Bonnie Springs Ranch Ghosts: A Vanished Old Nevada Town

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 17, 2026 · How we verify

Stories about the Bonnie Springs Ranch ghosts outlived the buildings they were attached to. For decades this spread of desert land near Blue Diamond, Nevada, held an 1880s Western town replica and a small zoo, sitting on 63.86 acres in the Mojave Desert below the Spring Mountains, about 20 miles west of Las Vegas. The ranch closed in 2019, its structures came down, and what visitors reported there now belongs entirely to memory, video footage and the accounts of former staff.

Springs, Wagon Trains and a Stopover on the Old Spanish Trail

The reason anything was ever built here is water. The site sits at roughly 4,000 feet, and its natural springs were within the Paiute peoples homeland for centuries. In 1843 the place was established as a watering stopover for wagon trains going to California on the Old Spanish Trail. In 1846 General John C. Fremont stopped at the springs on his way to Alta California, preparing for the crossing through Death Valley toward the Pueblo de Los Angeles. By 1860 the site amounted to a blacksmith shop and a one-room cabin.

That layer of history is the foundation for the ghost stories told later, and it is worth noting the distinction: the wagon route is documented, while the claim that travellers who died along it linger at the site is an interpretation offered by ranch staff, not a record of anything.

Bonnie McGaugh’s Bar Without Electricity

Bonnie McGaugh purchased the ranch in 1952, and it was named Bonnie Springs Ranch after her. The property she took on included a broken-down bar and a three-room house, reached only by a dirt road. The bar had previously operated as the Red Rock Tavern, opened in 1939. McGaugh reopened it in 1952 and ran it for the next twelve years without electricity, using kerosene lamps.

Everything else grew outward from that one room. The Levinsons expanded and refurbished the 1840s ranch house into a restaurant and bar, opening it as the Bonnie Springs Steak House in 1964. The bar became known for the neckties hanging from its ceiling with dollar bills pinned to them, a habit that began after Al Levinson was turned away from a Desert Inn restaurant for wearing a bolo tie.

Old Nevada: 45 Buildings for $800,000

The western town that most visitors remember was not old. Built at a cost of $800,000, Old Nevada opened on May 1, 1974 with 45 buildings across 5 acres of ranch land. The buildings were researched carefully, using old wood and plans from early western communities, and the Methodist wedding chapel was based on a chapel in Belmont, Nevada. Behind the weathered fronts they met modern building codes and had air conditioning.

A zoo had been added to the ranch by 1985, largely populated by rescued and abandoned animals, and a 50-room motel was added in 1989. As of 2013 Old Nevada included the wedding chapel, the saloon and a small schoolhouse, along with staged gunfights and two small museums.

What Staff Said Happened in the Opera House

The ranch has been speculated to be haunted, as claimed by some visitors. The clearest on-record account comes from Tim Harrison, the ranch’s marketing director and events manager, who in 2016 said, “We were the hub of wagon trains that came through and people camped here and a lot of people died on the way.” He returned to the subject in 2017: “There’s a little girl by the school house, several apparitions at the opera house. You hear all kinds of stuff.”

Those are the reported phenomena in full: an apparition of a child near the schoolhouse, figures seen in the opera house, and unidentified sounds. Nothing about any of it was ever verified, and the historical record of the site describes deaths along the wagon route in general terms rather than at this particular spring.

Television crews added their own claims. The ranch was a lockdown location in a 2011 episode of Ghost Adventures, whose team reported footsteps, sounds, and the presence of ghosts in empty rooms. It appeared again in a 2015 episode of Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks, and in 2018 it featured in Most Terrifying Places in America in an episode called “Devil’s Playground” on the Travel Channel.

Bonnie Screams and the Monthly Ghost Tours

The ranch leaned into its reputation commercially. Each October from 2008 to 2018 it was renamed “Bonnie Screams” for Halloween, with haunted house attractions, and in 2015 it added a zombie-themed paintball game in which riders on a bus fired at zombies. Also as of 2015, a local paranormal society ran a three-hour tour of the ranch’s haunted areas on the last Saturday night of most months, with attempts to contact the ranch’s ghosts, sometimes joined by figures such as Susan Slaughter of Ghost Hunters International.

Why You Cannot Visit Bonnie Springs Anymore

Bonnie Springs closed on March 17, 2019, after long lines on its final two days, with waits of up to 40 minutes to get in. Public feeling ran high: petitions to have the ranch declared a historic landmark gathered more than 25,000 signatures within days and 51,000 within two weeks, and by the time the Clark County Planning Commission considered the redevelopment nearly 54,000 people had signed, though the commission stated that no part of the ranch had been deemed historic.

The sale was finalized on April 2, 2019, at a cost of $25 million, by which point the animals had been relocated to other zoos and habitats. The wedding chapel was donated to a local woman who wanted it for her farm animal sanctuary, on condition she paid to move the 20-foot-wide building. Groundbreaking for the replacement project, The Reserve at Red Rock Canyon, took place on March 15, 2022, and the remaining Bonnie Springs structures had been demolished by then.

Anyone hoping to walk Old Nevada’s boardwalks is out of luck. What remains accessible is the wider Red Rock Canyon area around the site, and a stranger form of afterlife: Bonnie Springs appears as an abandoned town in the 2010 video game Fallout: New Vegas, and the motel had a brief moment in the 2005 film Domino.

Address: Near Blue Diamond, Nevada, about 20 miles west of Las Vegas

See Bonnie Springs Ranch for Yourself

Sources

• Las Vegas is hub of glamour, glitz, scenery, fun
• Our Story
• Bonnie Springs
• Preserving History: Local sites recall Nevada's bygone days
• Bonnie Springs Ranch-Green Oasis For You…
• Wikipedia: Bonnie Springs Ranch

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