The Mizpah in Haunted Nevada

The Mizpah Hotel in Nevada sits in a location that is exceptionally easy to ignore. Like many of Nevada’s small and neglected desert settlements, the town of Tonopah was founded with the intent to extract the newly discovered silver beneath it, around the turn of the 20th century in its case. The Mizpah Hotel opened its doors not long after. Between its construction in the 1900s and 1927, the building held the honor of the tallest building in the state of Nevada, sharing this with the Belvada Building in the same town. The hotel boasts links to many historic figures, from legendary lawman Wyatt Earp and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, who both allegedly worked there, to Howard Hughes and Jean Peters, who it is said held their wedding there. Although each of these stories has been disproven, they have all become part of the enigmatic lore of the hotel.

This lore stretches beyond celebrity cameos and backstories, however, and into much seedier elements. A number of murders are said to have happened at the hotel, and the spirits linked to them are still tied to the site. One ghost is known as the Lady in Red, and her prominence in the local lore is enough to have an entire room in the hotel named after her. In life, she was a prostitute who was accustomed to the high life and lived out of the hotel’s top floor. When she would not give up her lucrative profession for a boyfriend, he strangled her in that very room. If you want your very own experience to mimic Jack Nicholson’s from The Shining, hang around the Mizpah’s third floor for a bit, and you may encounter a duo of mischievous ghostly children. Don’t worry. They are not malevolent, but some visitors have understandably found their disembodied giggling quite unsettling.