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My Dark Path Podcast
"We just had a conversation with a staffer at the hotel we won't identify because they were kind enough to tell us a story about hauntings happening in this room. Someone came out with a bruise…Yeah, someone came out with a bruise, another girl said she got a quarter thrown at her. Which could make a bruise. Which could make a bruise. I think she said two people came out with bruises in separate rooms."

That’s the voices of My Dark’s Path’s Senior Story Editor, Nicholas Thurkettle, Contributing Writer Laura Townsend, and our special guest expert on the dark tales of Las Vegas, writer for Vegas.com Veronica Hodur. In our last episode, I told you that these three storytellers and lovers of strange history rendezvoused in Sin City for a special My Dark Path field trip. It was a wild success.

As the trio experienced the awesome, garish, and unmistakable sights and sounds of America’s gambling capital, they found plenty of sights and exhibits celebrating the city’s unsavory historical association with organized crime. And in our last episode, we covered the full spectrum of illegal activity, from cash-skimming and tax dodging to torture and murder.

Which makes it all the more interesting to discover what the people who work in this city don’t want to talk about. If they can name hotels and steakhouses after known killers, if a tourist bar can celebrate the gangsters who made fortunes while sealing dead bodies up in barrels to be dumped in Lake Mead, you can’t say that Las Vegas is shy about the gruesome parts of its past.

But, time and again, as members of our team asked hotel and casino staff members about ghost stories, they encountered employees who didn’t want to be named, didn’t want to be interviewed. They would give official answers, vague denials that gave the impression that this is what they’d been instructed to say. And when someone is working hard on the clock, you don’t want to press. But off the clock, and off the record, a few were more willing to pass along stories.

This city may be like nowhere on Earth, but many of its ghost stories share familiar details - a person swears that they’ve heard strange noises in a particular room, experienced unsettling impressions. Maybe their friend saw an apparition. I find it comforting that, even in a place like this, ghosts are behaving the way they seemingly do in every city.

As Nicholas, Laura, and Veronica explored hotel hallways, and walked the floors of casinos ranging from some of the oldest to the biggest and most glamorous, they didn’t come back with proof of life after death. I don’t want to make any false promises; we’re not that kind of show. But they did find that chasing ghost stories has an uncanny way of opening a door to a history we don’t talk much about; a dark path showing us that death, hubris, and greed aren’t just distant remnants of this city’s gangster years. They’re still with us today, with hints of them popping up in rumors about telephones ringing with no one on the other line, children heard laughing in empty rooms, the smell of smoke curdling through hallways without a flame in sight, and the sounds of bodies crashing into lobby floors. Let’s start the tour, shall we?

***

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and this is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. Since friends stay in touch, please reach out to me on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to explore@mydarkpath.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 37: Las Vegas Field Trip, Part 2: The Spooks Are On the House.

***

PART ONE

You’re going to hear more clips recorded by our team throughout this episode - often they were recording in the very places they were discussing - in the pedestrian hallways around Bally’s, on the main floor of the Luxor, or in a restaurant in Binion’s.

That first clip was recorded in The El Cortez, which you’ll recall from our last episode was the first hotel and casino Bugsy Siegel owned in Las Vegas. The supposedly haunted room, 3300, sits in the historic wing our team was exploring. There’s nothing to set it apart from the other rooms around it, nothing to let visitors know that stories have been told about encounters there.

This historic wing is distinct from other hotels around the city, because it’s not just a modern interpretation of the aesthetic from the years after World War II - it’s meant to be much closer to authentic, the colors and textures a hotel guest of the time might have encountered. In a city that’s always chasing the newest and shiniest attractions, that’s rare.

"What's cool is we're in the wing of vintage rooms, so the inside of these rooms may actually also look just as old school 50's as these hallways do. So when you go up the stairs, the stairs have these really gorgeous kind of gold gilded handrails and then the edges of the stairs - the stairs are all hardwood - but then the edges of the stairs have the same kind of gold as the handrails and there's little bits of square tiling."

It’s an eclectic, dazzling design - one wall painted in bright turquoise, the opposite wall in tomato red. The carpet is a forest of deep green palm leaves. Vintage photos of old Las Vegas line the walls. It’s a lot more cheerful than you’d usually imagine in a hotel that has ghost stories associated with it; but if you recall my personal experience of a haunting in the upscale contemporary Taipei Hyatt; you know that hauntings can pop up anywhere. And this deliberately classic atmosphere is a fitting backdrop for our journey into the city’s past.

