Nipton

Since the days of the gold rush, dreamers hoping to strike it rich have been staking their claim to a dusty 80-acre town in the Mojave Desert called Nipton. For nearly all of them, those dreams have been fool’s gold.

Ross Mollison is the most recent badlands baron. His company, Spiegelworld, bought the town on a whim last year for $2.5 million — a million or so shy of what he paid for his six-bed, five-bath apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

As the founder of Spiegelworld, a live entertainment company producing sybaritic adult circuses in Las Vegas, Mr. Mollison specializes in spectacle and calls himself an “Impresario Extraordinaire.” But even hedonists must occasionally fast. In the desert sun of Nipton, where visitors now can find little beyond a peeling one-room schoolhouse, an empty general store, a five-bed hotel and a small cluster of forgotten cabins, he is trying to build an oasis of escape — a circus sanctuary.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/realestate/spiegelworld-circus-ghost-...