Zak Bagans Just Bought a Cold War Bunker House Under Las Vegas for $4.5 Million — and He’s Turning It Into a Museum

LAS VEGAS — Zak Bagans already owns the most famous haunted mansion in Las Vegas. Now the “Ghost Adventures” star is going underground — literally. Bagans has purchased the Las Vegas Underground House, a Cold War-era bunker home buried about 26 feet beneath an ordinary-looking house on Spencer Street east of the Strip, for a reported $4.5 million. And he says he plans to open it to the public for the first time ever — as a museum.

The deal closed quickly and quietly, until TMZ broke the news on Sunday, October 5. The “Ghost Adventures” star dropped $4.5 million on the roughly 16,000-square-foot property, which boasts painted skies, fake landscaping, a pool, and lighting designed to replicate the different hours of the day. Local reports put the exact number slightly higher, at $4.55 million, with the Stasis Foundation — a nonprofit known for its work on cryogenic human preservation — as the seller.

The deal

Bagans announced the purchase himself on Monday, October 5, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s John Katsilometes was first to report the terms locally. The property had been sitting on the market with a $5.9 million asking price — the Zillow listing (MLS #2713309) shows 16,936 square feet, five bedrooms and six baths split across two homes, one above ground and one below, on a 1.05-acre lot. Holly Erker of IS Luxury held the listing; Rob Jensen of the Rob Jensen Company represented Bagans in the deal.

For a property this strange, the price history is a story of its own. The bunker house sold for $2 million in 2005, was foreclosed on by Seaway Bank and Trust Co. in 2012, hit the market at $1.7 million in 2013, and then sold in March 2014 for just $1.15 million to a mysterious group calling itself the Society for the Preservation of Near Extinct Species — a name that tells you everything about the aura this place carries.

A Cold War fever dream, 26 feet down

To understand what Bagans just bought, start in the 1970s. Avon executive, philanthropist and Dawson School founder Girard “Jerry” Henderson and his wife, Mary, built the Underground House between 1974 and 1978 with Texas builder Jay Swayze — the man behind the Underground World Home exhibit at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Henderson’s brief: survive a nuclear blast without giving up a single creature comfort.

What he got was buried about 23 to 26 feet below ground, east of the Strip near Flamingo Road and Eastern Avenue: an in-ground pool, two hot tubs, a sauna, a four-hole putting green, a dance floor with a small stage, and a full bar — all of it under painted skies and enormous hand-painted murals of tranquil rural landscapes. Sculpted faux trees, a waterfall, and programmable lighting that shifts to match the time of day upstairs complete the illusion that the world above still exists. A private tunnel once connected the bunker to Henderson’s office building across the street, which later served as headquarters for Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation.

Bagans’ team puts Henderson’s original spend at roughly $10 million — on the order of $68 million in today’s dollars — though other accounts of the build cite a far lower figure. Either way, the place has lived a second life as a curiosity: MrBeast filmed there and called it “one of the most expensive and bizarre bunkers on the planet,” and Imagine Dragons shot the music video for “Monday” inside its walls.

Dark history and undiscovered mysteries

None of that is why Bagans bought it — or at least, not the whole reason. According to TMZ, when Bagans did his walk-through of the property, he learned about the bunker’s dark history, which was reportedly so unnerving that some staff refused to go down there alone.

Bagans himself is leaning all the way in. “Once I was actually in the process of buying it, I was shocked by how many different mysteries are tied to this house, things I don’t wanna reveal just yet,” he told TMZ. He says he plans to preserve the house and its history so he can “dig deeper into the mysteries” — phrasing that should sound familiar to anyone who has watched him work a haunted hallway with an EMF meter for the better part of two decades.

He’s also framing the purchase as an act of preservation. “To me, it’s part of the Cold War history and Las Vegas’ atomic age,” Bagans said of the deal. “There are just so many layers that people will be immersed in.” In a city that has spent eighty years reinventing itself on top of its own history, a 1970s mogul’s nuclear hideout — frozen in amber, murals and all — is the rare Vegas artifact that survived the wrecking ball by being impossible to see from the street.

The museum plan

The headline move is the museum. TMZ reports Bagans plans to turn the bunker into a museum, opening it to the public for the first time in its half-century existence, and to produce an original documentary feature about the property and its mysteries. No opening date has been announced.

If the bunker museum happens, it will be Bagans’ second act as a museum man. Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum — housed in the historic 1938 Wengert Mansion at 600 E. Charleston Blvd. near downtown — is open year-round, Wednesday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (closed Tuesdays), with general admission at $54 and the RIP All Access experience at $88. Its 30-plus rooms hold the Dybbuk Box, Dr. Kevorkian’s death van and artifacts from the “Demon House,” and USA Today has named it one of America’s 10Best haunted destinations six years running. In October, it’s one of the anchors of Las Vegas’ Halloween season — which now has a new ghost on the horizon.

What it means for Vegas

Bagans buying the Underground House is a very Vegas kind of transaction: a celebrity, a Cold War relic, and a business plan built on people’s appetite for the uncanny. But it’s also something rarer — a preservation story. The property has cycled through owners, a foreclosure and a decade of semi-mystery since the Henderson era. A museum conversion, done right, would finally give the public a look at one of the strangest private residences ever built in the American West, in a city whose atomic-age history is mostly remembered in neon and museum placards.

It also deepens Bagans’ footprint as a Vegas culture fixture. He isn’t just a TV ghost hunter who happens to live here — between the Haunted Museum, his long-running presence on the local scene and now a second museum in the works, he’s building a small paranormal empire east of the Strip. In a year when Vegas keeps stacking cultural moments — from Wu-Tang’s final-chamber farewell to the closing week of Awakening at Wynn — a Cold War bunker turned public museum fits the city’s strangest tradition: the only thing more Vegas than a secret is selling tickets to it.

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