HGB Ep. 607 - Mizpah Hotel

This Month in History - National Hagfish Day

In the month of October, on the 21st, in 2009, National Hagfish Day was established by the non-profit marine conservation organization WhaleTimes. Hagfish are a strange looking, jawless, slime-producing fish that live deep on the oceans floors. Found around the globe, the peculiar fish play an important role as scavengers, cleaning the ocean floor and recycling nutrients. They prefer silty, muddy bottoms that they can burrow into. Similar to the shape of an eel, the hagfish has also been likened to that of a giant, pink worm. The extreme slime threads produced by these unique creatures can be used as ultra strong fibers for clothing. The slime can be spun into threads, similar to spider silk or Kevlar. The purpose of creating National Hagfish Day is to appreciate the less charismatic creatures of the ocean, the important role they play in the marine ecosystem, and the threats they face such as overfishing and pollution. National Hagfish Day is celebrated annually on the third Wednesday of every October.

***So, the take-away is that slimy hagfish haute couture, may be coming to a store near you!?  

Mizpah Hotel

The Mizpah Hotel has been voted the number one haunted hotel by a couple of publications. Not surprising for a hotel that has stood for 120 years. And it's been able to stand this long because this is one strong hotel. This building was formed from concrete, stone and brick in the Nevada town of Tonopah near the height of its mining boom. The lighted sign that sits on the roof can be seen from miles away. We wonder if that sign not only attracts travelers to come and stay the night, but does it get the attention of spirits as well? There are several spirits here, including a Lady in Red. Oh, and did you know that the Clown Motel is in Tonopah too. We'll talk about that as well. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Mizpah Hotel. 

Tonopah was the Queen of the Silver Camps. The town is located between Las Vegas and Reno in Nevada and began with the second richest silver strike in the state. How this silver was discovered is a matter of which story one wants to believe. A prospector named Jim Butler had married a Paiute woman and he more than likely learned from her tribe that there was some pretty silver minerals in the area. But the legendary story is much more interesting. Apparently, Butler had a burro that got away from him one night and he was quite frustrated looking for it the next day. When he found the creature, he picked up a rock to throw at it and he noticed the rock was really heavy and then he realized it was silver and BOOM! So 1900 would see the birth of another Nevada mining town. The town was named for Butler until 1905 when it was changed to Tonopah. Men flooded the town looking for their fortunes and this included many Chinese men as well. One of these men was a 24-year-old George Wingfeild. He was a gambler and found great success at the poker tables and soon had a gaming license. He had a friend come to town and start a bank, which he invested in and the men partnered in buying mines and supplying miners. They headed off for Goldfield later, having made around $30 million in Tonopah and knowing that the town would soon go bust. The mining in town peaked in 1913 and then slid until 1921 when the town's population was half what it had been. But before that bust, the Mizpah Saloon was the place to be in town. 

The Mizpah Saloon was a one-story building and shared a name with one of the mines. Mizpah comes from a Hebrew word meaning lookout. The word was connected to a story in the Bible featuring Jacob and his father-in-law Laban and a promise they made between each other. The erected a pile of stones as this mizpah watchtower and this served as a witness between the two men and God. This then became a word that represented an emotional bond between people and there is special mizpah jewelry inspired by this. Jim Butler's wife Belle is the one who gave one of the mines the name Mizpah. It was the richest and most successful in the town. 

The Mizpah Hotel was built by George Wingfield, George S. Nixon, Cal Brougher and Bob Govan in 1907 from reinforced concrete with stones on the front and bricks on the sides and rear. Architect George E. Holesworth designed the hotel, which stood five stories, matching the height of the Belvada Building that was built the previous year. The buildings shared the title of tallest building in the town. The Mizpah also had a three-story building next door that had rooms on the upper floors and businesses on the ground floor. The buildings were connected with a wood stairway crowned with a skylight. It cost $200,000 to build and was one of the first luxury hotels in the state of Nevada, featuring leaded glass windows, solid granite walls, Victorian-era appointments, solid oak furniture, and an electric elevator, which was unheard of at the time. There was also hot and cold running water and steam heating. 

There are many legends connected to the hotel, most of them not having any truth to them. One legend about the bar at the hotel claims that Wyatt Earp kept the bar at the Mizpah. That wasn't true. Earp did move to Tonopah in 1902 and he did co-found a saloon, but that was called The Northern. He served as a private police force for the town as well, mostly going after claim jumpers. Apparently, Earp left town before the Mizpah Hotel was ever built. Another legend claims that Jack Dempsey was a bouncer, but he always maintained that he had never been a bouncer. He did, however, box in Tonopah in bare knuckle fights and some of them lasted up to 25 rounds. And then there is the legend that Howard Hughes married Jean Peters at the Mizpah. Hughes did get married in town, but it wasn't at this hotel. 

