Make California Post a Preferred Source A famed Las Vegas mansion built for the end of the world has perhaps found its most fitting new owner — a ghost hunter.
“Ghost Adventures” star Zak Bagans paid $4.55 million for the legendary Las Vegas Underground House, a bizarre Cold War-era bunker mansion buried 26 feet below an otherwise ordinary-looking property — just minutes from the Strip, according to Neon and KTNV.
The 48-year-old paranormal investigator plans to preserve the property and eventually open it to the public as as a museum, turning one of Sin City’s strangest private homes into a full-blown attraction.
But the underground mansion’s story was wild long before Bagans showed up.
Hidden beneath 3970 Spencer St. near Flamingo Road in Las Vegas’ east valley, the subterranean estate was completed in 1978 for Avon executive, philanthropist and Dawson School founder Girard “Jerry” Henderson and his wife, Mary, according to UNLV Special Collections.
The property spans more than an acre and includes five bedrooms and six bathrooms across the above-ground home, underground residence and casita, according to its Zillow listing.
But the real showpiece is below: a 14,620-square-foot subterranean estate with an indoor swimming pool, putting green, theater, dance floor, bar, saunas, hot tubs, hand-painted murals sculpted fake trees and a programmable faux sky designed to mimic the rhythm of day and night.
It was not some concrete panic room with canned beans stacked in the corner.
It was a full-blown luxury fantasy for nuclear survival — a place where the rich could ride out Armageddon with cocktails, climate control and wall-to-wall 1970s Las Vegas flair.
Henderson, who made a fortune through business interests including Avon, had long been fascinated by safety, privacy and underground living, UNLV’s archive says.
His doomsday dream took shape with the help of Texas builder Jay Swayze, an atomic-age evangelist who believed the surface of the earth could one day become uninhabitable.
Swayze and his brother Kenneth had built an underground home in Plainview, Texas, before forming World Underground Homes Corporation, according to UNLV. Jay Swayze developed what he called a “ship-in-a-bottle” building after being commissioned by Plainview officials to build a demonstration fallout shelter in 1961.
Henderson contacted the brothers in 1963 and commissioned his first underground home outside Boulder, Colorado. That same year, he bought a 51% stake in the Swayze’s company and financed an Underground World Home exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
The fair exhibit helped sell underground living as futuristic, safe and comfortable, not just paranoid. Swayze even imagined underground schools and shopping malls, according to UNLV.
The Las Vegas mansion was the Hendersons’ bigger, stranger sequel.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1968, the couple commissioned the Spencer Street underground home in 1971. Planning began in 1973, and the dwelling was finished in 1978.
The couple lived in the bunker full-time until Jerry Henderson’s death in 1983. Mary Henderson later built a smaller conventional home above the underground mansion in 1985, where she lived until her death in the late 1980s.
From the street, the property gives little hint of what lies beneath.
But downstairs, the bunker was designed to trick the brain into forgetting it was buried under the desert.
Murals wrapped the walls with scenes of New Zealand, the Hollywood Hills, upstate New York, Switzerland and Colorado, according to the Underground House’s own website. Sculpted trees conceal the support columns. The lighting system could simulate different times of the day. The home also had its own generator and water supply, the site says.
The result was part fallout shelter, part Vegas party pad and part frozen-in-time Cold War dreamscape.
The home’s strange charm made it a magnet for curiosity seekers, filmmakers and internet gawkers.
YouTube superstar MrBeast featured it in a viral clip, Imagine Dragons filmed the music video for “Monday” there, and the property has hosted private events, photoshoots and tours.
It also spent years searching for the right buyer.
The property sold in 2014 for $1.15 million to the Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species, which later became tied to the Stasis Foundation, a nonprofit associated with life-extension research, according to Business Insider.
The foundation listed the mansion for $18 million in 2019, but the price was eventually slashed to $5.9 million. It returned to the market in 2025 for $8.5 million before closing this week for $4.55 million, according to the Neon and property listing records.
Bagans, who operates Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum in downtown Las Vegas, told Neon he was drawn to the home’s Cold War and atomic-age history.
He also hinted the mansion may have a darker side.
“During the initial walkthrough is when I became absolutely shocked at the stories of hauntings I was told,” Bagans told the outlet, adding that there are “some very heavy-duty mysteries associated with the place and the previous owners.”
Bagans said he plans to use the site for an original documentary feature and eventually let the public inside.
“Through the museum, I’m going to give the public a rare chance to step inside a place most people have never experience,” Bagans told KTNV.
The timing is almost too perfect for Las Vegas — a city that has always known how to turn catastrophe into spectacle.
The Nevada Test Site, now known as the Nevada National Security Site, was established northwest of Las Vegas in 1950 and hosted 100 atmospheric nuclear tests before above-ground testing ended in 1962, according to the Nevada National Security Site.
The site later hosted 828 underground nuclear tests before full-scale testing ended in 1992, according to the US Department of Energy.
In that atomic-age world, mushroom clouds were part of the desert mythology, and survival fantasies sold almost as easily as show tickets.
The Underground House sits at the intersection of all of it: Cold War fear, Vegas excess. midcentury futurism, rich-guy eccentricity and, now, paranormal showmanship.
What began as one millionaire’s bunker against disaster could soon become a museum for the masses.
In other words, the apocalypse finally has a box office.
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