The Clown Motel
Leroy and Leona David opened this motel in 1985 and filled it with the clown figures their father had collected. Clarence David is buried on the other side of the fence, in the cemetery that closed the year he died. The collection has grown from about 150 figures to somewhere near 6,000, and nobody has counted them. The motel's own history has the year of his death wrong by 31 years.
Field Guide Entry
The Old Tonopah Cemetery's record for Clarence David gives the date as February 23, 1911, the age as 40, and the cause as asphyxiation. He was a native of Illinois who had been in town a few years. He was carrying a roll of canvas into the Tonopah-Belmont mine and was warned against going down, and he went down. His widow, Elizabeth Campbell, took a settlement from the mine company. Their daughter Genevieve was born seven months later.
Seventy-four years after the fire, two of his children, Leroy and Leona David, opened a motel on the lot beside the cemetery and decorated it with about 150 clown figures from their father's collection.
The date the motel gets wrong
The motel's own history page puts Clarence David's death in a Belmont mine fire in 1942. The cemetery's grave record and a compiled list of the fire's victims both put it in 1911, in the fire that killed 17 miners.
The fire
The Tonopah-Belmont fire started on February 23, 1911, at the 1,166 foot level. Seventeen miners died. An inquest interviewed 70 people. The cemetery marker says 14 of the dead are buried here; the victim list names 13.
The cemetery took its first burial on May 7, 1901, John Randel Weeks, and closed to new burials in April 1911, two months after the fire. More than 300 people are buried in it. A replacement cemetery opened a mile west of town that year and is still in use, which is where anyone looking for the wrong one ends up.
The plague, which was two outbreaks
The marker also names victims of the 1902 "Tonopah Plague." The Town of Tonopah's account of the cemetery describes two separate waves, usually told as one.
The first ran through the winter of 1901 into 1902. When the San Francisco Call described a pneumonia scourge at Tonopah, the Tonopah Daily Bonanza answered with a count of its own: 27 pneumonia deaths between May 1901 and January 1902, in a camp of about 1,500 people, which the paper argued was not a heavy death rate for the size of the place.
The second came in 1905. The same account cites the report of the Secretary of the State Board of Health to Governor John Sparks: 56 dead between January and April, blamed on sanitation, particularly near the slaughterhouses.
About 30 percent of the headstones are original. Causes of death on the rest were added by researchers in recent decades, which is worth knowing before treating any one of them as a record of what happened.
The collection
Vijay Mehar bought the motel in 2019, after Bob Perchetti had run it since 1995 and listed it at $900,000. Mehar told the Los Angeles Times in December 2024 that the collection had gone from 800 or 850 figures to close to 6,000. The motel's site now advertises over 6,500. Neither figure comes from a count.
Ghost Adventures filmed in rooms 217 and 108 in 2016, and rooms carry horror-film names now. The cemetery is over a low fence at the edge of the parking lot, open at any hour.
Visiting Information
The motel has 31 rooms and books through its own site, which publishes no nightly rate. The Los Angeles Times reported $85 to $150 a night in December 2024.
The lobby doubles as the clown museum and the gift shop, and people who are not staying can walk in and look.
The cemetery next door is free and open day or night, visitors are welcome to use the motel's parking lot, and a walking-tour map is posted at the entrance. Headstone inscriptions are the main thing to read there, and many of them are modern replacements.
Tonopah sits on US Routes 6 and 95 between Las Vegas and Reno, a long drive from either.
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