And then there is the legend connected to Key Pittman. Pittman had been a powerful Democrat senator in the U.S. Senate. He advocated for and supported the silver industry in his home state of Nevada, so everyone called him the Silver Senator. He was  running for a sixth term in the U.S. Senate in 1940 when he died. Apparently, the Senator liked his drink and he was drinking heavily as he campaigned through Nevada. On November 4, Pittman had a heart attack and was hospitalized where two separate doctors said he would die shortly. Newspapers were told that he was just exhausted and resting at the hospital. The next day was election day and people went to the polls and re-elected Pittman. Pittman did die on November 10th. Now, some stories claimed that Pittman had the heart attack in Reno, but the more interesting tale claims that he was in Tonopah and that he actually died before the election and was put on ice in the hotel. The truth was hidden, so that people would vote for him. The book "The Green Felt Jungle" shared this legend and it became fact. So while Nevadans like to share a story that their state once elected a dead man, that wasn't true. But the story of Pittman on ice in a bathtub at the Mizpah continues to be told by some in the town today. 

The 1940s also saw gaming come to the hotel. The first chips were issued in 1945. Guests could play at the craps table, roulette wheel, poker and blackjack tables and slot machines. The Mizpah closed in 2000 and sat abandoned. Today, the hotel is owned by Fred and Nancy Cline who purchased the property in 2010. They restored the hotel to its prior glory, keeping the lobby full of plush antiques that transports one back to a previous era. The doors reopened in 2011 and rooms offer elegance and luxury linens. There is the Lady in Red Suite or the Jim & Belle Butler Suite, and the latter suite has a bed frame made from a wagon. The Pittman Cafe is award-winning and offers great breakfast fare. The Jack Dempsey Room serves up dinner and the Longshot Bar has drinks.

The Mizpah Hotel embraces their haunted reputation by offering ghosts tours that incorporate a little bit of hunting. Several employees will say that they didn't believe in ghosts before working at the hotel, but after being at the hotel for awhile, they are true believers. There are several spirits at the hotel. Ghost children run and laugh through the upper floors. They like to play pranks on hotel guests. And strangely, there is a soldier that roams the grounds. Perhaps a carry over from the Civil War or maybe even the Paiute War of 1860. Some claim to see him wearing a World War II uniform. He is seen often on the 4th floor. A bellhop wanders the floors with people's luggage. We're not sure how he came to his end, but it must have been while he was working. And even though we don't know if Key Pittman was actually in this hotel...and on ice...there are those who claim his spirit is here and they say they have seen his apparition. Two bank robbers have their spirits hiding in the basement. It is here that they met their ends at the hands of their third partner in crime who betrayed them and murdered them both and made off with all the loot. There is anger here and people feel unsettled in the basement. 

The most famous spirit here is The Lady in Red. I feel like we should cue Chris De Burgh's song about his wife. The story about the Lady in Red has nothing to do with being a wife though. This woman was a prostitute. She often worked in the Mizpah Hotel and she had one of those clients who decided that he wanted her all to himself. So he put her up on the 5th floor of the Mizpah hotel in a suite. That suite today has been broken up into three rooms to give you an idea of how big this was. No one is sure if she was strangled, beaten or stabbed to death, but she died on the 5th floor after her lover went into a jealous rage.  

Much of the paranormal activity at the hotel is attributed to her . She messes with the elevator, especially when it is on the 5th floor. Her disembodied whispers are heard, often by men, and this usually happens in the elevator. This is how she would have escorted men to her room back in the day. But the really weird thing that happens is that guests will find a single pearl under their pillows in the morning. This is said to be from the pearl necklace she was wearing on the night she died. Cordero Gomez wrote on the blog Traveling Fiction, "While I didn’t witness any paranormal activity in the room, lobby, or roaming the halls, my daughters described hearing whispers at night. They also said their bed lifted up. That’s some weird and spooky stuff. However, I didn’t hear or see anything, despite a restless night’s sleep. Many instances of hearing strange noises can rightly be assigned to the building settling, guests roaming the halls, the elevator opening, or the wind. However, while my youngest daughter and I were exploring the upper floors, my wife, Amber, and my eldest daughter heard a knock on the door. When Amber answered it, no one was there. Cliché, yes. Classic, most definitely. I can come up with theories, such as the knock coming from the room across the hall, or naughty children ding-dong ditching. What I can’t account for, however, is why there were no creaking or thuds from the floorboards? Is it proof of life after death? I don’t think so, but it is certainly unexplained." Steven B. wrote, "My husband and I recently stayed on the second floor, Room 207. The floor itself felt very heavy when we stepped off the elevator and, in fact, uncomfortable. We didn't have anything happen while awake. However, we did not sleep well. I have never been one who has a lot of dreams or nightmares, but I had one after another while trying to sleep there, so did my husband. From talking in our sleep, to yelling out and in fact I woke with a bruise on my arm that had not been there when I had gone to bed that night. After checking out of the hotel, we compared notes on our dreams and nightmares and found that we both had similar dreams...and in fact one of them actually was the same dream. I can't find anything written about a bellman in this hotel, but he and a very angry woman in period clothes seemed to frequent both our dreams the whole night. My husband also had a woman whisper "hey you" in his ear while in the lobby bathroom."

Yvette wrote, "I stayed in Room 205 with my 9lbs dog. She woke up around 3am startled and was looking back as if someone was trying to pet her. She jumped off the bed and proceeded to "avoid" this person for 5 minutes. I also felt a light touch on my ankle around midnight but dismissed it as nothing. The next morning, I noticed a thumb sized bruise on my left arm as well as a smaller one as if someone had pinched me." Hebert wrote, "The breakfast coffee station on the fifth floor is the corner of the floor where the lady in red is said to be. We were at the opposite end of the floor and my partner heard children playing in the hall way in the night, but there were no children on the floor." 

Letsctheworld wrote, "We are in the wagon wheel room right now. My husband was sitting in the chair while I'd gone down to get ice and he was tapped on the shoulder three times." Jill Delaney wrote in 2024, "My daughter and I stayed in the Lady in Red room in July of 2024. We went on the evening ghost tour, which was really cool. I felt something heavy pounce on the foot of the bed. It didn’t feel light like a cat, though. I woke up and gasped in fright, expecting the sheets to next get pulled off the bed. That didn’t happen, but for a split second I saw a large black dog curled up on the foot of the bed who was gazing at me with kind eyes. And then the image was gone. My daughter didn’t wake up at all. I asked the clerk in the morning if others have mentioned a ghost dog. She said that she sometimes sees a large black dog out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns nothing is there. Pretty cool." 

Ghost Adventures investigated the hotel in 2011. A static night vision camera was placed in the basement and captured a shadow figure. Zak also saw a shadow and this blocked out a light coming from under the door. They caught EVPs saying "Dammit, What The Heck", "We Got Work To Do", some moaning, an unexplained voice, an unexplained scream, "Hey You" and "I'm Evil." Nick said he felt as though something went through his body. The crew also heard knocking and banging. An elevator that no longer works suddenly opened and closed its doors. 

Sam and Colby visited in 2022 and the woman at the front desk said that she was standing next to a guest who was taking pictures in the lobby and in one of the pictures, they captured the Lady in Red. The woman described her as being in a red period dress and it looked as though she were captured in mid-waltz across the room. They were excited to see a rocking chair in their room because Connor Randall, one of the inventors of the ESTES Method, told them that rocking chairs enhance the session because of the rocking leading to a trance-like experience quickly. There were two women with the guys and the group was down in the basement where a vault had been and one of the girls was touched on the back of her neck. She had long hair so it had to go through the hair. The guide who was taking them through the basement had felt something touch the back of her head a little before this. This guide told them the following story, "I guess I'll start with the first time that I did an investigation. It was just me, Celia and Jonathan. I'm standing here, Celia is here, Jonathan is there. Celia all of a sudden starts like moving backward. She's like, I just got groped. Then all of a sudden I jump and I was like what the *F*, something just grabbed my leg full on and squeezed it. Then Jonathan's standing here and he goes, "Something is grabbing me." His whole sleeve was like [and she pulls the sleeve out away from her arm]. So all three of us got touched or grabbed." They used a spirit box and the Lady in Red identified herself as Evelyn. They think her name was Evelyn May Johnson. Most people refer to her as Rose, which could've been a pseudonym. They returned to the hotel again in 2023. 

