In Which I Indulge High Desert Nostalgia and George Wingfield Gets Away With Murder
My author bio states that I’m an erstwhile ghost tour guide. It’s not an attempt to be quirky or whatever, but a core detail about who I am, culled from my history in a rural, high-desert Nevada town.
Tonopah lies nearly directly between Reno and Las Vegas on Route 95. A silver-mining town originating in the late 1800s, Tonopah has had its ups and downs. Once a destination frequented by celebrities and politicians, including the mythical Wyatt Earp and, much later, Gene Wilder & Gilda Radner, today Tonopah is a place lost to time. Visiting there, one has the sense they’re a few decades behind the rest of the world.
My father moved us there in 1993, when he took a position as Emergency Manager of Nye County. We were there until ’98, third to seventh grade for me. Not necessarily adolescence, but still, important formative years.
Among my childhood memories in Tonopah:
White-out blizzards (the elevation is around six-thousand feet, so snow falls whenever it pleases; it snowed once during the Fourth of July parade), limiting visibility to a few feet ahead;
McDonald’s Pizza. It was a thing. You can look it up. This obscure locale was somehow one of their test markets. For fast-food pizza, it was fair. The building houses a coffee spot now;the McDonald’s closed because its employees were selling drugs out of the drive-thru window;
A since defunct, indoor aquatic center, where my grandma claims to have met Robin Williams during one of their visits;
My family joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, strictly as a means to find community, and my first kiss with a Mormon girl at eleven-years-old. Oh, and being baptized in the name of a bunch of dead people at the Vegas temple. Wild stuff;
A brief, forced stint as a Boy Scout, during which I participated in the Pinewood Derby, earned the Arrow of Light, and went on my first camping trip, where I hid in my tent and read Stephen King’s Cujo, at the tail-end of third grade;
Joining the school band as a trombone player;
My older cousin visiting for a summer, when we played Ace of Base’s The Sign to its limit and watched the O. J. Simpson chase on live TV;
Difficulty making friends, social awkwardness, and relentless bullying. During the dorkiest stage of my life, Joe Bird pantsed me, boxers & all, while I was drinking from a water fountain during a class break, with everyone around. After we left Tonopah, my mother learned that he had been decapitated during a roll-over while off-roading with high school friends in the desert. Also, after years of harassment by Martin Martinez, I got in my first fight with him during recess and won. I was suspended, but it was worth it. Mom was proud of me. And I’d discovered I was good at fighting;
My first best friend, Ross Bispo, with whom I remain friends. Fifth grade was the year Ross moved to Tonopah from Henderson. Even as the new kid, he was immediately accepted into the popular crowd, and yet still took the risk of befriending me. I was at first suspicious of his friendship, but found that I was half-heartedly accepted, by proxy, on the outskirts of popularity.
*
Our friendship started when we took a bathroom break at the same time during English class. I started to wash my hands and the sink, as if its intended function, sprayed water directly on the front of my shorts. It was clear that returning to class would now be an awful experience for someone of my station. Ross stood at the sink next to mine, watching what happened in the mirror. He understood the look on my face.
He turned on the faucet and splashed a generous handful of water on the front of his shorts. When we reentered the classroom, our teacher knitted her brow and the students snickered, but nobody teased me directly because Ross’s shorts were also wet. Nobody was going to harass him over it, even if he had been the only one to return with wet shorts.
The first slasher flick I ever watched was with Ross. On a Friday after school, we sat down for a viewing of Friday the 13th VII: The New Blood. A mutual interest in horror films soon colored our friendship. Midway through the school year, we planned an epic horror night for one of our Saturdays. My mother drove me to Scholari’s, where I picked out Scream, Return of the Living Dead 3, and Friday the 13thVIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. My mother also bought us a spectrum of snacks, soda, and treats. We returned home too early and I was too eager for the night to begin. It was four in the afternoon and Ross wasn’t set to arrive until six. Six came and went.
