It was in the weird confines of the Sanctum where The Shadow retreated to plan his campaign against crime, to think, to research, and to prepare. Visually, it is a striking image we are most treated to- the hands of The Shadow, girasol gleaming, moving like living things beneath a bluish light, working on cases, scribbling notes in invisible ink... we never get too clear an image of the Sanctum. All files and equipment, as well as his direct line to Burbank, were boobytrapped, and only The Shadow knew how to operate them safely. In two stories, criminals found the Sanctum. In "Gray Fist" (2/15/34), the villain has his henchmen leave a dead body with a notein the Sanctum as a challenge. In "Crime Insured" (7/1/37) criminals tricked The Shadow into retreating into the Sanctum, where they carried files and equipment away before utterly destroying it. The Shadow had safely hid himself in a secret compartment in a filing cabinet which was carried away before the destruction. (Can you imagine how utterly ENRAGED he was at this?) The Shadow built a second sanctum somewhere else in New York, and this one was never discovered. The settings and atmosphere, as mentioned in Frank Eisgruber Jr.'s "Gangland's Doom", aided The Shadow's deep thought process and probably went back to experiences during the war of working in the dark. I think there are strong similarities between the Sanctum's atmosphere and modern sensory-deprivation tank experiments, where the subject is suspended in total silence and darkness, thereby robbing the senses of stimulation while increasing brain activity. At any rate, I HATED the Batcave/batchelor-pad design of the Sanctum of the 1994 movie. Oh, well...