Tonopah & the Mizpah Hotel

38°04′N, 117°14′W

Central Nevada, high desert on US 95 — silver-mining town; Mizpah Hotel built 1907

[from the public record]

38.0667, -117.2333 · view on OpenStreetMap →

What's documented

Tonopah is a small town in Nye County, Nevada, on US Route 95 midway between Reno and Las Vegas, at ~1,840 m elevation. Founded in 1900 after a silver strike, it briefly served as the county seat and a financial hub of the Tonopah-Goldfield silver boom. The Mizpah Hotel, built 1907, was when it opened the tallest building in Nevada. The town's population peaked around 1910 and stands at ~2,100 today. Tonopah lies adjacent to the Tonopah Test Range and is the closest civilian settlement to it.

Notable & intriguing

The Mizpah Hotel opened in November 1907 and was, at five stories, for a short period the tallest building in Nevada. It hosted the Nevada State Senate while the Capitol in Carson City was being remodeled, and was the regional financial center of the Tonopah–Goldfield silver boom.

Nevada State Historic Preservation Office; Tonopah Daily Bonanza, 9 Nov 1907.
Wyatt Earp is sometimes reported to have worked briefly as a Mizpah bouncer in 1902 — the claim circulates in regional tourism material but is not supported by primary documentation; Earp did prospect in the area, however, and the Tonopah Mining District was formed during his time there.

Folklore; Tefertiller, Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend, 1997.
Howard Hughes married Jean Peters in Tonopah on 12 January 1957 in a brief, private ceremony, choosing the town for its anonymity.

Associated Press, 13 Jan 1957; Hack, Hughes: The Private Diaries, 2001.
The Mizpah’s “Lady in Red” story — a prostitute named Rose, said to haunt room 502 — has been a fixture of regional folklore since the hotel’s reopening as a working hotel in 2011. USA Today has repeatedly named it among America’s most haunted hotels.

Folklore; USA Today travel features, 2014 and 2018.

Public-record items already documented about this subject. Folklore is labelled. Sources cited where the specificity warrants it.

Public-record imagery

Mizpah Hotel on Main Street, Tonopah. Built 1907; at the time the tallest building in Nevada. Wikipedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Raquel Baranow · 2013

Tonopah, Nevada — town view from US 95. Wikipedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Ken Lund · 2011

The Desert Queen Mine, Tonopah — one of the silver shafts that built the town. The boom of 1900-1920 funded the Mizpah Hotel and the streets that still mark the basin floor. By the 1940s the silver was gone and the town was almost empty when the AEC moved in. Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova · 2018

The entrance to Tonopah Historic Mining Park. The dark ridges visible east of town hide the Tonopah Test Range — and beyond it, the Nellis Air Force Range and Area 51. Tonopah is the closest civilian settlement to both. Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 · Rick Obst · 2023

Referenced in the codex

2. The Operators, Several Kinds A field guide to the menagerie. Stewards, Technicians, Watchers, and the question of the Apkallu. With an argument that the operator-side has been a coalition, not a monolith, the whole time.
7. 1956 — The Bilateral How the contemporary apparatus inherited its shape, between Wright-Patterson 1956 and the stabilization of 1972. Nine officers; six lost; one bilateral accommodation.
15. The Containment of Revelation The Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Marian apparitions as filed contact events. Cloistered mystics as sorted partial-rememberers. Modern UFO-cults as failure cases that double as stigma shield. Pat Donohoe in the chaplain corps. Religion is, in important part, what humanity has been doing with its operator-class memory.