Then seven, then seven-thirty. Each minute that followed was unendurable. I called Ross’s house and waited until the machine picked up. I called again, fifteen minutes later, and left a probably desperate sounding message. I asked my mom to drive me by the Bispo house, just down the street from ours. Nobody was home. I knew why this was happening.
As mentioned earlier, my mother had previously forced me to join the Boy Scouts, thinking it would build confidence or character or whatever. The troop was affiliated with a neighboring Baptist church and I’d been coerced into religious gatherings that had heightened my awareness of the risk of an eternity in hell, of an unsympathetic God.
Stemming from my taste in horror films, I’d begun writing scary stories on my father’s desktop. In addition to the violence the stories contained, my burgeoning hormones negotiated the inclusion of a peppering of sexual content. None of this writing was done without guilt attached. God, I feared, I knew, was watching.
And now, I was being punished. The one real friend who’d appeared in my life wasn’t going to show up tonight, possibly never hang out with me again, because of what I’d written. I sat down at the computer and deleted all of the stories. Zombies, werewolves, all of it. Strictly highbrow stuff. I don’t know how much writing was erased, but my only friendship was more important.
I promised God, as I was deleting my stories, that I wouldn’t write anything like that again. Ross showed up minutes later. His mother explained to mine that she’d been running errands, Ross in tow, and wanted to get everything finished before dropping him off. I was unamused and felt God was now among the roster of bullies pitted against me.
It’s clear now that it was coincidence, but one can see how it indulged my misunderstanding of the divine. Of course, I kept writing my stories. That was only the first occurrence in a long-standing habit of making and breaking promises to God, using empty bargaining chips.
*
Tonopah was more than significant to my character development. In adulthood, it was a place I longed for, and even visited a handful of times. Nobody else understood the appeal. People don’t allow enough credibility to the beauty of the desert; deserts are often mistakenly viewed as barren and unsightly. For my part, I’ve never seen a sunset nor sunrise quite as jarring in its beauty as I have daily in Tonopah.
Eventually, and not under ideal circumstances, I did end up getting to live there again. From October 2024 to September 2025, I spent the beginning of my forties reacquainted with my childhood home. That said, a year was more than enough; Tonopah isn’t all that big, and with a population of just under 1900 residents, everyone knows everyone and is too up-to-speed on one another’s business. But it’s an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything, especially considering what I did for work while I was there.
The cornerstone of Tonopah’s tourism draw—one of its only profitable industries, besides the solar field and numerous mines for various resources, outside town—is rooted in ghost stories. I should note that I’d always been a skeptic when it came to ghosts. I think all the paranormal media in our current culture is a bit much. Even so, after the year I spent in Tonopah as an adult, I now firmly believe in ghosts.
A whole lot of people have died in Tonopah, and in not so pleasant ways—though, disappointingly, the dead politician kept on ice in a bathtub is just an urban legend. Tonopah was once the wild west, with gambling, cowboys, prostitution, people shot in the street. The works.
If any exists, the reason to stay at the Clown is the neighboring Old Tonopah Cemetery, with which the motel shares its parking lot. Any ghosts encountered in the motel are likely only present because they’ve wandered over from next door. You don’t have to subscribe to the paranormal to be creeped out by the cemetery: many of the gravemarkers display death dates in the 1800s; there are several children & infants, lost to misfortunes that’d be easily avoided today; many of the stones list the causes of death, fascinating, depressing, unsettling, or amusing in turn; plenty of mining-related deaths and as many suicides, the latter of which are sometimes poetically alluded to, as with the bleak, Life became a burden; a particular unfortunate was attempting to thaw frozen dynamite, when he warmed it a touch too much and blew himself up.
When I was a kid in Tonopah, the Mizpah Hotel was in a state of neglect and mismanagement, and would temporarily shut down shortly after my family moved away. The building across the street—both venues are currently owned by the family behind Sonoma’s Cline Family Cellars—is now the Belvada Hotel, but was boarded-up and left to disrepair throughout the duration of my youth. They are, by a considerable amount, the two tallest buildings in Tonopah, at only five-stories a piece. When the Mizpah was built in 1907, it remained the tallest building in Nevada for the next twenty years. It also featured the first electric elevator that side of the Mississippi. Old-timers love that detail.
