House on the Rock

Alex Jordan Jr. began building on top of Deer Shelter Rock, a 60-foot sandstone column in the hills near Spring Green, Wisconsin, in the 1940s. What started as a low, dark, Japanese-influenced retreat house grew for four decades into a complex of exhibition halls that has no obvious parallel anywhere: the Infinity Room, a glass-walled spear of a room extending 218 feet out over the valley with no support beneath its tip; the Streets of Yesterday, a full indoor recreation of a 19th-century town at permanent dusk; a three-story sea battle between a whale-like leviathan and a giant squid; and the world's largest indoor carousel, 269 animals, none of them a horse, spinning under thousands of red lights.

The house opened to paying visitors around 1960; the attraction gives that year, and Jordan's first biographer gives Labor Day 1959. It became one of the most visited attractions in Wisconsin, all while its origin story kept shifting. A long-repeated legend claims Jordan built the house as revenge after Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Taliesin estate sits a few miles away, insulted his father's architectural ambitions. Both of Jordan's biographers trace the story to a single teller, his friend Sid Boyum, who won the Burlington Liars Club's contest in 1976. The current owners reject the story outright and point out that Wright was working in Japan when the meeting would have happened. Taliesin Preservation allows only that Jordan "may have been influenced by" Wright. Much of the collection carries the same charge of unreality. In 1978, Wisconsin's Department of Justice found that a music machine presented as having belonged to Emperor Franz Joseph, and a carved tusk, were fakes, and the armor on display was made for the house. Neil Gaiman set a pivotal chapter of American Gods at the carousel on the logic that a place this strange must be a genuine spiritual nexus.

The House on the Rock is not a hoax in any simple sense: the building, the engineering, and the obsession are all real, and the current operators are open about the collection mixing authentic pieces with fabrications. The unresolved part is Alex Jordan himself, who left almost no personal record and gave contradictory accounts of what the place was for. Biographers have variously read the house as an art environment, a decades-long act of spite, a machine for separating tourists from money, or all three at once.

The complex is walked in three sections along a one-way route, and a full visit takes 3 to 5 hours. The regular season runs from mid-March into early November, Thursday to Monday in spring and fall and daily through the summer, and a Christmas season follows with the first two sections only. The only food inside is a stand partway through the second section, which cannot be reached from anywhere else on the route. The Gate House and Original House cannot be reached by wheelchair, walker, or stroller. The house is about 40 minutes west of Madison on State Road 23.