Welcome to Weird, Wild, Wonderful Nevada

The Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. | Photo by Louiie Victa; Illustration by Lille Allen/Eater

A journey through Nevada’s eccentric side — where the ghosts are real, the art is immersive, and the weirdness has no bounds To many outsiders, Nevada is just the desert landmass that surrounds the glamorous, neon-drenched dreamscape of Las Vegas — a state whose name is mispronounced as often as it’s misunderstood (it’s Nev-add-uh). Others know Nevada to be ghost country, not just for its literal ghost towns, but for the apparitions rumored to haunt its century-old hotels and saloons. The state is, of course, the backdrop to Area 51 and (allegedly) classified extraterrestrial activity. It’s the collective memory of mushroom clouds blossoming over the Mojave Desert. It’s the rootin’-tootin’ Wild West. These images all coalesce into the tapestry of a state unified by the weird, wild, and wonderful.
All of this to say, Nevada isn’t just drawn to the strange — it depends on it. Its history, infrastructure, and identity have been stitched together in secrecy and by speculation, which, in turn, have shaped the state’s appetite for the uncanny, the campy, and the downright surreal. I’ve lived in the Battle Born State since I was 14. Zak Bagans’s haunted museum sits just down the street from my house. The bar where my friends and I regularly celebrate birthdays glows with Atomic Age memorabilia. My weekend road trips include renegade art exhibits of upturned cars and spectral recreations of The Last Supper, often bookended by stops at alien-themed gas stations and beef jerky stands. Here, roadside restaurants and watering holes serve as waypoints and mythmakers, where strangers trade ghost stories over hotel bar counters, gather in a restaurant near Area 51 to compare unexplainable night sky sightings, and refuel with cherry-steeped beer from a remote brewery that alone can justify an hourslong drive.

Janna Karel
Cathedral Gorge State Park.

My previous road trips throughout the state have featured stops at attractions that are pointedly bizarre — like artist Ugo Rondinone’s psychedelic Day-Glo monoliths that comprise Seven Magic Mountains. I’ve journeyed to many geologically surreal destinations: Take, for example, the soaring spires and person-wide slot canyons that rise from the pale siltstone and clay shale of Cathedral Gorge State Park. For the past decade, I have been telling my friends that next year is the year that I’ll join them on a silica-coated dry lake bed managed by the Bureau of Land Management for Burning Man, where some 70,000 people erect a city of tents, temples, and flame-spewing octopuses every August leading up to Labor Day.
The West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach.
Nevadans may be uniquely predisposed to look for things that are weird, says Michael Green, chair of UNLV’s history department. Consider the boom-and-bust mining towns of early Nevada and the resulting transience that lends itself to ghost stories. There’s Area 51 and the patchwork of lore regarding what secretly goes on beyond its gates, just 80 miles outside of Las Vegas. Even today, more than 80 percent of the state’s land is federally owned. “There is some degree of secrecy associated with federal land; there is also a degree of secrecy associated with the mob,” Green says. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the mob — more specifically, the American Mafia — exerted sweeping control over Las Vegas casinos: It built them, ran them, and controlled the flow of money both on and off the books. The mob’s goings-on were generally limited to verbal agreements and handshake deals, with documents minimally used and even written in code. “There are so many things that have been done behind the scenes, under the table, that we figured there has to be more to the story,” Green says.
Nevada’s preoccupation with the weird isn’t just about secrets; it’s also about the inherent wistfulness of the American Southwest. There’s the nostalgia shaped by the open road, Route 66, and cowboy iconography — all shorthand within pop culture for individualism and escape. For longtime Nevadans, that nostalgia may be more textured, based on yearning for a slower pace or the do-it-yourself era of Las Vegas before corporate monoculture took over the Strip. More broadly, the West has long been a mirage — the draw of exploration, ambition, and self-invention shimmering like water: imminently ahead but just out of reach.

George Rose Getty Images
Seven Magic Mountains near Jean, Nevada.

In April, I traveled 479 miles to see the weirdest and wildest lore-steeped sites in Nevada. Flying 80 miles an hour down the 95 — past sun-hardened rock faces and thorny desert scrub — I blearily had visions of making the same trip by foot and on horseback. In Tonopah, Nevada, I read an epitaph for a pair o