Mikayla is frozen in the dark cemetery, certain that whatever’s rustling in the night behind me is going to attack. I call her to higher ground. It’s cooler and breezy here: box seats to the haunting. She doesn’t budge and demands I come down, convinced that a ham-wielding clown is running around the parking lot of the adjacent motel.

It had been a long ride. Eight hours to Tonopah (it should’ve been three), mostly in the dark. Stranded travelers load the town. The radiation leak near Beatty shut down 140 miles of the interstate, and floods turned the desert to chocolatey rivers. Trying to get north came with bizarre obstacles, but we needed to see about a ghost at the Clown Motel.

“Come down here,” Mikayla insists and, I kid you not, actually stomps her feet. I only see cars sealed up for the night. No clown. No ham.

*****

We head into the motel right next to the haunted cemetery, where Joe Mizzi checks us in and fields our questions about ghosts and clowns and flash floods. After a while an emergency worker walks in and says she’s tallying vacancies. Travelers unable to get through on the interstate keep rolling in. Churches may have to open to house them.

The Clown Motel has only two rooms left, but they’re smoking so nobody wants them. Potential boarders walk into the office and back out, hundreds of clowns staring at them. Laughing at them, really. The phone rings. It’s Luther.

“No, Luther. We don’t have room for your weights,” Joe tells him, then hangs up. “Luther Manhole” is the famous prankster from 2012’s Longmont Potion Castle video, who called the motel repeatedly to request three rooms—one for himself, one for his weights and one for his raw meat. The dialogue derails with threats and warnings recorded and posted on YouTube with an image of the Clown Motel’s marquee, inspiring copycat callers.

It’s an odd piece of the property’s mythology, which has grown around the innate creepiness of clowns and the nearby cemetery, where victims of a mining disaster are buried and believed to roam in spirit form. Mizzi’s not a believer, but he lives at the motel and knows what drives business. And he seems to really enjoy the novelty. Ghost Adventures filmed here, bringing significant attention (and airing a return October 24), as did a fictional clown motel featured in the video game Call of Duty. Celebrity George Takei apparently said he wants to be buried in the cemetery outside. So, yeah, business is good.

“I had a girl whose parents flew her all the way from Australia to see the Clown Motel,” says front-desk worker Marie Bruhn, adding that certain guests refuse to enter the office because of the clowns, insisting the paperwork be brought to them.

Apparently the combination of plywood walls, shag carpet and clown figurines—some stacked two or three deep on the wooden shelves—is a little too much for some. There are hobo clowns, fairy clowns, circus clowns, clown candles, clown clocks, clown paintings, a life-size clown sitting in his chair with more clowns on his lap, and a life-size clown statue, equally nightmarish. “Why would you stay at a clown motel if you’re afraid of clowns?” Bruhn says. “It’s the third-worst phobia in the world.”

*****

Clown paintings hang above the beds in our room, which has been well lived in. We rest, unpack and head out to the cemetery again, pausing under a white sign serving as the gateway and listing the years 1906-1911. Miners are buried here, including those who died in the Belmont Mine disaster. Pioneers are buried here. Former Nye County Sheriff Thomas Logan was put in the ground in 1906, and allegedly still fires his gun. We stumble around the shadowy frontier plot with reverence and fear, wondering how far it stretches into the dark and careful not to trip on the rocks outlining each grave in the desert soil.

One belongs to the father of the man who founded the baby-blue motel with white trim. Clown memorabilia collector Leroy David built it in 1990 as a tribute to his dad, who was killed in the Belmont fire. Mikayla wanders its misty parking lot. Her ivory skin, auburn hair and classic beauty have me thinking she’ll be mistaken for a ghost.

A sudden hailstorm sends us for cover, and we head to the motel’s second level for a view. We pass clown after clown (one on every doorway) as we move down the blue AstroTurf promenade, then back down to our room.

We’d seen a full double rainbow that day. We sat parked on I-95 with other stranded cars before heading back to Vegas to take another route. We’d even been punked by a GPS that took us to a vacant lot in the black of nowhere. But when Mikayla points to a creamy smudge on the wall outside our door, things get weird. It’s gotta be ham grease.

We go inside and sip our beers. Stories on the Internet claim that a staffer dresses as a clown with a ham to give guests their money’s worth. At this point, I’m convinced there could be a radioactive unicorn in the parking lot, and that a ghost with a chainsaw is about to let him in. But we see no phantoms and drift off to sleep, learning in the morning that it took Bruhn many years before she saw one.

“I’ve been here 10 long years,” she tells us in the crisp day after the guests and rains have cleared out, leaving the haunted motel and cemetery bathed in sunlight. “I was in housekeeping a good seven years, and nothing ever happened. Then one day I’m behind the window folding laundry. A woman peeked her head back to look at me. I get up to tell her that she can’t be back here. Nobody can be back here. I come out here, and there is not a soul.”

Bruhn says a medium who stayed there said there were no ghosts in the motel, but that when he arrived there was a woman standing behind the woman checking him in. Shown photos of employee Pam Jones’ deceased mother, he confirmed it was her.

Jones walks into the back office, where we’ve been talking about the apparition. “She’s watching out for us.”

Even having seen Pam’s mother on the property, Bruhn is practical when folks ask if the Clown Motel’s haunted: “I tell them what Joe tells them, ‘It can be if you want it to be.’”

*****

Before leaving town we lunch at the historic Mizpah Hotel, built in 1907 on an old mine and known for its hauntings. The meal’s delicious, but we want to find the famous Lady in Red, a spirit who roams the hallways and is said to have left pearls on guests’ pillows.

I ask our waitress if “Rose” is to be found on the hotel’s fourth floor, and she says the woman has been spotted throughout the hotel, and to try the fifth floor. “Photograph mirrors,” she says. “That’s where she usually appears.”

We climb the wooden staircase, checking mirrors for signs of Rose. We feel her everywhere. If not her presence, then definitely the lore.