We mislead you a little in our previous episode, talking about the history of the mob in Vegas through the lens of Bugsy Siegel and the Five Families of New York City. But the truth is, there was another criminal kingpin in the years after World War II driving the evolution of Las Vegas, and making a fortune as he did it. His name isn’t as well known now, though I mentioned it just a minute ago. But his influence lasts in essentially every hotel and casino here. His name is Benny Binion, and the hotel that still bears his name in downtown Las Vegas is the only one that’s happy to tell you all about its ghosts.

***

Benny Binion didn't learn basic reading skills until he was in his 50’s. By then, he had the spare time, because he was in prison. Before then, he was seemingly too busy taking the sleepy town of Las Vegas by storm. There’s a statue of him in the city to this day, honoring the transformative impact he had. When he arrived here, he was already an experienced gambling hall boss and a convicted murderer, but his story doesn’t begin in the underworld of an American metropolis; instead, we have to go to the wild, open plains of Texas. Haven’t heard of a Texas mobster before? You’re about to meet one of the true legends.

Benny was born Lester Binion in 1904 in Grayson County, Texas. Unlike Bugsy, Tony Spilotro and other mobsters we’ve discussed, who grew up roaming crowded cities with like-minded petty criminals, Binion lived in the quiet of the countryside. He was in chronic poor health, and his mother wanted to keep him out of school and away from the germs other kids carried.

His parents decided instead that he would get his education in the great outdoors, by accompanying his father on trips throughout the wild, wild west.

Binion's father worked as a horse trader. That meant long journeys leading horses from town to town, and setting up campsites while they waited for market day. Once camp was made, the horses tied to tree trunks and sleeping, and the campfire crackling, you had to do something to pass the time. And the horse traders that Benny Binion grew up around, liked to pass it with gambling. These campgrounds were his education in how to play, wager, and win.

His health improved, but there was never any discussion of enrolling him in school. This was actually relatively common at the time - outside of the major cities most American children at this time wouldn’t finish high school. Benny was getting his education on his father’s sales trips. He made money running errands for the gamblers; and with that money, he started to play. He became an expert at cards - priding himself in his ability to keep from being cheated by dirty players.

By the time he was a teenager, his primary job was to lure new gamblers to the campsite, or to the fairground if they were already set up in town. You didn’t need a formal education to know that more people meant more money. He knew everything he needed to know about betting, and the challenges of operating an illegal business, by the time his peers were starting high school.

When he turned eighteen, Benny Binion ditched rural Texas and moved to El Paso. The bigger city allowed for more opportunity - and with Prohibition in full-swing, he had arrived at just the right moment for someone like him. Like many other future mobsters of his time, Binion got his start in the bootlegging business; and thrived.

In 1928, he moved up again, opening his first illegal gambling hall in the big city of Dallas. When he had craps tables shipped to his saloon, he had the crates labeled "hotel beds" to avoid suspicion. His staff was so well-trained that if they got word that the police were sniffing around, they could transform the whole saloon in just a half an hour, making it look completely legitimate.

This wasn’t the end of his criminal endeavors. Having grown up around violence and danger, he was known to carry three pistols on him at any given time. And in 1931, he used one of them to kill gambler and rum-runner Frank Bolding. Bolding had stolen some of Benny Binion’s liquor, so Binion shot him in the neck. For this killing, Binion got the nickname “The Cowboy”. He received a two-year jail sentence, which was then suspended. This seems shockingly lenient, but with his wealth and position in the community, being able to influence the legal system was just part of the game in the wild west. And Frank Bolding was a black man in Texas in the 1930’s - it seems the justice system didn’t care to work too hard for him.

Five years later, Binion killed another man named Ben Frieden for operating a rival numbers game. Think of numbers as like the lottery, only you have to trust a criminal gang boss to tell you if you got the winning number or not.

Now these are just the murders that we know about. And to tell the story about how Benny Binion made his way to Las Vegas, we have to talk about another rival named Herbert Noble. While Binion was known as “The Cowboy”, Noble’s nickname was “The Cat” - because he had survived an astounding number of murder attempts.

He was shot in the back, but lived. Once, he found dynamite strapped to his car. He sped away in his car while assassins shot at him through the windows. Noble had long suspected that Binion was the culprit behind these attacks, but couldn’t prove anything. Then, when his wife died in a car explosion that was clearly intended for him, The Cat blamed Binion, and dedicated his life to getting revenge.

