World Famous Clown Motel

June 1, 2023 2:34 AM

I came here in January, wanting to learn more about why America — my adopted home for 16 years — so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past. Nowhere is this more true than in the American West, and nowhere have I seen it better epitomized than in Tonopah. from In the American West, a Clown Motel and a Cemetery Tell a Story of Kitsch and Carnage by Andrew Chamings
posted by chavenet (25 comments total)

The English author thinks it's uniquely American to fetishize the brutal past?
Looks at the London Dungeon Tour, looks back at the author...
posted by MrBobaFett at 7:23 AM on June 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

I was thinking similar thoughts. Belfast, for instance, has a large exhibit on the Titanic (they built the ship there), and a number of tours focused on the Troubles (book now and save 10%!). Tragedy sells, I guess.

As for Tonopah, Atlas Obscura just did a piece on it which popped up on my Youtube recommendations last night.

Now I'm wondering if this is part of a Tonopah marketing campaign. I suppose I'll start seeing ads for the Clown Motel everywhere now.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 7:44 AM on June 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

I also felt whiplash at the author’s assertion that England buries its brutal past. The UK is certainly in denial about imperialism, but I’ve seen the lines at the Tower of London and the buses at Culloden. There’s a museum in Eyam dedicated to the time the entire village died of the plague, not unlike this graveyard in Tonopah.

It’s also frustrating that the author never says what was killing the miners. I assume it was radiation?
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:04 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Cause of death was bacterial pneumonia due to poor sanitation.

It’s buried in the article.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:11 AM on June 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

the author never says what was killing the miners

It was buried at the end.

Back in 1905, months after the Death Harvest ended, the bodies were sent to San Francisco and Reno for autopsy. It wasn’t bad booze or noxious gas that killed so many people, it turns out, but a form of pneumonia caused by unsanitary water.
posted by MrBobaFett at 8:12 AM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

That still doesn't explain why only the men were dying though?

I think the phenomenon of towns that depend so heavily on macabre tourism as a primary input to the local economy is probably inextricable from the car culture here and when in the nation's history it developed. This is such a Route 66 phenomenon, right? Every one-horse town in the west had to have a tourist hook.
posted by potrzebie at 8:17 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the Mizpah is old and charming and has ghosts with names and was even voted number one for ghosts, and you just hope they're real or at least that everyone working there is getting paid to tell the stories. It's also a good dining experience, renovated by some notable vintners. But the clown motel catches the eye, and editors insist on using it to introduce a mining town that needs tourism now. They will even frame it as a nasty American habit of fetishizing plagues, but it's just a clown motel that doesn't need ghosts to give you the creeps.
posted by Brian B. at 8:18 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

That still doesn't explain why only the men were dying though?

It was mostly a man camp, and there was a plague in San Francisco around the same time that used new medical forensics to solve it (fleas and rats). Tonopah history also tells of a riot against Chinese miners, resulting in a Chinese boycott of American imports.
posted by Brian B. at 8:54 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

so strangely and uniquely fetishizes its brutal past

Recently, and for the first time, I had the opportunity to visit the UK, northern Scotland. On the drive from the Inverness airport into town you see the signs pointing out the location of the Battle of Culloden (1746). A memorial cairn and mass grave markers were erected there about a hundred years after the battle; in 2007, a visitor center was opened on the site.

Coincidentally, in London that same week, a very peculiar and ornate ceremony was held for a older gentleman who got dressed up to sit on an antique chair with a (previously stolen (1296), now repatriated (1996) and on loan) rock in it, get dripped with oil, touch several other historical artifacts of various kinds, and wear a hat. His wife also got to wear a hat, hers with a (stolen (1849)) rock in it. (The other significant rocks in that hat, interestingly, also come out of Britain's brutal colonial history (1902), but a different part.) Sure, it's no Clown Elvis, but the fans say that this guy and his family are very important UK tourist attractions and worth every penny!

It's true though that England isn't always so forthcoming about its own history; in order to find memorials to the Irish Famine (1845 - 1852), for example, I'd be better off looking in the US.
posted by radiogreentea at 9:02 AM on June 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

That still doesn't explain why only the men were dying though?

It does take TFA a long time to get to it but:

It wasn’t bad booze or noxious gas that killed so many people, it turns out, but a form of pneumonia caused by unsanitary water. In its rush to pull the riches out of the ground, the town had built no working sewer system. Chamber pots were thrown onto the wooden sidewalks. Waste from the town’s slaughterhouse flowed through the streets.

on edit (yes it doesn't explain why only the men)
posted by achrise at 9:17 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

“A bloodstain still drying in the sand” is a nice turn of phrase.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:52 AM on June 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

a form of pneumonia caused by unsanitary water

maybe Legionnaires' disease
posted by ryanrs at 9:57 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

hmm, nope I don't think Legionnaires' does that:

In the spring of 1905, a local newspaper began reporting that about a dozen seemingly healthy men in their 20s were dying every day of an unknown affliction that killed four out of every five men it infected. Early details coming out of the town were sparse and horrific. A victim’s neck would swell, then his skin would turn black. Most died within a day of getting sick. One man who escaped the horror to Reno told reporters that he saw 12 bodies on slabs on his way out, “blackened by the terrible disease that is mowing down the people.”
posted by ryanrs at 10:04 AM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

yet, somehow, women and children were spared.

