I Found Proof of the Afterlife in Nevada

There have long been rumors of ghosts in Nevada, but can these hauntings actually be proven?There were no windows in room 2 of the Silver Queen Hotel. That’s why the notice on the door warning against lighting cigarettes or matches made me so anxious. Should there be a conflagration–not necessarily something of the caliber that razed this city to the ground in 1875, but something localized right here in my own room–well, I’d be a goner. Just another ghost roaming the streets of Virginia City, Nevada.And though that might give me the proof I’d come looking for, I wouldn’t be able to report it. I was on a ghost hunt in The Silver State, but not for kitschy frights; I wanted evidence, something to tell me that when it’s all over, it’s not really finished. A literal spiritual journey.Room 2 was a dusty chamber, and when the ceiling fan blew, grime kicked up like a haboob. A menacing illustration of a Victorian boy and his penny-farthing tilted on one wall; next to it, a shower leaked. The bed was pushed against a small door–I could see it through the heart-shaped rod-ironed headboard.“What’s behind that small door?” I asked the bartender at the saloon downstairs. The Silver Queen didn’t have a lobby, just a bar, and the bartender also played the roles of front-desk clerk and concierge. Continue Reading Article After Our Video Recommended Fodor’s Video “Um,” she said. “A crawl space or something.” Crawl space indicated a passage of sorts–was my room accessible through that small door? Before I could ask a follow-up, she was tending to other drinkers. “Come by tomorrow,” she told them. “A robbery is scheduled.”Virginia City is a Wild West town, and re-enactments plague its main boulevard, C Street. The town made a name for itself in 1859 with the nearby discovery of the Comstock Lode, a bonanza of silver so vast that it bankrolled the Union armies. Droves of fortune-hunters descended on the city–and with them, enough sin to make the devil blush. 1. Room 2 of the Silver Queen Hotel, a dusty chamber.Jeremy Tarr 2. The art of room 2: a Victorian boy and his penny-farthing. “Vice flourished luxuriantly during the hey-day of our ‘flush times,’” so wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It. He’d come here to find his treasure, but ended up a reporter for The Territorial Enterprise. As he told it, it wasn’t money that made a man–it was murder. “A person is not respected until he has ‘killed his man.’ That was the very expression used.” Desperados were the celebrity du jour, and they “stalked the streets with a swagger graded according to the number of his homicides.”Though costumed cowboys still swagger, so too do modern renegades. This weekend, biker clubs from across the state swarmed Virginia. Riding their thundering Harleys into town, bandana and leather-clad, craggy beards blowing, they climbed down from their choppers and stood over six feet tall, each one of them in black leather boots that boomed with every step they took along C Street’s plankboard sidewalks. Now, if that ain’t a modern desperado, I don’t know what is. 1. Biker clubs from across the state swarm Virginia.Jeremy Tarr 2. The window of the Silver Queen Hotel boasts that Mark Twain once worked at this spot…before the conflagration of 1875. A club called Tribe gathered at the Gold Hill Hotel and Saloon. Their rowdy banquet took up all the tables, so I squatted at the bar, where I met Taylor Hamby–lucky for me, she not only poured drinks, but was a bona fide local historian.Taylor had spent plenty of time at my lodgings, the Silver Queen, and filled me in on the lore. Way back when, a woman killed herself in room 11–which happened to be right across from room 2, my dusty little coffin–and now she appears in the beds of visiting men, where she caresses their backs.“Ever see her?”“No,” Taylor said. “But something happened to me in room 14.” She was staying there for a spell with her then-boyfriend. Next door, a man had come to town for work, along with his dog, Akira, a big old thing. Akira never left his side, but this man had an overnight gig and asked Taylor if she might watch the hound. Though friendly, Akira grew standoffish when the couple retired for the night. She sat on the floor, at the foot of the bed, constantly, diligently staring at the door. They figured she simply missed her owner, so they went to sleep. But Taylor snapped awake at 3 a.m. Akira stirred. The dog leaped into bed, shaking. The transom window quaked. Then shattered. Thick shards of glass exploded into the room, cascading down onto the very spot where Akira had sat sentinel.Rooms 12 and 14. It seems 12’s transom has been repaired, though now 14 is damaged.Jeremy TarrI thought of that yarn as I