Also around this time, Binion was drawing an uncomfortable amount of attention from the local government. His antics had become too destructive to buy his way out of trouble. Reluctantly, he decided it was time to leave his Texas days behind. And that’s when Benny Binion set his sights on Las Vegas - it was nirvana for an entrepreneur with his skills.

It took him a few years, and a few failed experiments, until he hit on the formula for success. He purchased the Eldorado club and the hotel attached to it, which was called the Apache. He renamed the whole complex Binion’s Horsehoe Casino; and the ideas he tried out there changed everything about Sin City.

Other casinos set a limit on craps table bets - fifty dollars, maximum. But Binion knew that there were high rollers out there with a lot more money burning holes in their pockets. He set the limit ten times higher, at $500; and this made Binion’s the place that every rich player wanted to be at. You could win bigger, you could lose bigger, but bigger was the whole point.

And, like Bugsy Siegel and the Flamingo he built over on the Strip, Binion had a vision to make the experience of gambling more classy, more seductive. While it seems absurd to imagine now, most casinos in Las Vegas had hard floors with sawdust on them. It was Benny Binion who put in carpet. He was the first to send private cars to pick up wealthy players, the ones Vegas now openly calls “whales”. He was the first to provide free drinks to players all over the gaming floor - one of the city’s most famous perks to this day. And the restaurant on the property proudly advertised a two-dollar steak. That’s about $24 today, and whether you consider that a bargain or not probably tells you whether or not Benny Binion would consider you a high-roller; but it was innovative perks like these that kept his guests from leaving the property to seek their pleasures elsewhere.

It’s part of the formula that makes Las Vegas work - to make sure you have such a good time that you don’t think about the money you’ve lost.

Binion’s Horseshoe Casino opened in 1951 and was profitable faster than even Benny Binion could have dreamed. Amazingly, he was still being stalked by the vengeful Herbert Noble, who attempted to bomb Binion’s new Las Vegas home. But this campaign of vengeful stalking came to an abrupt end when “The Cat”, who had survived so many assassination attempts, died from a bomb planted in his mailbox. We don’t know who put the bomb there - but hey, did you hear about that $2 steak at Binion’s?

As hard as The Cowboy worked to escape his past, violently, when necessary, it finally caught up with him. During a visit to Texas in 1953, he was arrested for tax evasion. In order to pay his legal fees, he had to sell partial control over the innovative casino he’d built. Even worse, his Nevada gambling license was revoked, for life.

He’d crapped out of the game, but in just two years he’d reinvented Las Vegas and the city never looked back. Today, he’s revered as one of the city’s founding fathers. His son took over ownership and the hotel stayed in family hands until 2004. Benny himself died in 1989, and a year later was posthumously inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame. If you’ve ever sat at a table in Las Vegas and been offered a beverage by one of the staff, that drink came courtesy of Mr. Benny Binion.

***

PART TWO

These days, one section of hotel at Binion’s has had its original name restored - The Hotel Apache. And it’s this historic area that, as I mentioned before, is the only hotel in Vegas that will tell you openly that it’s haunted. It’s been featured in episodes of Ghost Adventures and Haunted Collector, among others. When you check in at the front desk, there’s a pamphlet describing its history of haunted encounters. You can even fill out a card reporting your own ghost story, the way you might leave comments about the water pressure or the quality of the bedsheets.

We’ve posted the full Binion’s list on our website - multiple stories of objects being knocked around, latches opening, furniture moving, strange noises of running, or of children laughing. What struck our team when they saw this list, though, was that multiple stories centered around the same rooms, or the same areas of hotel floors. Not only were there multiple encounters in room 282, a guest in room 280 reported hearing mysterious noises in the room next door - room 282. The hotel has no official story to explain why supernatural experiences might be clustering in this vicinity, but now that you know the story of the founder - would anything really surprise you?

While the Hotel Apache is the only one to acknowledge supernatural legends, it is far from the only haunted place in Las Vegas. There are other hotels with their own ghost stories that they don’t like to discuss. We’ll get to those. But since we’re talking about Benny Binion and the criminal element that helped build this place, it gives us the chance to detour into the suburbs, to a place with an innocent appearance but a dark history.

