Lifestyle
At Nevada's Clown Motel, the vibe is creepier than ever, and business is good
TONOPAH, Nev. — 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, Nev., 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 said recently, “they want to be scared.”
So aiming to lure more people off Main Street (a.k.a. U.S. 95) to visit this 31-room motel in the dusty, stark middle of Nevada, Mehar is boosting his creepiness quotient.
A giant cutout of a clown adorns the side of the Clown Motel.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
By the end of 2025, he’s hoping to have completed a 900-square-foot addition, doubling 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.
Many details are yet to be settled, but the idea is for these additions to complement the motel’s existing guest rooms, which teem with enough clown imagery to eclipse a Ringling Brothers reunion. Mehar also aims to convert an existing room into a honeymoon suite.
“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 neighbors. The motel stands next to the Old Tonopah Cemetery, most of whose residents perished between 1900 and 1911, often in mining accidents.
The creepy clown film “It” is muralized on the walls outside the rooms.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
Some guests explore the cemetery after dark or google “fear of clowns” (coulrophobia). Others settle in with a horror movie, perhaps one of the three made on site in the last six years. (“I am the bad clown in ‘Clown Motel 2,’ ” Mehar confided.)
Mehar said 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 said. “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.
Clown miniatures, donated to the Clown Motel from around the world, are on display around the motel.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
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, ash trays, bracelets, bumper stickers, clothing, key chains, magnets, mugs, patches, shot glasses and wallets.
“Do you use knives? I have clown knives,” Behar said, raising one in his right hand. The blades are 4 inches long.
Throughout the motel’s corridors and no-frills guest rooms (usually $85 to $150; rated at 3.5 stars by Yelp and Trip Advisor), the clowns continue against a color scheme of purple, yellow and red, augmented by polka dots of blue and green.
A spot check revealed five clowns in Room 102 and a dozen in Room 208 (but none in the bathrooms). Several rooms are themed, including 222, which highlights Clownvis (Elvis as a clown, basically).
If you book that room, the motel warns, you may be awakened by a mysterious “malevolent entity.” The hotel also warns all guests that, despite monthly pest-control visits, you may encounter “UFI’s (Unwanted Flying Insects),” because rooms open to the outdoors. (This part of Nevada is known for its many Mormon crickets.)
Every room at the Clown Motel, has its own art display.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
“If we had paid 60, or 70, or even 80 bucks, this place might have been worth it,” wrote one unamused motel customer on Trip Advisor recently.
“We had good fun, and even better we weren’t murdered,” wrote another.
It’s 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 face-lift, which includes a pair of clown cut-outs, two stories tall, that beckon passing traffic.
Many travelers make the 210-mile 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 (about 2,100) that’s 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. Tonopah Historic Mining Park includes an underground tunnel and displays of old equipment and minerals.
The Clown Motel is owned by Vijay Mehar and his family.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
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. Thus, 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 longtime 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 70s. A few years later, he put the 1.2-acre motel property up for sale, asking $900,000 and later $600,000 (clown collection included). In 2019, veteran Las Vegas motel proprietor Mehar and his family bought it.
The façade of the Clown Motel.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
Mehar, who now splits his time between Tonopah and Vegas, declined to say the sale price, but said 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 said, “and there’s a YouTuber every second day.”
That doesn’t 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 asked. “We’re half the way.”
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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