Looking for a doomsday bunker? Former KY lawmaker is selling his for $6.5 million.
If you’ve got $6.5 million, former state Rep. C. Wesley Morgan has an impressive house just outside Richmond to sell you.
It offers six bedrooms and seven full baths, a saltwater pool, a steam sauna and heated floors to keep your feet toasty warm, all on roughly 200 acres of lakefront property.
But the crown jewel is hidden underneath: a 2,000-square-foot, fully stocked and furnished doomsday bunker behind a massive steel and concrete door. Advertised as being capable of withstanding nuclear, biological and chemical fallout, with its own water tank, the bunker itself is valued at $3 million.
“I just wanted someplace safe,” said Morgan, an owner of liquor stores who served as a Republican member of the Kentucky House from 2017 to 2019. Last spring, Morgan unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in the GOP Senate primary.
“I saw the bad stuff that was going on in the world,” Morgan said. “And I think there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now. If we don’t get our act together, we’re gonna end up in a civil war.”
The online listing for Morgan’s house has drawn snarky attention on the popular Instagram site Zillow Gone Wild.
Some on the site questioned why a “nuclear/biological fallout shelter” would be advertised in a field in rural Kentucky. Others seized on pictures from the bunker: a food storage room with rows of freeze-dried sliced strawberries in large tubs; a hatchway in a bedroom wall that opens to reveal a dark tunnel to ... somewhere.
“What can you take through the portal to Hell?” one woman wrote on the site. “A can of sliced strawberries?”
So, what is the hatchway in the bedroom wall?
“It’s just an escape tunnel,” Morgan explained.
To where? You’re already in an underground bunker.
“Well, I don’t want to disclose that,” he said.
Morgan earned headlines during his one term in the General Assembly for sponsoring a bevy of self-interested bills that would have rewritten state law in ways that benefited people who own liquor stores, as he did with his small regional chain of Liquor World stores. He was defeated for re-election by a fellow Republican in 2018.
Morgan said he initially bought the large tract of land on Taylor Fork Lake west of Richmond as an investment property, believing it would grow in value given its proximity to Interstate 75.
But after Democrat Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Morgan said, “I could see the handwriting on the wall that Obama was trying to change our country into a socialist country.”
Apart from the potential for economic collapse and civil disorder, there were hundreds of tons of chemical agents stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot south of Richmond, not far away, he said.
Suddenly those open fields looked like a good place to prepare for the worst by digging a bunker for his family’s protection.
“I consider myself to be a Christian and a religious person,” Morgan said. “I felt like something was telling me to do that, so that’s what I did. Now, it may prove to be nothing or it may prove to be prophetic. I don’t know. I guess we’ll see.”
Construction on the bunker — what Morgan calls “the basement” — began a dozen years ago. He and his wife moved into it and lived there for several years while work continued on the more luxurious house above. The bunker has bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room, so it’s comfortable enough, although deficient in windows.
With the liquor business not doing as well as it once did, Morgan said, he decided to list the property last year to see how many offers it might attract. So far, interest has been scarce. There aren’t many people in Madison County looking to spend $6.5 million on a house.
The bunker probably was an “eccentric” move, he acknowledged. He just wanted to make sure that his family and close friends could survive any disasters that came. The space could hold up to 30 people if necessary, he said.
If the worst did happen, how would he feel about climbing from the ground into the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world?
“When we first built it, you know, that wasn’t something I thought a lot about,” Morgan said. “But I’m coming up on 71 years old, so that’s a big change. Now I’m not so sure I’d want to go on living in a world where everyone was gone. At my age, if I had it to do over, would I? Probably not.”
