Photograph Courtesy of Curt Sleeper
A real-estate listing isn’t typically cause for worldwide news.
Then again, Curt Sleeper’s home in Festus is far from typical.
“I’m all the rage in Moscow,” he jokes, explaining in mid-March that a Russian TV crew filmed his home the day before. He’s recently done interviews with CBS, ABC, and the BBC. Newspapers in Germany, France, and Uganda have featured his house. FOX & Friends is chatting with him in an hour and a half.
The reason: Sleeper’s house is a 17,000-square-foot cave. He built the three-story house inside a former sand mine during years spent sleeping alongside his family in heated tents. Over time, he had received calls from media outlets hoping to show off his unusual abode. “I hadn’t allowed any media in the property for the past five years,” he says, adding that he’d kindly declined HGTV in the past. But faced with the threat of losing his house when a five-year balloon note used to buy the property expired, he placed it on eBay for $300,000 on February 9. “I was trying to attract a large audience—not quite as large as what I attracted,” he admits.
Suddenly, the home wasn’t so underground. “I’ve got some 10,000 emails in the last 30 days,” he says. Most messages wished him well, sharing tales of loss and encouragement. “I think I cried about three times a day just reading these stories,” he says. Others asked about buying the home or swapping. He nearly accepted an 85-year-old Florida woman’s generous loan offer—until her son talked her out of it. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I almost fleeced someone’s grandma,’” says Sleeper.
At last, in mid-March, New Jersey–based Logical Source Inc. offered him a 15-year loan. “I just lost 3,000 pounds of stress off my shoulders,” he told SLM the day after finding out about the loan.
Asked about his 15 minutes of fame, Sleeper says, “I don’t think I’ll be recognized nationally… Locally, I was pretty much already known as ‘that cave guy’ or ‘the cave family.’ I don’t think that will change.”
