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Tribune News Service

Business is so good at the Clown Motel, you might expect more of its painted faces to be smiling.
But as Vijay Mehar has learned in his years as owner of the creepiest motel in Tonopah, Nevada, happy clowns are not what most of his customers want.
What they seem to want is fear, loathing, painted faces, circus vibes and hints of paranormal activity. Basically, Mehar says, “they want to be scared”.
So, with the aim of luring more people off Main Street (aka US Route 95) to visit this 31-room motel in the dusty, stark middle of Nevada, Mehar is boosting his creepiness quotient.

By the end of 2025, he is hoping to have completed an extension spanning 85 square metres (900 sq ft) that will double the size of the motel’s busy, disquieting lobby-museum-gift shop area. Meanwhile, behind the motel, Mehar is planning a year-round haunted house, to be made of 11 shipping containers.
“America’s Scariest Motel”, read the brochures by the register. “Let fear run down your spine.”
There are paintings, dolls and ceramic figures, each with its own expression – smiling, laughing, smirking, weeping or silently shrieking. And then there are the neighbours. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents.
Some guests explore the cemetery after dark or google “fear of clowns” or coulrophobia. Others settle in with a horror movie, perhaps one of the three made on site in the past six years.
Mehar says hundreds of people stop by the motel on busy days, mostly focusing on the gift shop and the crowded, dusty shelves of the museum. The clowns there, contributed by donors worldwide, are not for sale.
“When we came here, there were 800 or 850 clowns,” Mehar says. “Right now, we have close to 6,000.”
The lobby-gift shop-museum expansion means more room to show them off, along with the motel’s wall-mounted array of presidential caricatures, Joe Biden and Donald Trump included, each sporting a clown’s red nose.

In the six years Mehar has owned the place, the gift shop merch inventory has swollen from hats, T-shirts and sweatshirts to include nearly 100 products: art, ashtrays, bracelets, bumper stickers, clothing, keychains, magnets, mugs, patches, shot glasses and wallets.
“Do you use knives? I have clown knives,” Behar Mehar says, raising one in his right hand. The blades are 19cm (4 inches) long.
Throughout the motel’s corridors and no-frills guest rooms, the clowns continue against a colour scheme of purple, yellow and red, augmented by polka dots of blue and green.
If you book Room 222, which highlights Clownvis – Elvis as a clown, basically – the motel warns, you may be awakened by a mysterious “malevolent entity”.
“If we had paid 60, or 70, or even 80 bucks, this place might have been worth it,” wrote one unamused motel customer on Tripadvisor recently.
“We had good fun, and even better we weren’t murdered,” wrote another.
It is a family project. After years as an art director, Mehar’s brother, Hame Anand, serves as manager of the motel and has masterminded its latest facelift, which includes a pair of clown cut-outs, two storeys tall, that beckon passing traffic.

Many travellers make the 210-mile (340km) drive north from Las Vegas just for the clown experience. At booking or check-in, guests often sign on for a motel and cemetery tour with guide Wanda Crisp.
Tonopah sits roughly midway between Las Vegas and Reno, with a population – currently about 2,100 – that has been shrinking for more than 30 years.
The hillside town, born as a silver-mining outpost in the first years of the 20th century, features a pair of historic hotels, the Mizpah (built in 1907, renovated 2011) and the Belvada (built as a bank in 1906, renovated in 2020), which flank Main Street in the heart of town. The Tonopah Historic Mining Park includes an underground tunnel and displays of old equipment and minerals.
You could say the Clown Motel grew out of the cemetery. As local boosters tell the story, a miner and clown collector named Clarence David was killed in 1911 in a mining accident and buried in the cemetery.
When two of his children, Leona and Leroy, decided to open a motel, then known as the David Motel, next to the cemetery in 1985, they displayed about 150 of their late father’s clown images and figures.
A decade later, they sold it to long-time Tonopah entrepreneur Bob Perchetti, who transformed the motel as part of his efforts to boost local tourism.

The big breakthrough came in 2015, when a crew from the television series Ghost Adventures came to shoot at the Clown Motel, intriguing lovers of kitsch and horror nationwide.
By then Perchetti, who died this year, was well into his seventies. A few years later, he put the motel property spanning 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) up for sale, asking US$900,000 and later US$600,000, clown collection included. In 2019, veteran Las Vegas motel proprietor Mehar and his family bought it.
Mehar, who now splits his time between Tonopah and Vegas, declines to say the sale price, but says he was able to pay off the loan within a few years. Two or three times a year, “the paranormal people” will book the whole place, Mehar says, “and there’s a YouTuber every second day.”
That does not mean the motel is a gold mine – Mehar still does most repairs and improvements himself – but in its niche, it has no rival.
“You know the American dream, rich and famous?” Mehar asks. “We’re half the way.”


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A mural of Pennywise, the murderous clown from horror film It, adorns one of the motel’s walls. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS

Clowns donated from around the world are on display around the Clown Motel. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS

Every room at the Clown Motel has its own art display. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS

Vijay Mehar bought the Clown Motel in 2019, and is planning to extend it and build a year-round haunted house behind it. Photo: Los Angeles Times/TNS

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Travel & Leisure

Fancy being awoken by an evil spirit? Try Nevada’s Clown Motel, where scary figures are everywhere. The owner has spine-chilling plans


Fancy being awoken by an evil spirit? Try Nevada’s Clown Motel, where scary figures are everywhere. The owner has spine-chilling plans.


United States