Murphy Ranch

Jessie M. Murphy purchased 41 acres of the Lawes property in Rustic Canyon, Los Angeles in the early 1930s.[7] A Rasputin-like spiritual healer named Conrad Anderson convinced Winona to purchase the Murphy property as a survival retreat, accurately claiming that a great war was coming.But only the steel building and two other small houses were built by the time the Stevens family moved in, which was November 26, 1942 - Thanksgiving Day.All but Conrad Anderson worked daily on the property, tending livestock and chickens, maintaining the orchards, milking cows, raising hay and other crops, etc.[10][11] John Vincent was a UCLA music professor who helped Huntington Hartford with the purchase of Murphy Ranch from the Stevens family and later managed the art colony.When a local historian, Betty Lou Young, was writing a book about Pacific Palisades, she asked him to tell the story in the form of an affidavit in 1975.In the affidavit, he said that the Stevens family (he misspelled their name 'Stephens', which lingers on in the legend), built out the property based on National Socialist ideals.The legend grew in the telling, eventually claiming that the FBI raided Murphy Ranch on the day after Pearl Harbor, that Nazi spy Herr Schmidt and the Stevens family were arrested, that 50 members of the pro-Nazi Silver Legion of America marched on the property, that the property contained a bomb shelter, that the fence was electrified, etc.