I have fond, childhood memories of sneaking into the Mizpah with Ross, in an attempt to see its infamous resident ghosts. Funny how life plays out.
After I was discharged from a month-long ICU stay in Reno, technically homeless and with everything I owned packed into my Honda Fit, the easiest destination seemed to be Tonopah. It was three or so hours southeast, a journey I could feasibly endeavor, even in my debilitated state. I knew it was cheaper to live there than most places, and I could, potentially, land on my feet. After residing in the Dream Inn Motel for a week, I was lucky enough to secure an interview as a Mizpah Front Desk Agent. I was offered the job the next day, and two days later, was able to move into employee housing in the hostel located on the same lot as the Mizpah, in the old Wieland Brewery, constructed in 1901 when Tonopah was mostly a tent camp. The accommodations were sparse, just a small room with a shared bathroom and kitchen, but for a year, it was home.
After the few months it took for my health to mend, to be able to walk around without feeling like I was about to collapse, I expressed interest in joining the hotel’s Ghost Tour program. My manager, a paranormal aficionado, had created the program in order to capitalize on hotel guests’ fascination with ghosts, and to draw ghost-hunters from around the nation and worldwide. If you’re in Vegas to visit Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum, you may as well make the three-hour drive northwest for something a bit more authentic and with its share of rustic charm, to boot.
I’d be remiss not to mention that your Ghost Tour experience depends entirely on which guide leads it. There is a loose script, there are facts. But Tonopah’s historians weren’t the most-qualified or thorough, and there’s a whole lot of background to the town based entirely on hearsay, passed down by mouth from one local to the next. The tour guides have a template and are allowed to make the tour their own. As someone with reasonably bad social anxiety, leading the tours served as exposure therapy, and I treated them like performance art.
I was inclined to the morning shifts on the front desk, which meant I was off by three each day. Ghost Tours typically were scheduled after sundown and could start as late as midnight, running from an hour and a half to two hours a piece. During our busy season, I would have at least one tour a night, and sometimes up to three in an evening. Extra hourly pay, commission per guest—up to twenty heads per tour—and generous tips. A person could do worse for a side hustle. And I like to think I was pretty decent at it. I had my routine down, and the guests enjoyed my bad jokes and embellishments. If you dig around online, you can find me looking weird and acting awkward in YouTube videos from ghost-hunters based in both the UK and South Korea.
We’d begin in the basement, where highlights included the original vault, in which a heist had gone awry, leaving behind two dead miners. Also, the old cooler, complete with its original wooden door, where a woman left her two children to suffocate. Along with the walled-off underground entrance to the hotel, which exited from one of the original mining tunnels—there are hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels beneath Tonopah—made for a solid opener.
After that, it’s on to the third floor conference room, which the hotel rents out for meetings and events. The room is always open when it’s not in use, and this is the one place in the hotel that gave me notably sinister vibes. I was not a fan of being in that room alone. There’s no account of what went on there, but it is home to a non-human entity, a mean-spirited presence, confined to the room by its many mirrors. Crossing the threshold is accompanied by a discomforting chill, and a sense of being watched that lingers as you leave the room to walk down the hall. A former tour guide refused to enter the room ever again, after she claims she was fixing her hair in one of the mirrors and a face overlapped with hers. I would often tell guests that they were welcome to explore the room, or the rest of the hotel, after the tour, and those who took me up on it reported that the experience had left them disturbed. One couple, who’d booked a multi-night stay, departed two days early after visiting the room on their own in the middle of the night.
Despite there being ominous vibes throughout the hotel, the conference room is the only place where I have had a paranormal experience. The third floor of the Mizpah is the reason I believe in ghosts. During a smaller tour with a mother and her two preteens, we entered the room to observe, clearly in the corner, a human form, which immediately vanished. Now, I’d been up since five that morning and it was already close to ten at night. I might easily accept that I was exhausted and my eyes were deceiving me. But as soon as the form dissipated, the mother alongside me turned and asked, concerned, if I’d also seen what she just witnessed. I don’t have a logical way to accommodate that.
