Mizpah Hotel

The story

Tonopah, in Nye County, exists because Jim Butler found silver there and founded the town in May 1900. The 1978 National Register nomination credits that strike with reviving a stagnant Nevada, pulling in capable young people and setting up the state's modern economic and political life. Tonopah's silver output trailed only the mines of Virginia City, and for a while the town was Nevada's financial capital. The hotel takes its name from the Mizpah Mine.

The nomination says the Mizpah began as a saloon in 1901 and was the first permanent structure in Tonopah; Wikipedia instead dates the Mizpah Saloon to 1907, so the early chronology is muddled. What the nomination documents more firmly is the building sequence. A three-story hotel with a rough-cut stone front opened in 1905, its central entrance flanked by a brokerage and the Tonopah Banking Corporation. A small frame building on the corner, the Mizpah Grill, followed. In 1907-1908 the Grill gave way to a five-story stone and brick hotel, which opened on November 17, 1908, at a cost of $200,000. A stairway was needed to link the two buildings because their floors were at different levels. The nomination names Morrill J. Curtis as architect, a designer whose Nevada work included two Reno hotels, the Grand Opera House and several University of Nevada buildings; a 1980 Nye County survey instead credits George E. Holesworth as architect and builder. The Mizpah had Tonopah's first electric elevator, according to the tourism office, and, according to Wikipedia, shared with the Belvada Building the title of tallest building in Nevada until 1927.

Money and politics flowed through the lobby. Tasker Oddie, later governor and U.S. senator, was a familiar figure, as was Senator Key Pittman. Henry Calvin "Cal" Brougher, a director of the hotel company who built Tonopah's first mill, owned the Tonopah Banking Corporation in the lobby, later bought by George Wingfield; George S. Nixon and Bob Govan are also listed among the hotel's backers. The nomination relays the claim that mining companies were set up and sold off in the lobby within hours.

The Mizpah also collected tall tales. Wyatt Earp is said to have run the saloon, Jack Dempsey to have worked the door as a bouncer, and Howard Hughes to have married Jean Peters on the premises. Wikipedia rejects all three: Earp had left Tonopah before the hotel went up (even though the nomination lists him among the hotel's notable figures, as an employee of the Tonopah Mining Company), Hughes's wedding happened elsewhere in town, and Dempsey denied ever being a bouncer. Even so, both names live on inside: there is a Jack Dempsey Room, and the bar is named for Wyatt Earp.

In 1978 the Mizpah was still a hotel, with a casino in the lobby. A renovation began in 1979; the hotel closed in 1999, and new owners reopened it in August 2011 with 47 rooms.

The legend

The Mizpah's resident ghost is the Lady in Red, a name given by guests who say they have encountered her. She is linked above all to the fifth floor, where she is said to have died violently in the stretch between rooms 502 and 504, and to the elevator. Two versions of her death are told. In the first, she was a prostitute whose jealous ex-lover killed her on the fifth floor. In the second, she was a married woman whose husband missed his train, came back to the hotel unexpectedly, found her with another man and killed her. No historical record of any such murder has been identified, and the name "Rose" that sometimes attaches to her online is unconfirmed. She should be read as legend.

The town's tourism office adds a few details found in only one source: guests sometimes find pearls, described as her calling card; playful child spirits are reported on the third floor; and the basement is said to hold "echoes" of miners. The front desk keeps a book in which guests record their ghost stories and photographs.

The date of the first ghost reports is unknown. The haunting became widely known around the hotel's 2011 reopening, helped by television. Ghost Adventures devoted season 5, episode 2 (aired September 30, 2011) to the Mizpah and the Lady in Red. The crew, Zak, Nick and Aaron, had wanted to investigate the building since 2004, and the trip also brought them back to Tonopah's Castle House, the scene of their very first investigation. Readers' polls by USA Today's 10Best listed the Mizpah among the best haunted hotels in 2018 and 2022. No skeptical study of the claims is known.

What remains today

The five-story 1908 block, about 65 feet tall, stands at the corner of Main and Brougher streets, attached to the older three-story building. The nomination describes a Western take on the Italian Renaissance style: rough-cut stone columns at street level, a second story faced with grooved plaster imitating smooth stone, tan brick on the upper floors, and pressed-tin cornices and bands made to look like carved stone. Fire escapes with lacy railings were designed as decorative balconies, and shallow balconies with balusters shaped like a Union Jack mark the two entrances. Inside, the nomination noted a wooden stair under a skylight between the two buildings, tiled bathroom floors, cast-iron radiators, a tin lobby ceiling, the old bank vault and the original elevator still in service. The 1980 county survey recorded that storefronts and parts of the interior had been altered in the 1979 remodeling but judged the building sound. The Mizpah is on the National Register and belongs to the Historic Hotels of America program.

Visiting

The Mizpah is a working hotel with 47 rooms, two restaurants and a casino, in a town that has long served as a rest stop on the drive between Reno and Las Vegas. Booking a room or visiting the public lobby, bar and restaurants is the way to see it; check the hotel's official website for current details. No organized ghost tour is known, but you can ask at the front desk to look through the guests' ghost-story book. Respect the privacy of guests on the upper floors, including the fifth, and stay out of staff-only areas.

Tonopah promotes itself as "Haunted Tonopah": the self-guided walking tour of the Old Tonopah Cemetery (brochure available locally) and the Clown Motel nearby make easy additions. The 1978 nomination noted that the town honors its founder with Jim Butler Days on the last weekend of May.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #78001725 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #78001725) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Mizpah Hotel — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Tonopah, NV 1960 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1960 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Tonopah, NV 1907 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1907 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Tonopah, NV 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
7. "Haunted Tonopah" — Tonopah tourism (town site) — Tonopah tourism (town site
8. "List of Ghost Adventures episodes" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
9. "Mizpah Hotel" — Tonopah tourism (town site) — Tonopah tourism (town site
10. Official website
11. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.