The Lady in Red | Tonopah's Mizpah Hotel

There's a five-story hotel in the Nevada desert where guests wake up to find a single pearl on their pillow. Nobody brought it. Housekeeping didn't put it there. The staff keeps a guest ghost story book at the front desk. The pearls keep filling it.

The gang investigates the Lady in Red — the ghost of the Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada. USA Today named it the #1 Most Haunted Hotel in America in 2018. Shane flew to Vegas early for CrimeCon, Jennifer joined them, and he brought a Lady in Red mystery worth the trip.

The legend says a woman named Rose, working out of the hotel in the early 1920s, was strangled on the fifth floor by a jealous lover. Her pearl necklace broke in the attack. Pearls scattered. For years, across multiple ownership groups, guests have reported waking up to a single pearl on their pillow — same floor, same hallway outside Room 502. The Lady in Red's official room is 504, red curtains and a canopy bed. But the activity isn't in 504.

Zoinks! Here's the problem. Shane went looking for Rose and couldn't find her. No contemporary newspaper coverage of a murder at the Mizpah in that period. A name attached to the legend, Evelyn Mae Johnson, born Baltimore 1879, doesn't match any of the fifty-two Baltimore birth records from that year. The hotel built its entire identity around a woman the historical record cannot confirm ever existed. 

And yet the Lady in Red keeps leaving pearls.

When Ghost Adventures filmed at the Mizpah for Season 5, Episode 2, broadcast September 30, 2011 — about a month after the hotel reopened from a twelve-year shutdown — cameras caught elevator doors opening on their own, a shadow blocking light from under a closed door, and an EVP of a female voice saying "I'm Evil. " THB rule: we report what cameras recorded. We don't tell you what it means.

Like, what if a town of eighteen hundred people, with the darkest sky in the lower forty-eight, a 117-year-old operating elevator, a cemetery next to a clown motel with six thousand clown figures, ends up haunted not because of Rose, but because the place outlived its purpose and the building didn't know how to stop?

This is the special Vegas drop. Recorded the night before CrimeCon. Three voices in a hotel room with Nevada laws that sound made up, a bar that built a rooftop to watch nuclear weapons detonate at sixty-five miles, and three Mirage dolphins relocated to SeaWorld San Diego before the casino shut its doors in July 2024.

What you'll hear in this episode:

The pearl that keeps appearing on the pillow across multiple ownership groups

The Lady in Red legend and the historical hole at the center of it

What Ghost Adventures caught at the Mizpah in 2011

The other Mizpah ghosts — children, miners, a soldier — none of whom get the marketing

Why Tonopah itself might be the haunting

Shit Fire storie: the Yellow-billed Loon, one of the rarest mainland-breeding birds in North America, that shut down the Bellagio fountains,.

Join the gang. The mystery stays open. The pearl stays on the pillow.

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