There are other haunted locations in Tonopah. The town has seen some tragedy. There was the Tonopah Plague, which swept through the town in 1905. What started as chest pains lead to death within a number of hours. People's livers turned black and hard as stone. It was believed that poor sanitation led to the illness. Hundreds died. In the early hours of February 23, 1911, a fire broke out in the Belmont Mine, at least 1100 feet deep.   

A man named William 'Big Bill' Murphy set out to rescue the trapped miners in the mine and he went down in the cage and returned with it full. He went a second time and then a third. When the cage got to the surface, Big Bill was not on board and one of the injured miners said that someone had fallen out of the cage. It was Bill, of course. His last words before he went down that third time were, "Well boys, I've made two trips and I'm nearly all in, but I'll try again." Bill was only 28-years-old and he had saved many men. His tombstone in the Tonopah Cemetery reads, "Died while saving others." Seventeen miners lost their lives that day, along with Big Bill. There was another fire in 1942. The Tonopah Historic Mining Park is located where several f the original mines were located. The park covers 100 acres and offers history exhibits, self-guided tours and ATV tours. The park is open seven days a week and hosts a few spirits. The name of one of the ghosts is Bina Verrault and she is said to be elegant and smart. Hard to believe she was a criminal. She apparently was on the run from the law, having made it to Nevada from New York City. Bina died of alcoholism and was buried in the Old Tonopah Cemetery. She is seen looking out of the windows of buildings. The disembodied voices of dead miners is heard and people have captures anomalies on their cameras.

The Tonopah Liquor Company is a historic saloon that was established in 1906. They have over 100 whiskeys on site. There are a couple of ghosts here. One is Hattie who is believed to be a former barmaid. She seems to love children and is a benevolent spirit. The other is George Davis who went by the nickname Devil. He loves to play pranks because he was a trickster in real life. Apparently, he was a black man whose wife shot him in the back. He had abused her so she was only given a year in prison for it.

The Vanwood Variety Store had been the Nye County Bank. The building was constructed in 1902 and was Tonopah’s first permanent stone building. Visitors and staff in the store say that there are cold spots, unusual lights, strange sounds and disembodied voices. The spirit here may belong to a former bank employee who died inside the old basement safe. The Old Tonopah Cemetery was founded in 1901. There are 300 graves in this dusty cemetery. Burials stopped in 1911. People claim to see mysterious lights in the cemetery and they hear strange noises. Full-bodied apparitions are seen walking among the tombstones. They have self-guided maps, so a cool place to visit. And wouldn't you know that this cemetery sits right next door to the infamous Clown Motel. 

The Clown Motel was built in 1985 by the children of Clarence David, Leona & Leroy. Clarence had been buried in the Tonopah Cemetery and so they decided to open a motel next to it. Their father had collected clowns, so they used the motel to display all 150 pieces of that collection. There are clown statues, dolls, paintings and toys. In 1995, Bob and Deborah Perchetti bought The Clown Motel because they lived in Tonopah.  Bob ran the hotel for twenty years and it was popular with motorcyclists, but traffic was slow. That was until Ghost Adventures visited in 2015. 

Zak's crew put the motel on the map. People not only visited, but sent clowns from all over the world. There are now around 6,000 clown items. During their investigation they caught a shadow figure and they had "Hello, it turned on" come across the Spirit Box. And they caught the hand of a large clown moving off it's leg entirely of it's own accord on camera. In 2017, Bob decided to retire and put the motel up for $ 900,000 with the strict condition that the new owners had to keep the clown collection at the motel. The motel sold in 2019 to the Mehar family and they have embraced the Clown Motel's haunted reputation. Vijay Mehar worked as a Master Chef in hotels around the world and he has worked hard to renovate the motel. He gave it a 360-degree facelift by revamping its exterior adding clown colors and polka dots to give it a real circus look. Jolly the Clown has become the brand of the motel and so there are two Jolly Clown cutouts that stand 19ft. tall on the outside. There are themed rooms featuring the Exorcist, Friday the 13th, IT, Fear Unlimited and a Chucky Room. They offer ghost hunting at the motel. If you do want to record videos, there are rules and money and such, which seems to be a growing trend in some of these haunted locations. And reviews indicate that it is scary for all the wrong reasons. People do claim to have experienced objects being moved, hearing disembodied voices, seeing full-bodied apparitions and experiencing unexplained cold spots and hearing strange sounds. EVPS include "we mined" and "we died that day." One guest had a terrifying dream of a headless lady in a rocking chair.

Tonopah has a deep mining history and the tragedies in the town lend themselves to hauntings. Is the Mizpah Hotel and these other locations haunted? That is for you to decide!