tucked myself into bed. I’d been drinking all day with barkeeps and bandits and quickly fell asleep. I woke and looked at the time. Three o’clock. On the dot. I waited for something to happen–would it be a ghost massage or a raining stream of glass daggers? Nothing; the time ticked on. A noise–did I hear a noise? I’d fallen close to sleep, so did I hear it or imagine it? It had been a quick plodding sound–possibly from the hall, or maybe downstairs, or maybe…the door behind my bed.Reaching through the rod-ironed heart-shaped headboard, I jiggled the knob–enough to scare off anyone who might be on the other side. I heard nothing, so twisted it this time–and even gave it a tug. It opened. I cursed it for opening–why couldn’t it be locked? An unlocked door pried open my curiosity. Brave with the remnants of booze, I pushed aside the bed and tore open the miniature door, like tall Alice ready for Wonderland. Someone (or something?) had written on the door–first “2016,” then a series of names (victims?). Inside, a small compartment with a strip of dirty green carpeting, just long enough to fit a body. The cubby curved to the left, and grew into a wide expanse–the rafters over the saloon. At the outer edge, before the turn, a rustled pillow looked freshly used; a discarded sheet had been thrown aside, as one might push away a blanket after a restless night’s sleep.Inside the small door: a rustled pillow looks freshly used; a discarded sheet has been thrown aside.Jeremy TarrI wasn’t visited by ghosts that night, but maybe by something much more corporeal. Something sleeping inside the wall.Climb down from those Virginia City hills, and there’s a long stretch of desert to traverse. My rental car blasted a loop of Townes Van Zandt’s melancholy twang and Nick Cave’s growling murder ballads. An oasis called Walker Lake appeared along the 95 freeway that looked the spitting image of the Dead Sea. Then nothing for two hours. Until a giant clown burst over the horizon.This is Tonopah. At the edge of town was the so-called “world famous” Clown Motel, which was exactly what you might expect, a clown-themed motel, supposedly haunted, but not my digs for tonight. I was there for what’s adjacent: the cemetery. Crooked wooden crosses all in a row, aluminum plates hammered onto them, spelled out downright chilling deaths. “Struck by a runaway ore car,” “miner’s consumption,” “buried by rock while attempting to open a plugged ore chute,” “explosion,” “fell down mine and was blown up by dynamite,” “drove chisel through his body when he fell.” If going by the epitaphs in Tonopah, no one here had a happy ending. 1. The “world famous” Clown Motel is said to be haunted.Jeremy Tarr 2. The Clown Motel’s neighbor is the old Tonopah Cemetery. Except maybe Jim Butler. He made this town in 1900. I heard the story from Jim Martin, who runs tours at the Tonopah Historic Mining Park up the road. It goes like this: Butler was the county district attorney, and along with his burros, wandered around all the corners of Nye, as this barren county was deemed. One day, a burro acted up, a stubborn thing, so Butler picked up a rock to hurl at him, but found it unusually heavy. That was no ordinary rock–it was silver ore. He staked the claim and made himself a millionaire. (As I took it, here’s a town built on animal cruelty.)Just like in Virginia City, the mine lured in the masses. A grand hotel went up on Main Street in 1905 called the Mizpah. The word is Hebrew, from the Book of Genesis, and while meaning “watchtower,” it also translates to “May God watch over you.” Hopefully, He’d watch over me, as I was staying there, and it’s notoriously haunted.The Mizpah Hotel, which translates to “May God watch over you.”Jeremy TarrHere, my accommodations were nothing like the Silver Queen lodging. First of all, there were windows, loads of them, it’s a corner room. It’s kitschy, though, delightfully so–my bed was a stagecoach, literally. The best part: I felt the presence of neither ghost nor crawl space squatter.At dusk, I met Siobhan Smith, a manager at the Mizpah, for a seance in the least spooky of spots: the conference room. Joined by a smiling couple and a father with his nervous young son, we sat around a table, lit only by the illumination of the exit sign. Equipped with an EMF reader to locate the spirit, and divining rods to communicate, our medium laid out the method of conversation: crossed rods equaled “yes,” uncrossed “no.”The EMF sensors pulsed to life, up and down, like a quickening heart. A spirit was present. Siobhan asked the ether: “Is there anybody specifically you would like to speak to?” The rods crossed: Yes. “Please point the rods in their direction.” They pointed to me. “You would like to talk to Jeremy?” Yes. “Oh,” I said. “Hi. Hello. Um. Are you friendly?” No. “Oh. Are you angry?” Silence. “Are you just unhappy?” Yes. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you not like this room?” No. Siobhan interjected: “He doesn’t like this room because I moved the mirror.”I cocked my head. “The mirror? You don’t like this room because of the mirror?”“I took your portal away,” the psychic confessed. The stagecoach digs at the Mizpah Hotel.Jeremy TarrApparently, Siobhan had trapped the spirit in this room. I felt for the ghost. It couldn’t be much fun haunting a conference room, spending eternity listening to the drab dronings of a staff meeting or the reading of minutes by the local rotary club. I continued: “Can you tell us your name?” No. Siobhan interjected that the spirit will never tell us the name, for if we hold the name, we hold power over the spirit. She said the reason for this is that the spirit is a “D.” “The name starts with a D?” I said.“No,” she corrected. “That’s a vague scope of what he is.” Too stupid to comprehend, I pressed further, and she literally had to spell it out for me: “D – E – M – O -”“He’s a demon?!” I blurted out. The little boy attending the seance tugged on his father’s arm and begged to leave. They were free to go, but Siobhan warned them that at the threshold of the conference room, they must say to the demon this: “You do not have permission to follow me. Please stay here.” Say it out loud and with conviction, lest the demon hitch a ride! A demon lives in this conference room.Jeremy TarrLater, I went across the street–presumably alone without a freeriding demon–to a bar called the Tonopah Liquor Company to post-mortem my spiritual journey thus far. The seance didn’t give me much proof–just the spectacle of another person’s belief. The bartender, Tiffany Grigory, gave me a shot of her excellent 120-proof housemade whisky, and I asked her if she’d ever seen a ghost.Turns out, this building’s lousy with them.Tiffany and her husband, Marc, bought the century-old structure ten years ago. Back then, they were living in Las Vegas and looking to escape. They stumbled upon a Craigslist ad offering it up, so they gambled everything, moved here with their two-year-old and a newborn, and made a new life. Tiffany first suspected a haunting afoot when her baby, sitting in a carrier atop the bar, seemed happily distracted by an invisible force. After some inquiring, she learned of a sex worker named Hattie, employed upstairs in what was then a brothel. A maternal soul, Hattie still hangs around cooing at kids. Also in the bar, George lurks–he’s a happy chappy, who used to own the joint, loves it still, and enjoys a prank or two. Meanwhile, down in the basement, there’s a grumpy ghost who sits in the corner all day long and has yet to be identified. 1. The Tonopah Liquor Company, the best bar in Tonopah (maybe even Nevada), is home to several ghosts.Jeremy Tarr 2. George, a former owner of the bar, still hangs around. After another couple shots of local whiskey, I told Tiffany the reason I swung into town–I wanted evidence and not the kind of proof attached to 60 percent hooch. Tiffany said there might be a way to prove it–a phenomenon sometimes occurred in the corner of the bar. Rub a bottle against it, and it’ll stay afloat–the spirits keep the spirits aloft. So began the experiment. One, two, three. No. It fell. Again. One, two, three. No. It fell. Again. One, two, three. No. It fell. Not happening tonight. The spirits aren’t participating, or maybe mischievous George is up to his pranks and hoped the bottle might break.Stumbling back to the Mizpah, I hoofed it upstairs, toward my room–but stopped en route. The conference room door was ajar. This time, I didn’t have the courage to enter.The Silver Queen and Mizpah are so well-known as hotbeds for paranormal activity that myriad ghost hunters have dared to brave the night, stocked with enough scientific equipment to make Dr. Frankenstein envious. Perhaps the most famous of these spectral seekers is Zak Bagans, host of 30 seasons of Ghost Adventures.Conveniently, in this very state, only two miles northeast of the Las Vegas Strip, lurked an old mansion where Bagans stores a vast collection of “haunted” artifacts, all on view for his adoring fans, under the banner of The Haunted Museum.To explain “haunted” artifacts: Just as a demon might latch onto middle management in a conference room, a ghost might fasten itself to an object, say, a doll. This is a phenomenon that occurs more than one might think–search eBay for “haunted doll,” and there are more than 2,700 from which to choose.Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum, which houses a collection of “haunted” items.Jeremy TarrBefore my tour, I’d never heard of Bagans, but I quickly deduced he’s the PT Barnum of the Haunting Industrial Complex. There’s big money in ghost attractions–the two-hour museum tour cost a stunning $54, but one must shill out $88 for RIP Access (get it?), which included a tour of the Satanic basement. Throughout the tour, a guide narrated a pun-filled script depicting the various carnivalesque attractions on display: Bela Lugosi’s mirror (don’t look at it, or you’ll see how you’ll die!); a small doll called Noma with silver pins for eyes (don’t look at it, or you’ll be cursed!); a “dybbuk” box so evil it might have caused World War II (don’t look at it, or you might summon Hitler’s ghost!). There were so many items one shouldn’t look at, I began wondering what the point of dedicating a museum to them was–oh, that’s right, money!Curious deep divers will find few images or details about the museum online. Not only are photos not allowed, but phones must be turned off. The tour group was told this was an active investigation site (as though it might be an archaeological dig), and phones would interrupt whatever pseudo-science they’re employing. Though of course, it’s because they wanted to control their message–they don’t want to shatter the illusion they’re creating.Occasionally, Bagans appeared via video to discuss particularly important sideshows. In one, the origins of the house were divulged: the porn star, Jenna Jameson, alerted Bagans to the sinister workings of the basement–Jameson allegedly lived at this house as a child, and her family performed Satanic rituals down there; according to the video, her brother remembered it all. Because I paid that extra $34, I got to have a looky-loo. It’s dark, ritualistic music plays, and I was warned, once again, that a demon might latch onto me and follow me out. 1. Photography isn’t allowed inside The Haunted Museum, except here in the entry. But this is fairly representative of much of the rest of the museum.Jeremy Tarr 2. A photo of a startled-looking Nicolas Cage is also on display in the entry, showing Cage in the entry. Smoke machines blasted everywhere, so much so that my clothes began unexpectedly reeking of cotton candy. A fitting smell for an amusement park. But things took a decidedly unpleasant turn: a series of rooms dedicated to serial killers. The collection included Ed Gein’s shovel and cauldron, Charles Manson’s ashes, Ted Bundy’s ski mask, and John Wayne Gacy’s paintings. A content warning was given for one horror chamber dedicated to Robert Berdella, who murdered six young men in the 1980s. Grisly photos of their crime scenes hung. In a shadow box were Q-tips, once dipped in bleach and rubbed in the eyes of victims.These were not kitschy sideshow exhibits, but demonstrations of cruelty. It’s a collection of suffering stuffed into a fun house. It’s an unintentional reminder that so much of ghost hunting is the search for lingering hints of monstrous behavior. It’s clearly big business, and tourists eat it up, but these carnival barkers trade on pain. No haunting ever promises a ghost who died of natural causes, surrounded by their loved ones. And no proof could be found looking for something that’s made up to lure in suckers.In an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way town lived a coffin maker and his wife. Bryan and Dusty Schoening moved to Pahrump, Nevada, in 2002. They met seven years before at a protest over the treatment of a Luxor Hotel-performing elephant named Stoney. A torn hamstring crippled Stoney, and in 1995, a transport operation required a crane to move him. According to lore, the crane collapsed under Stoney’s weight, killing him.The Shoenings kept a plaque for the elephant in their pet cemetery. The pet cemetery was close to, but separated from, the human cemetery. Only the pet cemetery had actual bodies–the humans were all cremains, or cremated remains. Sometimes, like for Stoney, there’s merely a plaque on a headstone, honoring the dead, as there was for Bryan’s parents, who were killed in a car accident.Drivers along the solemn suburban road in this part of Pahrump can easily see the cemeteries. After all, they occupy the front yard of the Shoenings’ house. These grounds had been converted into a singularly peculiar experience called Coffinwood. 1. The cemetery at Coffinwood, in Pahrump, only holds cremains.Jeremy Tarr 2. Coffinwood’s pet cemetery has bodies. When I first met Bryan, he emerged from his dwelling dressed all in black. He donned a skull mask and a black-rimmed hat, even under an eviscerating sun and 107-degree temperatures. “I’m sorry Dusty can’t join us,” he said. “But I’m happy to show you around.”Bryan is a coffin maker. He’s also a mechanic, a carpenter, a prison maintenance and construction contractor, an ordained minister, a lapidist, a metal worker, and a local tourist attraction. One thing he is not is a casket maker. The word “casket” makes him wince.