Patti Petrone Miller

The Clown Motel Patti Petrone Miller

Don't touch the clowns, and don't let the clowns touch you. Just off of highway 95 in the state of Nevada, there lies the small town of Tonopah. For miles around, it's desolate and in the silence, there lies one lonely motel. Across from the motel is an old cemetery where miners were buried. It's not the ghosts within the cemetery that will make you run in fear...for those of you faint of heart and fearful of clowns, this is not a delicate story. America's scariest motel is haunted...by hundreds of clowns. Spending the night in this creepy Motel is definitely a true test of courage, because it's full of clowns. There are clowns tacked onto the doors, shelves of clown dolls starring at you with their beady glass eyes, and collectibles in the lobby that are neatly seated in chairs as if guarding the place from harmful intruders. There are clown paintings on the walls that look at you. And if you have a second-floor room, you can look out from the balcony and see why the motel is so eerily quiet and dark at night. It's the cemetery. The Clown Motel stands right next to Tonopah's old, dusty, unlit cemetery. Closed for over one hundred years, it's packed with the graves of the town's miners who died very unpleasantly. That should be cause for panic and even more so, if you've ever watched the movie Poltergeist, and you decide to spend a night at this unique lodge. Spend at least a minute or two wondering if, just maybe, part of a cemetery full of graves of men who died horrible deaths once stretched underneath land now occupied by the Clown Motel... I tell this story with locked doors and windows. I was one of the lucky ones. They are coming. They are coming for me. As the saying goes, you can check out any time you want, but you can't leave. There's a lot more buried there than you might think...