1913 Goodsprings Saloon Tied to Carole Lombard's Final Days
310 W Spring Street, Goodsprings, NV 89019
Age
21+ for bar, all ages for cafe and gift shop
Cost
$$
Food and drink menu pricing. Free to enter and view the Carole Lombard and Clark Gable memorial room.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Single-story wood-frame building with gravel parking
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1913 · Continuous Operation Since 1913 · Sears Roebuck Pressed-Tin Cladding · TWA Flight 3 Crash Coordination · Carole Lombard and Clark Gable Memorial
The Pioneer Saloon was built in 1913 by George Fayle, a Clark County commissioner who saw a business opportunity in the growing mining town of Goodsprings, Nevada. The building's distinctive pressed-tin exterior, manufactured by the Sears Roebuck Company, was an early-twentieth-century fire-resistant alternative to wood cladding and remains largely intact today.
The saloon's most-documented historical moment came in January 1942. On January 16, TWA Flight 3 crashed into Mount Potosi southwest of Goodsprings, killing actress Carole Lombard, her mother, twenty-two military personnel, and the flight crew. Lombard had been returning to Los Angeles from a war-bond tour. Her husband, Clark Gable, flew to Las Vegas and was driven to the search staging area. The search effort for survivors was coordinated, in part, from the Pioneer Saloon, the largest gathering place in Goodsprings.
The accounts of Gable's exact movements vary. Some sources describe him as having spent significant time drinking at the saloon awaiting news; biographer Robert Matzen's Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 argues that Gable largely avoided the Pioneer because of the press presence and stayed at a nearby hotel. Both accounts agree that the saloon was central to the public side of the recovery effort.
The back room of the saloon today holds a permanent memorial to Lombard and Gable, with photographs, contemporary newspaper clippings, and recovered artifacts from the crash site. The saloon continues to operate as a bar and cafe, and the surrounding settlement of Goodsprings retains its character as a small Mojave Desert ghost town.
Sources
The Pioneer Saloon's paranormal lore is unusually grounded in named historical figures. The most-cited entity is Carole Lombard, whose presence has been reported throughout the memorial room and occasionally elsewhere in the saloon. Visitors describe a figure moving among the displayed photographs and the sensation of being watched while standing in front of the case holding crash-site artifacts.
A second figure, regularly described by staff and longtime bartenders, is an elderly prospector who is reported to sit at the far end of the bar during the slowest hours of the morning. The figure is sometimes described as a full-body apparition and sometimes as a brief impression that dissolves on second glance.
The third commonly cited entity is Paul Coski, a gambler shot and killed during a poker dispute inside the saloon in 1915. Bullet holes from the incident, or attributed to it, remain visible in the saloon's walls and are pointed out to visitors. Reported phenomena tied to Coski cluster near the area associated with the original poker table.
Pioneer Saloon has been featured on Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures and is a regular stop on Mojave Desert paranormal-tourism itineraries. The skeptical counterweight is well-represented as well; the Center for Inquiry has published a detailed investigation of the saloon's accounts.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Eat or drink at the 1913 pressed-tin Pioneer Saloon, then step into the back room dedicated to Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. The memorial preserves photographs, news clippings, and artifacts connected to Lombard's January 1942 plane crash at Mount Potosi and Gable's vigil during the recovery effort.
Pioneer Saloon hosts after-hours paranormal investigations covering the main bar, the back memorial room, and the kitchen. Investigators focus on reported phenomena tied to Carole Lombard, an unnamed prospector regularly described at the end of the bar in the early hours, and the 1915 poker shooting of Paul Coski.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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