Some places feel like they were built for one of our stories. The Mizpah Hotel in Tonopah, Nevada, is one of them: a five-story Victorian relic that rose out of the desert in 1907, back when the mines were coughing up silver faster than the saloons could separate men from it. USA Today’s readers have crowned the Mizpah the number one most haunted hotel in America, and after a night walking its halls, I can tell you the place earns every inch of that title.
The headliner here is a ghost the locals call the Lady in Red. Her name, depending on who’s telling it, was Rose, a working girl on the fifth floor who, so the legend goes, was caught in the arms of the wrong man by a lover who did not take the betrayal gracefully. He strangled her with her own strand of pearls in the hallway between rooms 502 and 504. A century later, she’s still there. Guests on the fifth floor report sweet nothings whispered into their ears in the dark, and some have woken to find a single pearl tucked beneath their pillow. A souvenir, maybe. Or a warning. I haven’t decided which I’d rather believe.
(If you want to fall down this particular rabbit hole with me, here’s the fuller legend. Pour a glass of something red first.)
She isn’t alone, either. Children’s laughter skitters down the third-floor corridor late at night, except there are no children registered at the hotel. In the basement, where the Mizpah sits atop a web of old mining tunnels, two men are said to linger: miners, perhaps, who took a wrong turn underground and never found their way back to the sun. The staff will tell you, if you ask nicely, that they don’t go down there alone.
You can imagine what a night like that does to a writer like me. Luna has walked worse places, of course: Tokyo alleys where Kuchisake-onna lowers her mask and asks the question that has no right answer, moonlit forests where the pack hunts things older than humanity. But there is something about a real haunted hotel, with its Victorian wallpaper, its antique wood-paneled elevator that lurches between floors like it’s remembering something, and its century of unfinished stories, that reminds me why I write what I write. Love and loss don’t quit when the body does. Sometimes they just change shape.
So I sat up that night with the laptop glowing and the keys clicking, chasing my next story through the dark while somewhere down the hall, or maybe just on the other side of the wall, the faintest whispers drifted in and out of hearing. I couldn’t quite make out the words. I’m not sure I wanted to.
Rose, if that was you, the laptop’s always open. Feel free to read over my shoulder. And if you’ve got notes, the comments below are open to the living and the dead alike. A five-star review from beyond the veil would do wonders for the algorithm.
Until then, sleep with the light on if you must, but leave a little room in the dark for the possibility that the dead still have things to say.
May the moon light your path,
Veronica
P.S. If you’re new here and wondering who Luna is, you can start her story for free: grab Lycan Legacy – Prequel and see how it all began.
