Clark’s Travel Center

While not haunted, this unassuming roadside pit stop has a rather scandalous past. It’s where Reverend Jimmy Swaggart picked up a lady of the night before being promptly pulled over by the police on October 11, 1991. The scandal (Swaggart’s second such offense) led to the temporary shutdown of the televangelist’s ministry and a massive media blitz, which then Indio Police Chief Jerry Graves told “The Desert Sun” garnered “the most intense interest in a news story that I’ve been involved in.” In an only-in-the-desert twist, a bronze plaque now marks where the incident occurred, quite fittingly displayed just outside of the travel center’s restrooms.