Dancing to an Empty House: The Haunted Amargosa Opera House

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 10, 2026 · How we verify

Out on the edge of the Mojave, where California State Route 127 crosses the road into Death Valley, a U shaped block of adobe sits by itself in the desert. The haunted Amargosa Opera House and Hotel is what remains of a borax company town, and for roughly forty five years it was also the personal stage of one dancer who refused to leave. Marta Becket staged dance and mime shows there from the late 1960s until her final performance in February 2012. The buildings still stand, the hotel still takes bookings, and the ghost stories are recent enough that the television crews arrived before most of the town did.

Amargosa at a Glance

Built: 1923 to 1925 by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, to a design by architect Alexander Hamilton McCulloch. Style: Spanish Colonial Revival adobe, arranged in a U around a courtyard, originally holding company offices, employees’ headquarters, a dormitory and a 23 room hotel with dining room, lobby and store. Listed: the Death Valley Junction Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places on December 10, 1981. Owned by: the nonprofit Marta Becket established for preservation of the property. Where: Death Valley Junction, eastern Inyo County, with the Nevada state line five miles to the northeast and Death Valley National Park 27 miles away.

The Borax Town That Built a Theater by Accident

Amargosa was never meant to be a cultural destination. It boomed on borax mining and on its position at the terminus of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, and at its height about 350 people lived there. The hotel was the good address in the district, comfortable enough for company executives and visiting investors, who were met at the train by white gloved valets after a long and hot ride. The rest of the complex was working infrastructure: bunkhouses, an infirmary, a general store, a cafe, and a large gas station and garage across the road, the only place for miles that could repair the trucks hauling borax out of the mines.

At the northeast end of the U was a recreation hall that served as the community center, used for dances, church services, movies, funerals and town meetings. The room that would become the Opera House was, in company town days, mostly a place to show films.

The end came with the railroad. When the Tonopah and Tidewater ceased to be economical in 1942, the tracks were torn up completely and shipped to Egypt, where the line was laid again to support the Allied effort in North Africa. Afterward the Opera House, the hotel and some 250 acres of land changed hands many times.

Marta Becket Rents Corkhill Hall

In 1967 Becket rented the recreation hall, then known as Corkhill Hall. She repaired it, built the sets, painted murals on the adobe walls, and renamed the place the Amargosa after the original name of the mining town. In 1970 journalists from National Geographic found her giving a performance with no audience in the room at all. That profile, and a second in Life, turned a solitary desert habit into an international curiosity, and visitors began arriving from around the world, among them Ray Bradbury and Red Skelton.

Becket finished the murals in 1974 and founded the nonprofit Amargosa Opera House, Inc. to preserve the property. Working through the Trust for Public Land, the nonprofit bought the town of Death Valley Junction outright. In 1983 the Opera House replaced its worn garden chairs with 120 theater seats acquired from the Boulder City Theater in Boulder City, Nevada, and the official National Register marker was set in place. The tradition outlasted Becket’s own performing career: Jenna McClintock, who saw a show at six years old and went on to dance with the Oakland Ballet, came back to thank her, stayed to keep the theater running, and retired from the Amargosa in the spring of 2016.

The Hauntings and the Two Television Crews

This is the part where the record thins out, and it is worth saying so plainly. Reports of hauntings in the buildings exist, and they were substantial enough to attract two national paranormal programs: Ghost Adventures filmed at the site in 2010, and The Dead Files followed in 2013. What the documented history supports is that the reports were made and investigated. It does not establish what, if anything, was found, and no verified account of a specific apparition, name or death attaches to the buildings in the public record.

What the place has instead is atmosphere with an unusual pedigree. A theater in a near abandoned desert town, painted floor to ceiling by one woman, where the most famous single image is of a dancer performing to rows of empty chairs, hardly needs help from a legend to unsettle a guest at two in the morning. Visitors should treat the ghost stories as reported experience rather than history, and judge them from a hotel room rather than a screen.

Amargosa on Film

Directors found the location long before ghost hunters did. It was one of three motels covered in Christian Blackwood’s 1989 documentary Motel, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Individual, Informational Programming. David Lynch used it in Lost Highway, where it appears as the Lost Highway Hotel. The exterior turns up in The Hitcher, in Carl Colpaert’s Delusion and in the 2020 miniseries The Stand, and the cafe and hotel colonnade fill a forty second stretch of Robert Plant’s video for his 1983 song Big Log. The interior of the Opera House appears in the Lighthouse Family video for “Lifted.” Todd Robinson’s documentary Amargosa, released in 2000, won a 2003 Emmy for cinematographer Curt Apduhan and was a finalist for an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Becket and the Opera House also feature prominently in Nicolette Polek’s book Bitter Water Opera.

Staying at the Amargosa Hotel

The hotel is open year round and remains in operation as of 2026, which makes this one of the few haunted locations where the visit and the overnight are the same decision. Come prepared, because Death Valley Junction beyond the maintained buildings is close to a ghost town. There are no gas stations. The Amargosa Cafe, once run by the Opera House and Hotel, is no longer open, so bring food and fill the tank before you arrive.

The site sits at the meeting of California State Route 127 and the National Scenic Byway route toward California State Route 190, which makes it a natural stop for anyone driving into Death Valley National Park, 27 miles northwest, or heading south toward Shoshone and the Tecopa Hot Springs. The Nevada line is five miles northeast.

Address: California State Route 127, Death Valley Junction, Inyo County, California

See Amargosa Opera House and Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• Soiree Planned for Becket's Final Stage Performance
• Hotel
• Desert Dance: 'Amargosa' tells mesmerizing tale of eccentric ballet dancer
• Amargosa Opera House
• Loc (official)
• Wikipedia: Amargosa Opera House and Hotel

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