The popular name is La Palazza Mansion; but it has other names - like The Death Mansion, The Devil's Mansion and The Hell House. With nicknames like that, you might be picturing a gloomy Victorian house, filled with cobwebs, lightning striking just overhead. But in reality, La Palazza Mansion is a typical postwar Spanish-style house in a residential neighborhood miles from the Las Vegas Strip. It's painted a cheerful yellow with a red tiled roof, and a cluster of palm trees stand along its entryway, which is blocked by an iron gate.

La Palazza was once owned by Tony “The Ant” Spilotro - and if you listened to our last episode, you’ll recognize the name. He was the enforcer dispatched to put some discipline into the Mob’s operations in the city. And this house is rumored to be the place where the mob carried out its most heinous deeds. There are rumors of hidden rooms, and Veronica is not only well-versed in stories of Tony Spilotro’s violent deeds, she saw one of the ominous details of this house with her own eyes - a drain in the floor of a room that wouldn’t normally need a drain, believed to catch the blood spilling from Tony’s victims.

"He was an enforcer for one of the deadliest, big gangs in Vegas. And there is rumor - so there's that truth, which is that an enforcer owned this house and built this house for himself, and then there's the urban legend of the fact that they found bodies in the backyard and there's a secret room in the middle of this house with a drain in the middle of it and a sink covered in blood and behind a hidden door. So there's all of these kind of different, like - here's a truth and - but there is actually a drain because I saw the drain - there is a legitimate drain and I don't know if people died in there, but people definitely got the shit beat out of them, zero question."

This house was featured on an episode of Ghost Adventures, but otherwise, La Palazza does not offer ghost tours or welcome spectators of any kind. It’s privately owned and has switched hands multiple times. And there are stories of previous owners being driven out by eerie happenings, like we described in our multi-episode exploration of Amityville. Previous owner Chris Martinez, who led the Ghost Adventures crew through his haunted abode, said he had experienced harassment from demons. His girlfriend complained that she heard voices shouting vulgar things at her while she showered. Visitors have claimed to see blood on the walls or between the floorboards. One rumor has it that an apparition of a woman wearing giant sunglasses sits on the front porch smoking a cigarette. This woman, according to legend, was a cash counter for the mob during Spilotro's tenure in the city.

But like the current owners of the infamous Amityville House, the current owners of La Palazza have no desire to embrace the legends of The Death Mansion - to them, it’s just a home that want to live peacefully in. So, do us a favor, don’t go knocking on their door asking about the drain.

As we described last time, the downfall of Tony “The Ant” correlated strongly with the end of organized crime’s exclusive dominion over Las Vegas. Throughout the 70’s and the early 80’s, a new gang was muscling in on their turf - global resort and entertainment corporations. They had the capital that the Mob could never access, and once they started buying up old properties and building spectacular new ones, the likes of Bugsy Siegel and Benny Binion were swept away like so many casino chips on a losing hand.

With that in mind, it might be assumed that Spilotro's Devil's Mansion might be one of the last true haunted places in Vegas. Of course, out in the desert and near Lake Mead and Hoover Dam there might be ghostly encounters - that's where the mob dumped many dead bodies - but with the mob gone, Vegas might have been assumed to be safe from any future spiritual roamings.

***

PART THREE

The corporate takeover of Las Vegas transformed not only the casinos, it changed the stories. One thing that the mob and corporations have in common is an interest in making as much money as possible. A story of malfeasance in organized crime, though, usually involves details like Tony Spilotro having a victim’s head crushed in a vice; installing a special drain in his house for ominous reasons.

But corporations can find themselves connected with death, too; all too easily. And when people die from our collective sins, ghost stories seem to follow. The site of one of the biggest sits at the heart of the Strip today, just a short walk from where Bugsy Siegel  built the original Flamingo.

One of the original corporate-run hotel and casino resorts in Las Vegas was the MGM Grand. Just to clarify, it’s not the MGM Grand you’d visit today, with its lion habitat in the lobby. The original MGM Grand now operates under the name Bally’s; but it was the Grand when it opened in 1973. It was one of the first skyscraper hotels on the Strip, soaring an amazing 26 stories into the sky, setting a standard for glamour and luxury that finally realized the dream Bugsy had a quarter-century before. It offered the promise that every desire could be fulfilled within its walls. But on Friday, November 21st, 1980, the guests and staff of the Grand suffered an unimaginable disaster.

The fire broke out just after 7am in a restaurant. The flames clung to the wallpaper and raced through the kitchen, into the hotel lobby, and across the casino floor. And I do mean raced - investigations estimate that the fire was moving at 10 to 13 miles per hour, as fast as the average adult can sprint at maximum effort. Firefighters were on the scene in just seventeen minutes; but by then, eighteen people on the casino floor had already perished. And despite the heroic efforts of the firefighters, who kept the flames confined to the ground floor, the nightmare wasn’t over; as thick clouds of smoke began to rise up the elevator shafts and stairwells of the hotel.

When the MGM Grand was built in 1973 - it was not legally required for a building of its size to have emergency sprinklers, or fire alarms. A corporation that had spent big on plush furnishings and luxurious decor had skimped on safety; and as terrified guests crowded the elevators and stairwells, desperate to escape, chaos ensued.

Firefighters describe climbing over dead bodies, trying to gather and secure the living; but they were delayed because they didn’t know the layout of the building; and as any savvy gambler will tell you, a casino can be difficult to navigate by design. Hotel guests tried to tie bed sheets together into makeshift ropes, hoping to escape out a window. But remember - the building was 26 stories high, and the fire truck’s ladder could only reach to the ninth floor. In the end, the rising smoke killed more people than the flames; most of the deaths happening between the 19th and 24th floors.

85 people died in total; one of them from head trauma after they dove out a window. Hundreds more were injured. It remains the worst disaster in the history of Las Vegas; responsible for more deaths even than the horrific mass shooting in 2017. Fire codes and safety procedures in hotels and other buildings all over the country were transformed by this event. And the original MGM Grand closed for a top to bottom overhaul - reopening in July of 1981, this time with sprinklers and fire alarms.

In the modern-day Bally’s, the tower where the smoke claimed so many lives is still taking in guests today. Not surprisingly, there are recurring stories of guests having eerie encounters both there and on the casino floor. Even over at Binion’s nobody talks about seeing apparitions in the casino itself. Let’s let Veronica tell it:

(Veronica describes the hauntings in great detail from smelling smoke to the woman with her dress on fire, etc.)

This horrific tragedy did nothing to slow corporate enthusiasm for Sin City. The historic casinos of Fremont Street were largely forgotten as The Strip grew, with one spectacular resort after another rising up. The trend was towards elaborate themes that would define the look of the casino inside and out - a medieval castle called Excalibur, the pirate-themed Treasure Island; and, in 1993, one of the most eye-catching buildings ever constructed in a city known for outlandish architecture - the massive black pyramid called The Luxor.

When you picture a hotel tower, you have every reason to picture a giant rectangle. But when Circus Circus Enterprises designed The Luxor, the goal was to evoke an exotic vision of Ancient Egypt; and it wouldn’t just be in the decorations, the building itself would establish the theme in a way that could be impossible to ignore.

The glossy black windows along its massive walls reflect the dazzling lights of the city; and as if that weren’t enough, a shaft of overpowering light, called the Luxor Sky Beam, blasts up into the heavens from the pyramid’s uppermost point. The intensity of light is measured in units called candelas, with one candela being the equivalent of a single, old-fashioned candle. The Luxor Sky Beam has been measured at 42.3 billion candelas; believed to be the brightest beam of light on Earth. Airline pilots over two hundred miles away in Los Angeles can see it; and at times it has been known to attract swarms of moths, beetles, and other insects; like an Old Testament plague.

Those details alone make it iconic; but it you dig a little deeper, as our team did, there are ominous stories behind those black walls.

The last stop on the field trip was the Luxor’s Egyptian-themed lobby; where they had this conversation in the shadow of a giant indoor obelisk marked with heiroglyphs.

Veronica describes the beginning days of The Luxor, the Egyptian theme.

The Curse of the Luxor began with its construction. It was built over a soft spot in the desert, meaning the ground below it was not meant to hold this much weight. This made construction extremely difficult, more hazardous than the average project here. But the corporation was following the same path that Bugsy Siegel had almost fifty years before in building The Flamingo - they were racing to finish by Opening Day, and cutting corners as they did. There are rumors that anywhere from 2 to 7 construction workers died during this process; but we can’t verify that any further. Construction is hazardous under the best circumstances, and these weren’t the best circumstances.

"They say it's possibly due to the main pyramid's deeply sloping shapes. The Luxor's construction was considered to be extremely difficult and dangerous - and remember they did it in 18 months."

This has been described as the most difficult building project in the history of The Strip, and the ambitious vision for the building stretched past its unusual shape - the original resort included Egyptian-themed rides, as well.

(Veronica describes The Nile River ride and its hauntings.)

This combination - of real-life danger, rumors of covered-up fatalities, are the seeds of many a good ghost story. But there was something else that fed the legends about the Luxor, sinister hints that the design of the Egyptian-themed building itself summoned a curse.

(Veronica describes the reason The Luxor is cursed - black pyramid and light beam instead of eye at the top)

Now, any mythology regarding Black Pyramids and the protective Eye of Horus is held together by a lot of speculation - there is a somewhat credible eyewitness account from a few centuries ago of a European explorer seeing a Black Pyramid at Giza near the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx; but it was either dismantled by thieves later, or was never there to begin with. And while some pyramids had inscribed altars at the top, it wasn’t universal even in Eqypt for them to have a protective eye. So what Veronica’s describing here is just a best guess for how the Luxor’s designers might have tempted fate.

Put that together with that fact I mentioned earlier, about the Luxor Sky Beam attracting a plague of insects, and it’s irresistible to imagine the place attracting dark supernatural energy. When you’re inside the casino these days, the heiroglyphs are still everywhere, but the atmosphere is cut in the way it usually is around this town, with the blinking lights of gaming machines, and the unending video loops of colorful advertising billboards. Right next to that obelisk our team gathered near, you can see a commercial for the Luxor’s current headline entertainer - Carrot Top. It makes for a strange juxtaposition with all these stories about ancient superstitions; but strange juxtapositions are what this town is all about.

And as if the hotel’s owners didn’t tempt fate enough, they’re currently hosting two tourist attractions that come complete with their own rumors of hauntings.

(Veronica describes hauntings of Body exhibit and Titanic exhibit)

But beyond the fun of speculating about these ghost stories, the Luxor is distinct from other Las Vegas hotels in other ways that have had real, verified, fatal consequences. As Veronica describes this, picture being on the inside of a hollow pyramid, looking up and seeing every floor of the 30-story hotel above; each floor a little smaller than the one below, pushing out a little further over the empty interior.

(Veronica describes the safety hazard of the rail-less hallways)

Other than a wall about the height of an average adult’s chest, there is nothing in place to protect a person from jumping or falling off the ledge. And it has happened.

Behind the entertainment offered by Las Vegas, there’s this more unsettling truth that we have to reckon with. Gambling has ruined lives - gambling has ended lives. It is documented to be as capable of producing addiction as alcohol or drugs; and in a town designed to overwhelm your better judgment, some people wake up to the cold, horrible reality that they’ve lost everything, and there are no refunds. You paid for those free drinks after all.

Multiple suicides have occurred at The Luxor. It is likely that every operating hotel in Vegas has been the site of people dying in this way; but the unique shape of this building offers opportunities that other casinos don’t. More than once, people have jumped from an upper balcony and plummeted hundreds of feet into the center of the lobby. In 1996, a woman jumped from the 26th floor and landed near diners at the lunch buffet. Her ghost is said to haunt that floor she jumped from.

Another man fell to his death from the 10th floor, but it was never definitively ruled a suicide. Despite these incidents, the walls remain as they are today - chest-high, no protective barriers, thirty stories’ worth of open air.

These aren’t the only records of death at this casino. On May 7th, 2007, a vehicle in the hotel’s garage blew up because of a homemade pipe bomb. The owner of the vehicle, a hotel employee, was killed. The garage wasn’t closed down or evacuated. You could pull your car into that very spot today and never even know what happened there. And in 2010, UNLV Football Player DeMario Reynolds was killed in an altercation at the hotel.

In 2012, two guests got in a fight outside of the elevator. As one of the guests shoved the other toward the elevator doors, they mysteriously opened - into an empty elevator shaft. The man fell down 25 feet to the basement. He was taken to the hospital in critical condition; whether he survived or not didn’t make it into any news accounts.

One of the things we’ve noticed in the stories we’ve told about places with a haunted reputation is that the reputation has a way of feeding on itself, of growing unchecked, as more people, perhaps subconsciously, start to draw connections between strange incidents and the stories they’ve heard. Ironically, even if the giant, black pyramid in Las Vegas isn’t actually drawing in dark, supernatural energy because of its cursed design; its aura of a home for disturbing stories is growing nonetheless. Despite the best efforts of Carrot Top.

***

Just a brief tangent - a palate cleanser after that segment - we haven’t talked yet about celebrity ghosts. Big stars are, after all, part of the draw in Las Vegas - the chance to see showbusiness legends live on-stage. So it won’t surprise you that stories abound of headliners choosing to take up residence here after their demise.

The most famous, you’d probably guess, is Elvis Presley. The King died in Memphis, and has been reported to haunt multiple places around America while also being spotted secretly alive all around America; but Las Vegas is happy to claim that the spirit of Elvis is paying regular visits. Before his death he performed over 800 shows at the Westgate Hotel, so that’s where you’re most likely to encounter him.

And speaking of Kings, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, has also been sighted. He passed away in Los Angeles, but at the time, he’d just completed a residency in Las Vegas. In 2013, the cast of a Michael Jackson tribute show produced by Cirque Du Soleil at the Mandalay Bay claimed that the Moonwalker’s ghost was haunting their gig, that they could sense his spirit among them during both rehearsals and shows. When a famous performer leaves this world behind, would getting a permanent residency in Vegas be considered a reward, or a punishment?

***

PART FOUR

As we’ve said, a lot of these stories are ones which the powers that be in Las Vegas aren’t eager to publicize - and you can understand if it’s not the image they want to convey. It was the same at the Taipei Hyatt where I had my own ghostly encounter, which I told you about all the way back in our third episode. Maybe too many thoughts about our mortality would distract us from the 24-hour party.

But there is one place in Las Vegas where ghost stories rule - and if you’ve been to the city recently, you were probably wondering if we were going to mention it. When we did our episode on haunted dolls, I told you about paying a visit to Zac Bagans’ Haunted Museum. Filled wall to wall with cursed objects, antique curios, relics of real-life serial murderers, even the so-called “Death Van” of euthanasia advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Haunted Museum is an entertaining place to scratch your itch for the morbid and strange. On a tightly-organized tour, you’ll even hear stories about supposed demonic cult activity in the building’s cellar. Bagans is a talented promoter and showman, so I can tell you first-hand that if you visit, you’ll have a good time. But if you’re familiar with the techniques of misdirection, of priming subconscious expectations and creating an aura of authenticity without actual proof, you’ll see that these exhibits and stories are great for stimulating your imagination; but you’re not getting an actual supernatural experience for your ticket.

(The group discusses the museum.)

It makes sense that a city like Las Vegas would find a way to sensationalize even the dead and the mysteries of the afterlife. I also can’t help but wonder if the success of this museum provides a service to places like the Luxor, that would prefer to draw your attention away from the fatalities which have happened within its walls. Just like those myths about ancient pyramids attracting dark energies, maybe this little house miles from the strip is siphoning away peoples’ appetites for a good spook story, separating it from the casinos.

But there’s really no escaping the dark paths of Las Vegas - they weave everywhere, from Binion’s on Fremont St. to the Strip and its toweing monuments to excess; through suburban homes with an extra drain, to the soft desert floor that may conceal even more buried secrets. The city never stops changing, building on top of itself, scaling ever higher in ambition and sensation. But history has a way of leaving something behind.

"There's all this kind of history that is in the books because you've got some things that are above court that you can prove that they own but then you've got all this shit underneath it that you can't prove anything about. And because Vegas built on top of the old over and over and over again and reformats and revamps and all this other kind of stuff at a certain point just because there might have been bodies in the basement ten years ago, now that basement might be a wood floor and you'll never know."

After the adventure was all wrapped up, I wanted to chat for a couple of minutes with Laura, who dove headlong into this topic despite having almost no experience with this place. I wanted to get her impressions coming back from this unique opportunity to learn about some of the history countless tourists stroll right by.

INTERVIEW SEGMENT HERE

It’s a city of star power and pleasure, but also a city of murder, torture, and misfortune. We’ve spent two episodes here but we know that we might find even more captivating stories if we stuck around a little longer. But even in a town that famously has no clocks, we know it’s time to wind this trip up, and put Las Vegas behind us for now. As long as we feel the temptation of a fast fortune or an endless buffet of entertainment, it will be there, ready for us.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Laura Townsend, with major assistance from our special Las Vegas expert and tour guide, Veronica Hodur. Check out her writings on Vegas.com. Our Senior Story Editor is Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

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