SOUTH RANGE — A tiered stone wall rises like a fortress at the end of this rural Douglas County dead-end road.
It’s holding back a hill with a nearly 8,000-square-foot triplex built into it.
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Like the stone walls surrounding it, the exterior of the home, 5312 S. Stone Road, is made of stone quarried from the 80-acre property’s ridges. It’s unclear where the roof, covered in lawn grass, ends and the yard begins.
It has backup water and heat sources and once could produce its own power.
If it sounds like a place where you could ride out the apocalypse, it was built with that in mind.
“We were conscious of the atomic business,” said Jerry Van Horn, 92, of Superior, who bought the property in the late 1970s with his son, Jeffrey, and brother, James. The trio then built the home over several years.
And if the stone exterior and concrete walls and ceilings weren’t strong enough, the Van Horns installed an underground tank that could serve as a bunker.
But its role was a root cellar “until we needed it for something more drastic,” Van Horn said.
The home is now listed for sale for $999,995.
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Owners Dave and Jon Allen, a father and son who bought the property from the Van Horns in 2019, live just a few miles away but had no idea the home existed until the Van Horns listed it.
The Allens are not preppers — a lifestyle of preparing to be self-sufficient in a doomsday scenario. Instead, they were drawn to the home for its unique features and solid construction.
The Van Horns compiled a photo album documenting each step of the construction process, from blasting into the rock to pouring concrete walls into forms and more.
That’s what sold Jon.
“Seeing the photo album and the construction and knowing that this is such a unique property,” Jon said. “We just had to have it.”
But after owning the home for five years and renting out the three units, the Allens are selling it.
And a few more people know about it this time around.
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Soon after it was listed for sale in March, the TikTok account homes.tastrophes created a video of the listing, describing it as a “fortress” and “the perfect place to ride out the zombie apocalypse.” As of early July, it had almost 140,000 views.
@homes.tastrophes Why not turn it into a #paintball course? Check out today’s newsletter, with links to 3 more listings with underground bunkers- link in bio! @Estate Media #realestate #apocalypse #doomsday #zillowtastrophe #prepper #survival #wisconsin #duluth #greenscreen ♬ Music Instrument - Gerhard Siagian
Then USA Today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail picked up the story.
That prompted interest from all over, including from overseas, according to listing agent Leah Hollenbach, a Realtor with Re/Max Results.
“Within the first week, it really spread like wildfire, and … we’re still getting decent attention to it,” Hollenbach said. “The variety of people all day that have been interested in it has been interesting.”
Still, it hasn’t sold yet. After being originally listed for $1.1 million, the price is now just below $1 million.
“This would cost millions to build today,” Dave said.
According to public records, the Allens bought the property in August 2019 for $330,000.
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Beyond its fortress-like construction, the home and surrounding property, which includes trails and a slice of the Little Amnicon River, resemble less of a post-apocalyptic bunker and more of a resort from the 1970s or 1980s.
The home is built with an off-grid lifestyle in mind; redundancies are found throughout.
The propane or wood boiler can heat the hot water for the home’s baseboard radiators. Each of the three units also has a wood-burning fireplace. The home faces the south, allowing for the low winter sun to shine in the large front windows and warm the concrete and stones.
There are two wells on the property, so the home can rely on one if the other isn’t working.
Though the home is connected to the electrical grid, a nearby stone building once housed a diesel-powered generator. Next to that, a tall windmill was put up with the intention of generating power, but Jon said the blades fell down in a storm long ago and were never reinstalled. The blades now lean against the corner of the generator building.
“There’s a lot of things that you can take into consideration if you want to live privately semi-off grid — or completely,” Jon said.
This story originally contained the incorrect listing price of the home. It was updated at 10:40 a.m. July 12. The home is listed for $999,995. The News Tribune regrets the error.
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