HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E1] MURPHY RANCH — THE URBAN LEGEND
DID NAZI OCCULTISTS BUILD A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DOOMSDAY MANSION IN LOS ANGELES DURING WWII?
Note: Higher Than Truth is an ongoing series taking deep dives into strange mysteries, conspiracies, and forgotten history. Please refer to the table of contents for all articles in their chronological order.
“It’s extremely difficult to connect all the dots. Too many have been erased.”
—Randy Young, local historian
I first stumbled upon the legend of Murphy Ranch in the summer of 2015, but intriguing rumors about this secluded location — both whispered and published — go back decades. According to legend, a remote property in Santa Monica’s Rustic Canyon was purchased from Will Rogers in 1933 by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Jessie M. Murphy, who was under the spell of a mysterious occultist known as Herr Schmidt. Schmidt instructed her to devote her fortune to build a lavish doomsday bunker that would be used by Adolf Hitler to survive the anticipated race wars Schmidt predicted would occur in the United States after Nazi Germany emerged victorious from World War II. Millions of dollars were spent on the project, yet Schmidt’s apocalyptic visions never came to pass, and by the late 1940’s the Murphy Ranch property fell into disrepair before it was sold and converted into an artists’ colony financed by A&P heir, Huntington Hartford.
There is no shortage of articles addressing these rumors, with many of them simply repeating what was written before. While some newspaper accounts in the 40’s do reference a “Murphy Ranch” (largely in connection to its later sale to Hartford’s colony), the first mention I can find connecting the property to Nazis comes from a 1963 column by Los Angeles Times’ journalist Art Seidenbaum, who states:
Even before the place was established as the country’s largest retreat for writers, composers, painters and sculptors, locals knew that strange things happened there. Half the acreage used to belong to a cult that brought in some 3,000 varieties of plant life and dug in with 5 years worth of emergency supplies to withstand the world’s end for everybody else. Then, during World War II, the cult commander turned out to be a German spy and the believers all blew away.
The story was revived and elaborated upon in a 1975 book by local historian Betty Lou Young, who used a one-page affidavit from John Vincent, the director of the Hunting Hartford Foundation who helped engineer the sale of the property in 1948. His account makes no mention of a Jessie Murphy, but does add new characters to the plot:
When I first visited… Winona and Norman Stephens were living in the steel garage, employing a caretaker to help maintain the extensive plantings. A guard was also employed who unlocked the gate to admit me. The entire property was surrounded with a chain link fence topped by barbed wire. A few people were present on the grounds. Goats, sheep and cows were kept on the flatlands at the bottom of the canyon…
Mrs. Young’s own research provided more details:
The colony spent $4 Million on buildings, landscaping, water tanks, fuel tanks, and a power station with generators large enough to supply electricity to a small town…The whole property was enclosed by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards to discourage trespassers. Workmen told of a self-sufficient farm, military drills, and of a commune that felt World War II would destroy the United States so it should develop a remote ranch to survive the bombings. These activities ended in 1941 when a German sympathizer living on the ranch with high-powdered radio equipment was imprisoned…
Randy Young, son of Betty Lou, continued his mother’s work. In a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Young says:
The strongest links…come from the oral histories of canyon residents who told [me] that armed guards patrolled the canyon dressed in the uniform worn by Silver Shirts, a paramilitary group modeled after Hitler’s brownshirts.
…A man known through oral histories only as ‘Herr Schmidt’ supposedly ruled the place and claimed to possess ‘metaphysical’ powers. He purportedly used the ranch to introduce his Nazi-inspired political philosophy.
I suspect…that ‘Murphy’ was a front name used by the Nazi group to purchase the property. There are no other records of Murphy, nor does she surface in stories told by old-time canyon residents…However, the Murphy Ranch name stuck.
A 2015 Curbed LA article by Hadley Meares zeroes in on John Vincent’s mention of Norman and Winona Stephens:
The couple were eager to sell the money-sucking 50-acre property to the Hartford Foundation and to tell Vincent their tale. They claimed to be a wealthy couple originally from the East, Norman a mining engineer and Winona a Chicago heiress with a deep interest in “metaphysical and supernatural phenomena.”
In this account, it was Winona Stephens, not Jessie Murphy, who was obsessed with Herr Schmidt:
Schmidt urged Norman and Winona to build a “self-sufficient farm based on National Socialist ideals.” So on August 28, 1933, the couple allegedly bought land in Pacific Palisades using the pseudonym “Jessie M. Murphy, widow.” According to Vincent, a building program was quickly underway, some of it under the supervision of Welton Becket of the respected firm Plummer, Wurdeman, and Becket…Many of the drawings, dating from 1934 to 1941, are now housed in the Lloyd Wright collection at UCLA’s Young Research Library.
(When I went to look at the blueprints in person, Hadley Meares was the last person to check them out.)
Though drawn in different hands, they have certain common features: a four-story mansion with a basement devoted to recreation, mechanical, servants’ work, and usually an indoor pool; a main “public floor” centered on a grand central hall, featuring multiple libraries, social rooms, and sometimes grand bedrooms; and upper floors with a plethora of bedroom suites and private rooms of various sizes.
