There was clearly a lot to be haunted
by. The house was built for Girard B.
Henderson, a wealthy financier with a
yen for underground living (he owned
another large bunker complex in Col-
orado) and an abiding dose of nuclear
paranoia. But what’s really bizarre about
the house, especially for those who
remember the civil-defense drills of the
1960s, is its late completion date: 1978,
16 years after the Cuban missile crisis
and long after the “duck-and-cover”
hysteria had subsided. Henderson was,
apparently, one of the last of the true
believers. “He believed that a nuclear
attack was possible and that the only
way to survive it was to live under-
ground,” Roy says. “That was why he
commissioned the Las Vegas house.”
The pedigree of the house, which was
built by a Texas contractor, Jay Swayze,
does date back to the height of the Cold
War. In 1962 Swayze was asked by the
town of Plainview, Texas, to build a
bomb shelter using government civil-
defense plans. Shocked by the austerity
of those plans, Swayze went on to design
and construct a 2,800-square-foot
underground ranch house that he called
“Atomitat” (a combination of atomic
and habitat). He lived there with his
wife and two daughters for four years.
Contrary to popular myth, ordinary citizens didn’t
rush out and construct backyard bomb shelters
(although the government published detailed
plans that encouraged them to do just that).
Below left: Government-issued drinking
water. Both brands claimed their water
would stay potable for years; U.S. Aqua said
its can was “impervious to nuclear fallout.”
