie gets you all wet inside, then come right in, and enjoy the show…..
In the middle of Hills Have Eyes Country, Nevada, is the place where nightmares are made.
So of course I had to go there!
I drove the 3 hours or so up the desolate Rt 95, where few, mostly abandoned towns pop out of the desert to offer much needed fuel, food, and relief for travelers.
It’s a little unnerving when speed limits suddenly drop from 75 to 20, and you feel every eye on you and your very obviously un-dusty city car.
But when you are heading to a clown motel, the possibly homeless man picking through the gas station garbage, the inability to figure out if a business is abandoned or open from the outside, and the knowledge that you are hours and hundreds of miles away from any sort of help that you aren’t afraid might be part of a local, tourist-hating, animal-raping, human-butchering cult, just adds to the awesomeness of the fact that:
YOU ARE SLEEPING IN A CLOWN MOTEL TONIGHT!
I warned you.
My heart skipped a couple of beats as I pulled up, at dusk, to this desolate looking obscurity. Pausing, as I put my hand on the office door to claim the room I had reserved over the phone, I inhaled quickly, thinking, “Am I ready for this? Am I walking into my doom. Does my mother know I love her?…” And I pulled the door open and stepped in….
It’s amazing how many clowns they have stored in this tiny reception area. All sorts of shapes, sizes, and levels of terror-inducing, panic attackness. I quickly claimed my key and exited this reception area to retire to my room, which luckily has less clowns, but …
There are photos of clowns on the walls, hanging over your head, that stare at you while you sleep!
Oh, and did I mention the graveyard in the adjacent lot? Home to early 1900’s miners. Many of whom died in a mine fire, or from something called the ‘Tonopah Plague’?
Awesome. Clowns and dead, burnt-corpsed ghosts wielding pick-axes.
I like clowns, yet I still woke up throughout the night having dreams about clowns and burnt zombie miners coming into my hotel room (which was on the first floor, so that wasn’t at all more unnerving).
So if you want to scare the crap out of yourself, head 3 hours north of Las Vegas and sleep for a night (if you can sleep) in one of the creepiest places on Earth.
Sweet dreams!
(PS: Turns out the people who run the Clown Motel are actually really nice and not scary at all. And the beds were really comfortable! Also there was a crew doing a ‘ghost hunter’ type show while I was there. So that was great. A tv crew there to piss off the dead miners. Awesome. But the Clown Motel is a great place to stay, and half a block down the street, on the left, is an awesome, little, Mexican restaurant where I had the best margarita I’ve ever tasted. )
About Dani Blanchette