Meares goes on to note:
Official documentation of Norman and Winona Stephens could not be found. But census records from both 1930 and 1940 show engineer Norman F. and Chicago native Winona B. Stevens living in Pasadena and Hermosa Beach during that time. Most telling of all are sets of architectural plans in the Wright collection from March 1935, which appear to have been signed, and possibly drawn, by an NF Stevens.
The Curbed LA article continues and, as it’s the most comprehensive article on the subject to date, I see no reason not to quote it extensively:
For all the owners’ years of planning, it seems that by the late ’30s the building program at Murphy Ranch had progressed very little. A plot map from the time shows only a few buildings on the property: the steel garage and living quarters, barn, and another small building, the ruins of which are all still visible today. Electrician David Trumbull of Sure Light Electric has confirmed that electric fixtures still present in what is left of the garage and barn date from the ’30s and ’40s. (Some rewiring took place in the ’50s and ’60s, when the buildings were repurposed by the artists’ retreat.)
In 1939, the owners hired one of the biggest names in Los Angeles, architect Paul R. Williams. Williams’s firm designed an evolved but essentially similar mansion, although (perhaps due to financial considerations) there is no longer an indoor pool. They also created the only rendering of what appears to be the proposed exterior of the Murphy Palace, a gargantuan Neoclassical structure with detached servants’ quarters. Many of the plans bear the initials JTR and ECD, while Williams’s own signature or initials do not appear anywhere.
The Williams plans stop in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II. Close inspection of the rather sloppy flagstone and iron gate at the entrance of the property makes one wonder if they, along with other aspects of the ranch, like the endless concrete steps, the terracing, and concrete greenhouse were a do-it-yourself project. Workmen and contractors had to have helped install the double-generator power station and the massive storage tank, but the construction process is as murky as the group’s true purpose.
And what of the mysterious “Schmidt,” the man supposedly behind the Stevenses and the dream of Murphy Ranch? No proof of his existence has ever been found. But a Los Angeles Times article titled “Trouble for Traitors,” from June 30, 1940, may offer the only known contemporary mention of the elusive “Schmidt”:
“Out in Santa Monica, only a few days ago, a man who is a veteran of the World War… answered the doorbell one night. “Vere is dot Herr Schmidt lives?” the caller asked in broken English. The former flyer appraised the man quickly, then smiled and directed him to Herr Schmidt’s residence nearby. Within 10 minutes, the [man] had informed US Navy intelligence… and within 20 minutes the investigation was on. An operative who lived in the neighborhood was assigned to the case. You may be sure that when he finishes, Naval intelligence will know all about Herr Schmidt and his mysterious visitors, but whether they are right or wrong, no one but Naval intelligence knows.”
The article warned that as soon as war was declared, traitors would be rounded up and dealt with. Legend (backed by no proof) has it that the day after Pearl Harbor, Schmidt was arrested at Murphy Ranch and the colony scattered. The mansion was never built. By 1948, the Stevenses were living above a steel garage, instead of the grand mansion of their dreams.
And, as the legend goes, they were never heard from again. After sixty odd years of whispers and rumors, the legend of Murphy Ranch goes no further.
But I was left wanting more. A conclusion, or at least a better conclusion. I wanted understanding, yet the stories left me with nothing but questions. The most basic of which were:
Nazis in Los Angeles?
Occultists in Los Angeles?
Maybe it was because I had just purchased my first home when I discovered the Murphy Ranch story, but I felt there had to be a way to “solve” it. The decision to buy a home is hard enough, but the decision to build a multi-million dollar doomsday bunker isn’t made lightly. It comes, I reasoned, from years of “belief” in “something”. The earliest blueprints for Murphy Ranch are dated August 23, 1934, but to even get to the blueprint stage one would have to:
- Believe in the necessity of a doomsday bunker.
- Convince others there’s a necessity for a doomsday bunker.
- Find money to build a doomsday bunker.
- Find land for a doomsday bunker.
- Find architects for a doomsday bunker.
- Build a doomsday bunker.
These aren’t decisions, I assumed, that are made on a whim. What might drive them? When I bought my house we had real estate agents, met with the bank, and toured properties. If the story of Murphy Ranch were real, then real people had to have been in real locations at real times. What could compel a couple to spend their fortune on the muttered prophecies of an Herr Schmidt?
And if the story of Murphy Ranch wasn’t real and was instead just clickbait headlines and lies, then what a tragedy for the presumably real people accused of being Nazi sympathizers. Is it possible the legend of a spooky house on the hill —in this case a house deep in a canyon— might be nothing more than the ghost stories of superstitious locals?
I wanted to find out, but there wasn’t much to go on, even as the questions piled up. The first real clue presented itself on August 31, 2015 in the comments section of the same Curbed LA article.
And it came in the form of a denial:
I am Norma Theanne Stevens, called Toni since I was 14. My dad Norman Stevens built this beautiful ranch and we lived there during the war. Carlile (Steve) and I went to Santa Monica Canyon School near Sunset Blvd and the beach. All of this about nazis and a Herr Schmidt is a bunch of garbage, totally made up by some kook.
So who were the real owners of Murphy Ranch, and is there any evidence tying them to a Nazi doomsday cult? Find out next, on:
