Sinister clowns, a Nevada hotel and the comic book guy.
You remember the scary clown phenomenon of last year, right? It peaked in the first week of October. Ground zero was North America, but tremors were felt here in Australia too because it was at that time that the world’s media, police forces, government organisations, major brands and the general public went into a collective high alert about the growing and persistent danger of lurking clowns.
If reports were to be believed, menacing clowns were everywhere. There were intimidations, robberies, even murders, and as a result, irrational fear and fascination briefly gripped the globe. This lead to a backlash which saw sales of clown masks banned at Halloween, McDonald’s limit Ronald’s appearances, and clown campaigners organising protests for their rights and livelihoods.
And it’s in this rather odd setting that the story of Christopher Sebela unfolds.
While most of the world looked on with cautious amusement at the rising tide of coulrophobia (yep, a ‘fear of clowns’), a Portland resident named Christopher Sebela conceived a creative opportunity. Chris writes comic books for a living. He’s written for Marvel and DC and is attuned to fantasy and other-worldliness. And more than most he’s used to embracing the darker side of humanity through the characters he helps create. Even so, and by his own admission, what he set out to do amidst a backdrop of clown madness was one of his weirdest ideas yet.
Chris decided that he would set up a Kickstarter campaign. The goal was to raise $4,500 which would allow him to travel to Nevada and stay for 30 nights at America’s creepiest hotel: the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada. There he’d write about the whole trippy experience and publish a zine. With a recipe like that and the support of a comic-loving social tribe, Chris raised a tidy, and perfectly appropriate, sum of $10,666.
The Clown Motel itself has been there for 35 years. It was originally bought and themed by a man called LeRoy David whose collection is epic: there are over 600 toy clowns on display in the motel’s front office.
But it’s the location of the Clown Motel that solidifies its reputation as one of the freakiest spots to spend a tortured night. Though Tonopah’s population today hosts 2,500 living souls, it was once a thriving mining town with a population of 50,000. Of course, all of those miners weren’t going to live forever, and so the Old Tonopah Cemetery was founded in 1901.
Over the next 10 years around 300 people were buried there, their graves marked with leaning wooden crosses and their names recorded on tin signs. It looks like something out of a zombie film. And it’s located right next door to the Clown Motel. That’s right, if you brave a night at the Clown Motel, you can look forward to a view of a very creepy boneyard from your clown-curtained window.
It’s now a year or more on, and as of March 2017 “I Lived in a Clown Motel (2nd Edition)” is available to buy through Chris’ website. Its description reads “A 40-page digest of my 30 days spent living in Tonopah, Nevada’s Clown Motel — aka the stupidest thing I’ve ever done”.
As with most things with inherent entertainment value, Chris made the world aware of the goings on from his remote location through a series of tweets and photographs which chronicle a nightmarish 30 days spent in the desert. Over the course of the month, he survived flash flooding, vicious hail and thunderstorms, and even a radioactive scare thanks to a fire at a nearby nuclear waste site.
He spent days surrounded by clowns: real ones in the form of drunken cowboys, bikers who visited the motel and hundreds of stuffed replicas which lived on the walls and shelves of the motel, their maniac smiles and eyes following him about every turn.
But despite all that, he’d never been more scared than when he ventured into the great expanse of nothingness beyond the Clown Motel.
It was on day 27 that Christopher Sebela received mail. He’d been sent some weird things previously like clown dolls, a clown mask, and a paperback book about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, otherwise known as the Killer Clown (the creep that inspired Stephen King’s It).
But none of these unrequested gifts alarmed him like the aged envelope that arrived at the motel on his 27th day. Unlike most of the other packages he’d received since publishing his address on the internet, this one listed a sender. “Not Chris Sebela.” He immediately recognised the return address in Portland, Oregon: It was his own. Inside the envelope, scrawled in a mess of black ink, was a crudely drawn map labeled “God Damned Wasteland.” It contained a set of coordinates and directions to a treasure buried in the desert, surrounded on the map by an illustration of a vulture and two wolves.
Chris Sebela’s story is a wonderful example of the fluidity of creativity and the power of narrative. It’s a tale that seamlessly shifts from online to analog through to physical spaces. It manages to feel cohesive and connected because of the collective cultural awareness that informed the adventure.
And, if you want to know what happened out there in the desert on day 28, perhaps you might now want to buy the book.
Andrew Reeves.
Know someone who might get a kick out of Everybody Knows? Send ’em this:
