Earlier this year I told you I was going to try out a new variation on this column called “Mysterious Island Goes to (fill in the blank),” and like any good newspaperman I follow through on my threats.
This new feature will be a sort of “on the road” idea whereby I will leave the confines of the Isle of Romance and venture out into the so-called real world.
From these distant lands, I will bring you the same tales of strangeness and amazingness that you have all come to know and tolerate.
Earlier this year I told you I was going to try out a new variation on this column called “Mysterious Island Goes to (fill in the blank),” and like any good newspaperman I follow through on my threats.
This new feature will be a sort of “on the road” idea whereby I will leave the confines of the Isle of Romance and venture out into the so-called real world.
From these distant lands, I will bring you the same tales of strangeness and amazingness that you have all come to know and tolerate.
Thus, this first column in a series of three will chronicle my travels in one of my favorite regional destinations, the High Sierra.
LAS VEGAS
What’s that you say? Las Vegas isn’t in the High Sierra!
Well, technically you’re right. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single misstep and as I began that journey I found myself racing across the blistering desert towards that gorgeous Venus fly trap in the sun.
Every place on earth has its mysterious dark side and one need not scratch deeply to find it in Vegas.
Even the name is something of a mystery: the name “Las Vegas” translates to “the meadows.” Go figure.
Not only is the history of Vegas tied inexorably to the Underworld, but not far beneath the fun and frivolity lurk tales of suicides, broken dreams and no shortage of paranormal stories, including a pair of particularly chilling ones I will relate to you forthwith from one of our very own Islanders.
A SORDID PAST
The foundation of modern-day Vegas was laid in the late 1940s by one Bugsy Siegel, a mobster associated with the Luciano crime family and the driving force behind the infamous crime syndicate known as Murder, Incorporated. Maybe you’ve seen the movie.
Siegel helped finance the original Flamingo Hotel & Casino, billed at the time as “The World’s Greatest Resort Hotel.”
But as with most bets in Vegas, the Flamingo didn’t pay off, at least not initially.
In its first year of operation, the resort was showing little or no profit and Siegel’s mob investors were losing their shirts, and therefore their patience.
After a number of Mulligans, reprieves and second chances—none of which proved successful—Bugsy met his end in true mobster fashion when he succumbed to an acute case of “artillery sclerosis” while relaxing in his Beverly Hills home.
Although Siegel met his end in California, the influence of the mob has helped give the city a reputation, though largely undeserved, as one of the murder capitals of the United States.
In reality, murder rates in Las Vegas tend to fluctuate around national norms and precious few of them these days are tied to organized crime.
But murder isn’t the only way of leaving Las Vegas feet first and the city also holds the dubious honor of being the suicide capital of America, a title it does deserve.
The chances of dying by suicide there, say the statisticians, are twice the national average, so watch your step.
Legion are the beleaguered souls who toss one last desperate Hail Mary pass in their lives: running off to Vegas with their life savings in the hopes of winning it big, thereby giving themselves a reason to keep on living. There, in the hallowed halls of Caesar’s, the Bellagio or the Venetian, they freely gamble away their 50 grand or whatever until there’s nothing left for them in this world but to take a selfie with a Smith & Wesson.
Since the Bugsy Siegel days, the city has gone through a number of transformations.
While vestiges of the old Vegas still can be found, Sin City has seen phenomenal growth, from the A-Bomb testing in the 1950s to the Howard Hughes years and particularly in the past 20 years with the advent of the “Mega-resort” era.
Despite its history and its unavoidable association with crime and tragedy, the city exudes—at least to us outsiders—an impressive aura as a safe, clean and well-run metropolitan area with superb examples of higher education, museums and the arts.
Unlike her East Coast counterpart, Atlantic City, New Jersey, she has developed and maintained a respectable reputation world wide.
And now for those ghost stories:
THE CURSE OF THE LUXOR
The macabre subjects of murder and suicide segue quite nicely to our Las Vegas ghosts stories courtesy of none other than our own beloved Rosa Miller.
It was a long time ago, said Rosa, perhaps 20 years ago.
She and her sister were staying at the Luxor Las Vegas when, at some ungodly hour of the night, they had a visitor.
“We were in the room, I don’t remember the room number,” said Rosa. “I woke up and I felt somebody sitting on the bed.”
Naturally, Rosa immediately thought it was her sister. “But it wasn’t,” she said.
With this “presence” sitting on the edge of her bed, Rosa raised her head from the pillow and looked over to the other bed in the room and saw her sister slumbering peacefully.
With a sudden dread, she then looked toward the edge of her own bed and saw someone sitting there.
“It was a black image,” she said, noting that while the room wasn’t fully lit, there was enough moonlight filtering through the window to clearly see the black silhouette of an apparently despondent looking young man.
Then, Rosa did a brave thing. “Instead of getting up and turning on the light I hid my face.”
Maintaining her vantage point beneath the covers, Rosa waited and waited until she felt safe enough to look out again. When she did, the apparition was gone.
The following morning Rosa made a few inquiries at the Front Desk.
“Do you have ghosts in your hotel?,” she asked the clerk.
“Why do you say that?” came the response. “What room were you in?”
Rosa then filled the clerk in on the details of the previous night only to have the clerk respond, “Oh, honey, you’re not the only one.”
The story goes that a young worker decided to commit suicide one day while the pyramid-shaped hotel was under construction.
It turns out that Rosa indeed hasn’t been the only to experience this visitation and a quick check on the internet will reveal a number of similar stories in the years since.
But there were more ghostly adventures awaiting Rosa on a subsequent trip, this time with a group of friends from the Island, including Diane Boultinghouse.
Rather than staying at the Luxor, this time she was staying in a timeshare condo not far from The Strip.
The girls were there for a seven-day stay, but it wasn’t until the seventh night that strange things began to happen.
“We all experienced something the last night,” she said. Those “things” included children crying and the sight of shadows moving back and forth outside their bedroom doors.
The girls were split between two bedrooms and each group thought it was the other girls that were responsible for the racket.
The coup de grace came when Rosa said one of her friends screamed at her to turn off her cell phone alarm, which actually wasn’t even ringing. When Rosa looked to the side of her bed…well…I’ll let her tell you: “I saw a cowboy standing right next to me.”
This was no Hollywood-style cowboy. Rosa said the tall man was dressed quite authentically. “He was wearing all black. He had a long black coat and a black hat.”
After that, the apparition simply vanished.
Oddly enough, this spectral gunslinger sets us up for our next destination which I will cover in next week’s column.
We’ll shake the Vegas dust off our boots and go from one extreme to another city-wise.
We’ll venture into the High Sierra proper and visit a legendary relic from the Old West.
