The saloon in the old Oatman Hotel on Main Street in Oatman is papered in one-dollar bills, walls and ceiling alike, each dated and signed by whoever pinned it up. Local tradition traces the habit to the town's gold miners, who signed a dollar and pinned it to the wall so that, when they were short of cash for a drink, they could find their own bill and spend it. Visitors took the custom over, writing a name and home town on a dollar and tacking it up beside the rest, and in 2005 locals estimated that more than 20,000 bills covered the room. John Durlin built the hotel in 1924, after a 1921 fire had destroyed much of Oatman, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 as the only two-story adobe building in Mohave County. The hotel shows a room as the honeymoon suite of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who married in Kingman on 29 March 1939, but their biographers record that the couple drove straight back to Los Angeles that night and met the press at Lombard's home the next day.
The bar keeps a ghost story as well. Staff credit a friendly poltergeist called Oatie, said to be William Ray Flour, an Irish miner who died behind the hotel, and one local account has spirits lifting money off the bar itself.
Getting there
35.0264, -114.3834
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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