Of course, the tour also includes the fifth floor, home to the Mizpah’s most notorious resident, Rose, also known as the Lady in Red, a prostitute so famous in Tonopah, she had her own suite of rooms. Her true identity is unknown and the exact circumstances under which she met her untimely demise are dubious. What is known is that someone murdered her outside her room, where guests claim to encounter her regularly.
Here I want to add, and not as some endorsement of the Mizpah, but from someone who holds Tonopah sacred in his heart and wants visitors to enjoy their time in a place I count as my hometown: the Lady in Red Suite is well and fine. I’ve stayed in it; not particularly spooky, and also not the nicest room in the hotel. It doesn’t offer the same scenic vantage of the modest town as the former, but for my money, your best bet is 103, which is a junior suite. While we’re at it, if you’re staying at the Belvada, across the street—the sister hotel is generally nicer, more modern, and a lot more quiet—you’re going to want to go with room 59; even if you don’t need a double queen, this provides easily the best view in all of Tonopah. Don’t expect too much though.
Acknowledge and accept the kind of town you’re in. As of my departure, the Mizpah is once again mismanaged and its housekeeping staff is often inconsistent.
George Wingfield was an incredibly wealthy man in his day, and was a major investor both in the Mizpah and Tonopah in general. The story goes that Wingfield felt like he could turn Rose into a kept woman, that she would be his, exclusively. When he stopped into the Mizpah, unannounced, he caught her with another man and started strangling her in the room. It would appear she’d misunderstood his interpretation of their arrangement. The struggle led into the hallway, where she was stabbed to death. Of course, at the time, there was no investigation into her murder, because of her line of work. Had a case been opened, there’s no way a person in Wingfield’s position of affluence and influence would ever have been brought up on charges. Nobody formally accused Wingfield of the murder, but enough people thought it out loud for the rumor to make its way to modern times. No surprise that Wingfield, considering the way our society has consistently privileged the wealthy, has a room on the fourth floor, complete with a plaque and portrait, honoring him.
To my knowledge, I’m the only tour guide to include this stop on my tours, on the way up to where the Lady in Red was murdered. I always asked guests to consider Wingfield’s portrait, tell me whether, looking into his eyes, they didn’t see a murderer. The majority of guests agreed, Wingfield was not someone with whom they’d want to be alone in a room.
If you ever make your way to Tonopah, don’t waste your money on a room at the Clown. A stop through its lobby museum and gift shop is enough to get the idea, but be sure to explore the cemetery next door, right around sunset. You can also forgo an official Mizpah ghost tour. The basement is the only place the public can’t access, and it’s really not that exciting. But do stop in the third floor conference room, turn the lights off and close the door. You don’t need permission, just pop on up there. Make a left when you get to the third floor, and you’ll find it down the hall, to the left. Let me know how long you last. Also, go pay Wingfield a visit. Same as the third, when you get to the fourth floor, hang a left and his room is toward the end of the hall on the left. Lastly, check out the hallway, to the right, on the fifth floor. Rose was murdered in front of what is now room 503.
Oh, how I could waste so much more of your time infodumping about Tonopah; for all I’ve imparted, I’ve hardly scratched the surface. But for now, I’ll just say that if you think you’d actually ever visit Tonopah, please do shoot me a message. I’d happily share plenty of other locals-only tips, most importantly where to eat and where not to eat. Your dining options are limited, but if you play your cards right, you can enjoy your meals between ghost-hunting in this bizarre, dusty little town.
John Christopher Nelson’s youth was divided between the ninety-four-acre site of a defunct dairy and a high desert mining town. John is an erstwhile ambulance driver, surf shop manager, and ghost tour guide. During a month-long ICU stay in Reno, he nearly died twice. John’s Instagram is @johnnygrovemumbler and you can find out more about him at johnchristophernelson.com
