Few have ever seen this corner of the Las Vegas underground.
That’s because The Underground House is not only literally beneath the city’s surface but has spent most of its 44-year life in private hands.
3970 Spencer St. — located 26-feet below the street — is considered by many to be Sin City’s most famous basement, but it’s actually a bomb shelter-made-opulent subterranean home. And now it’s on sale for $5.9 million to anyone looking to call its sunless decadence home.
The 15,000-square-foot bomb shelter features a pool, jacuzzi, casita, 500-feet of landscape murals, putting green and time-of-day lighting settings to mimic the world outside. It is accessed by an elevator from an above structure.
“When you go down there, you’re in a capsule and go back in time,” Tee Thompson, a member of the secretive human life extension-enthusiast group Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2018 while living in the space on behalf of the society. “I get to choose whether I want it day, night, dusk or dawn…When it is dark, it is pitch black, and it’s very peaceful and quiet. I don’t get to hear the outside elements. It’s beautiful being down here. If you’re not focused on what you’re doing, you lose track of time.”
The bizarre luxury pad 2.5 miles east of the Last Vegas Strip was built for personal use by investor Jerry Henderson in 1978. A subterranean living enthusiast who owned a company called Underground World Homes, Henderson also owned a 45,000-square-foot underground house in Colorado. He even built two bedrooms and an 800-square-foot caretaker house into his sunless Las Vegas bunker, where he and his wife Mary lived until his death in 1983.
After Jerry passed, Mary moved upstairs into the townhouse she built above the bunker and lived there until her death in 1989, at which point both properties were foreclosed on, according to the Review-Journal. In 2014, the bunker was bought for $1.15 million by the Society, which made a number of renovations to the space.
“Take an elevator ride down to an underground utopia,” advertised the current listing, which also features a number of digital renderings showing a couple standing in front of the underground house’s front doors, waving, the city street and sky above them.