The story
Death Valley Junction is a near-ghost settlement at the desert crossroads east of Death Valley, built in the 1920s as a Pacific Coast Borax company town — offices, dormitories and a community hall in Spanish Colonial style — and it would have faded entirely had not New York dancer Marta Becket, stranded by a flat tyre in 1967, fallen for the derelict hall: she restored it as the Amargosa Opera House, painted a permanent Renaissance audience across its walls, and performed her own ballets there for nearly half a century, an act of desert devotion that made the place legend. The adjoining Amargosa Hotel, in the old company rooms, supplies the ghost lore: guests, staff and television investigators describe footsteps and voices in the corridors, a presence in certain rooms tied in telling to the borax era and to children, doors and lights misbehaving, and — since her death in 2017 — affectionate stories of Marta herself near her stage. Operations at the remote site vary seasonally and should be confirmed before publishing. Present the accounts as guest and staff telling wrapped around a genuinely extraordinary history.