Were they actually? Or did contemporaneous reporting just not consider those deaths particularly newsworthy?
posted by solotoro at 11:35 AM on June 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

a form of pneumonia caused by unsanitary water

This is an unsatisfactory explanation. From the context, was it cholera?

I'm wondering if this is part of a Tonopah marketing campaign.

Felt like that to me.
posted by Rash at 2:11 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

"By his own approximation, Bob assassinated Jesse James over 800 times. He suspected no one in history had ever so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal."
posted by clavdivs at 2:55 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't know about you guys but I do indeed have "radioactive zombie clowns" on my bingo card.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 PM on June 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I dimly remember seeing an installation in Pompidou, consisting of dozens of flags? silkscreens? with quotes from people talking about links between crime and art. It was a kind of maze, and at the very center was... a John Wayne Gacy clown painting.
posted by doctornemo at 5:20 PM on June 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

This historical newspaper account from the clown motel website has more details.

These stories about 150 people dying in Tonopah every day are all buncombe," declared Mr. Cushing. "during the three days that I was there there were nine, 11 and 15 deaths respectively from this strange disease, which takes men off anywhere from 1 to 48 hours after the time they are attacked. From all that I could learn in the camp the disease seems to be a sort of combination grip* and pneumonia. In order to arrive at a solution of the trouble a number of bodies were dissected, and in each case the liver was found to be perfectly black and almost as hard as stone. The first symptom seems to be a cold, which is almost immediately followed by a pain in the chest. From that time on the sufferer sinks rapidly until the end comes.

* grip, grippe is influenza
posted by ryanrs at 2:34 AM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Wow, dead in under 48 hours! A geographically localized, severe outbreak of pneumonia with no person-to-person contagion sounds very much like a Hantavirus outbreak.
posted by ryanrs at 2:51 AM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

yet, somehow, women and children were spared

Thinking about this more, hantavirus is spread by deer mice, not house mice or rats. Deer mice / field mice are the mice you see out in the country, not in the city.

And I'm just guessing here, but maybe a gold rush boomtown doesn't have any deer mice? They don't adapt to people and towns like house mice and rats do. So that could explain why women and children didn't get sick, if they stayed mostly in-town.

It was the men out working in the mines and fields that caught the disease from deer mice droppings (archive.org). These are the wild mice you see around your campsite at night (also kangaroo mice). Hantavirus is the reason I don't sleep in old mining cabins.

The deer mouse vector, coupled with the lack of human-to-human transmission, could explain why the disease only killed men.
posted by ryanrs at 5:22 PM on June 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Distribution of P. Maniculatus (deer mouse) and Location of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome Cases. Tonopah indicated on map.

Because of the 1993 outbreak where the virus was first identified, it's been known as the Four Corners virus. But there is a definite cluster of cases in the Tonopah area, along the CA/NV border.

Source webpage. Bypass registration wall by clicking printer icon at upper left, then read in print preview or export to pdf.
posted by ryanrs at 2:24 AM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Solving a Medical Mystery With Oral Traditions
In 1993, Navajo elders provided a key piece of information to CDC scientists and climatologists to help combat a deadly mystery disease.

The Navajo have a long oral tradition passed from generation to generation, spanning hundreds of years or more and predating the written language. Some of these histories spoke of previous outbreaks of rapid onset, lethal diseases among the Navajo in 1918 and 1933. The cause, they reported, was “disharmony,” which leads to excess. All of the years when the sickness struck, including 1993, had had excess rain and snowfall, leading to a bumper crop of piñon pine nuts. The nuts led to a boom in the local rodent population.

With a key piece of information from Navajo elders, climate scientists and ecologists were able to link Hantavirus outbreaks in the region to El Niño.


I wonder what the weather was like during the winter of 1904/1905?
posted by ryanrs at 2:50 AM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I may be the only one still poking at this thread, but if anyone wants to dig through some primary sources, the Library of Congress has scans of the town newspaper.

Tonopah Weekly Bonanza 1901-1909

This page says there were 56 deaths from Jan-Apr 1905.

Particularly interesting would be reports of a wet/dry winter, excessive snowfall, flooding, etc. And any reports of the sickness and deaths.


Keep in mind that lack of wet weather doesn't mean it wasn't hantavirus. Wet years increase deer mouse populations, resulting in more human/mouse contact in e.g. Navajo communities. But the gold rush prospecting in Tonopah would also increase human/mouse contact, regardless of the weather.
posted by ryanrs at 10:12 PM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also would like to grumpily note that this British author only reached out to historians. If he’d asked hospitality and tourism professors, they’d have told him about dark tourism. It’s a term that was apparently coined in the UK, so y’know, maybe the American West is not so weird after all.
posted by librarylis at 9:40 AM on June 4, 2023 [1 favorite]