“A casket is a rectangle,” he lectured. Therefore, it requires little skill or knowledge of carpentry. A coffin has six sides and must be symmetrical. “The word ‘coffin’ comes from sarcophagus. But a ‘casket’ is something that holds precious things. It’s just a box.” He wasn’t trained for the death industry, but started by making a coffin for Halloween decor. Lining up the angles proved challenging, so he kept practicing. Discarded coffins became furniture, and soon enough, the Schoenings lived in a house suitable for Dracula. The hobby became a calling, and he sold his custom wares to people all over the country.Bryan and I strolled through the grounds, where everything was coffin-shaped–from the greenhouse to the gazebo to the plantbeds to the pond. “I used Google Earth to make sure I got the angles just right.”He told me all about his and Dusty’s life together. Their family, their move here, the plans for the future of Coffinwood. You might have seen them before, they’ve been featured on two reality shows: HGTV’s Home Strange Home and TLC’s Wild Weddings, where Bryan’s ministerial work, as the pastor of his own Church of the Coffin, was put to good use. The television appearances led to tourists showing up, wanting a look around.I asked him what he planned for his own coffin. Though it’s a question he gets a lot, he didn’t have much of an answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe when I perfect a coffin, I’ll take that one–I’ll take the best one I make.”“Would you want an open-casket funeral?” I asked, and he winced at my blasphemous use of that verboten c-word.“No,” he said. “I want to be cremated.” This spurred him to tell me that his cremains coffins were his best seller.We walked from the Schoenings’ hearse collection to their menagerie–but I couldn’t see any animals. A four-foot digging tortoise had burrowed a massive tunnel lair beneath our feet and sat out the heat somewhere in that abyss. Another 30-year-old turtle hid away somewhere in the shade. And a third, called Voodoo, stayed in a pond. Voodoo has lore: a friend brought him to Dusty, wanting to bury him. He’d stayed too long in his pond one winter and froze to death. But Dusty didn’t buy it–instead, she ran cold water over him for a while, and thawed out his shell. Soon enough, the turtle resurrected, a regular Lazarus. He’d only been hibernating. Too freaked out to keep him, the friend abandoned Voodoo to Dusty.Bryan Schoening in his skull mask. Though he shows his face to Coffinwood guests, he’ll only allow himself to be photographed masked.Jeremy TarrIn Bryan’s cluttered workroom, he instructed me to take no photographs. It seemed to me like the storeroom of a Spirit Halloween as organized by Willy Wonka. Bryan turned on Halloween music. The speakers were coffin-shaped. In another workroom, a lapidary, Bryan tended to his stone jewelry–earrings, coffin-shaped; pendants, coffin-shaped. A trailer housed the gift shop. I purchased a Coffinwood t-shirt and a skull made from discarded aluminum cans. He invited me into his home to fetch his credit card reader. The curtains were all drawn shut to keep out the Pahrump sun, and a behemoth dog, Grim, lumbered about, shy but loud.We entered through a shotgun kitchen, and in his living room, I waited while he ran my card. A couch and a coffin-shaped coffee table occupied one side of the room, and in the other stood a dozen mannequins, all bunched together as though waiting for a group photograph. Some were Halloween-decor ghouls, and others simply the department-store variety.“Well,” said Bryan, “I guess, since you were sent by the tourism bureau, I can share something with you. I’d like you to meet Dusty.”He gestured toward a mannequin in a black dress with a black wig–but it wasn’t the mannequin that he was introducing me to, but the coffin-shaped box mounted on the wall next to the mannequin. It was one of Bryan’s cremains coffins.“Dusty died two years ago from Covid.”I felt faint. I could muster no words but “I’m so sorry,” which I said over and over. I wanted to sob.“When you asked about my coffin,” he said, “I really do have it planned. That coffin is built for two urns.”I met a ghost that day. Dusty was her name. Spoken in the present tense, Bryan made her come alive. He resurrected her, just like she did to Voodoo. And by being alive to me, maybe she was alive to him. Dusty, in the present tense, is a ghost who lives. And after this long journey of seances, hole-in-the-wall sleepers, murder museums, and a whole lot of lore, she was the real proof I’d come looking for. Dead is not gone.