In American Gods, Neil Gaiman spoke thusly:

Forty years ago Alex Jordan … began to build a ouse on a high jut of rock in a field he did not own, and even he could not have told you why. And people came to see him build it – the curious, and the puzzled, and those who were neither and who could not honestly have told you why they came. So he did what any sensible American male of his generation could do: he began to charge them money – nothing much. A nickel each, perhaps. Or a quarter. And he continued building, and the people kept coming. So he tool those quarters and nickels and made something even bigger and stranger. He built these warehouses on the ground beneath the house, and filled them with things for people to see, and then the people came to see them.

With this sort of recommendation and expectation build up – American Gods was one of the primary sources of inspiration for this trip, after all – I was somewhat apprehensive about going there. I didn’t even plan it, actually – just browsing through a map of Wisconsin when I saw it marked up as a tourist attraction. Going to www.roadsideamerica.com, I could see it had its own page, heralded as the weirdest, wackiest roadside attraction in the entire United States.

So we just had to go there.

The House on the Rock

The House on the Rock sits in the middle of the Wisconsin dairy lands, in the middle of a forest, approachable by a flamingo-infested path and seemingly disconnected from the outside world. The place was built by one Alex Jordan during most of his life, from the 40’s to the late 80’s, and is still having things added to it.

The House on the Rock itself, the house that Alex built, is a sprawling complex over, under and inside the hill that he chose for his home. It is a claustrophobic place, low ceilings and red felt everywhere, strange angles and twisting corridors, carved wood and stained glass windows.

And every surface is covered with an eclectic collection of statues and decorations from all over the world. Spider-Buddhas and statuettes, Chinese furniture and a bellows-pump filled with glass eggs.

I’ve Got A Room Of Musical Tunes

Everywhere around the house is Alex Jordan’s major obsession – clockwork musical instruments. From the relatively simple music boxes and player pianos to the clockwork wonders on which he worked, musical instruments connected to a set of hammers, tubes and electrical motors all finely tuned to play themselves. Pop a token in the slot and watch them embark on Ravell’s Bolero or any number of other predefined tunes. Every once in a while an instrument goes out of tune or out of sync, sending discordant tones into the automatic orchestra until an attendant comes along to retune it.

Among the musical instrments there are also any number of automated penny-theater boxes. These used to be scattered around England’s railroad stations, little glass boxes with little wooden figurines inside a diorama. Put a penny in the slot and watch them dance jerkily to a comical number or a preachy morality play. The Magician shows a conjurer playing tricks under his handkerchief, while The Dying Drunkard outlines the inevitable end for the sorry wretch.

The Infinity Room

In one corner of the house sits the ominously named Infinity Room – a short corridor of a room projecting out of the house (hundreds of feet above the forest, on top of the rock, etc.)  and continuing off into (as it is meant to seem) forever. This nifty little feat of engineering is impressive not for the effect of infinity as much as for the simple fact that it does extend several hundred feet, unsupported, over prime Wisconsin woodlands.

The Nostaglic Era

Apart from building the House itself, Alex Jordan was also an obsessive collector of, well, practically everything. The second part of the House is full of nostalgic artifacts, remnants, knick-knacks and ephemera. While still walking about underground you can see huge galleries dedicated to weapons and armor, figurines and signs, all set up in the Streets of Yesterday section – a whole street, two stories high, deep underneath the rock.

Heritage of the Sea

It seems old Mr. Jordan was quite fond of nautical niceties as well. A whole section is dedicated to wooden model ships, ships’ logs and divers’ helmets, semaphore flags and other memorabilia.

In the beginning of the exhibit we ran into a small model of a Squid fighting a Whale, an epic battle of the sea. Amused, we moved on – only to encounter the same scene constructed of fiberglass and dominating the central exhibit, over 20 meters tall. My camera’s battery was running out at this point, perhaps from fright, so I only managed to get a few half-decent shots. One of the Whale and his latest dinner, the other of the Kraken’s Eye. Each tentacle sucker was bigger than your head. Each barnacle on the whale’s belly was big enough to kill a man. The dedication required to build such a thing is, frankly, ridiculous. And awe-inspiring. But mostly ridiculous.

The Eclectic Era

At this point my camera died, so there is little official documentation of our trip into the final – and by far the weirdest – part of the House on the Rock. The power to the ticketing computer was down, so we didn’t even receive a receipt. There is no record of us being there except for the images burned into our retinas.

The Carousel

The first room of the third part of the house is the Great Carousel. Neil Gaiman said it best:

Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different. He saw a mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk. Swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began.

There isn’t much I can add to that except that all around the ceiling of the Great Carousel room are statues of angels – mostly women, all bewinged, all fully man-sized and hand painted and floating on wires, and there are literally HUNDREDS of them. They’re not lined up or arranged, they’re just tied up to the ceiling, hundreds of angels frozen in place. And you know that if someone should unpress the Pause button there would be a terrible accident, all crashing into each other.

But the angels are frozen, and the carousel spins around, full of lions and hounds and mermaids and monkeys, and not a single horse among its 20,000 light bulbs.

The Room

It is hard to describe the great room we entered next in words. It is a great hall – big enough to house a concert, with a tall ceiling lost somewhere in the dark underneath the Rock. The room is round, with floating walkways criss-crossing it in different directions, intersecting in some places and overhanging in others, sometimes connected by spiral staircases encased in red felt and velvet. And everywhere you look there is something to see. One side of the wall is full of shutters leading to the Great Organ, a giant mechanical church organ, huge bellows pumping incessantly as it blasts the notes of Bizet’s Toreador or Glory Glory Hallelujah across the room. A row of gigantic bells, the smallest as large as a head, the largest as large as a man. Copper drums descend in a spiral from the ceiling, ranging from large to ridiculously huge. A huge polished copper vat stands to one side, pipes and gauges and levers all around. A gigantic steam engine with propeller attached stands next to a giant howitzer, its muzzle pointed at the walls. Near the center stands an electric organ – no, an entire musical command center. 9 rows of keyboard keys, hundreds of multicolored buttons and switches all inside a bubble-shaped console that might have looked futuristic in the 1950’s, and which would make Keith Emerson give up his moog. Deeper in stand two gigantic Tesla coils, 10′ tall each, connected to more arcane machinery that you can imagine, waiting only for the rock to open and lightning to strike down to charge their polished copper terminals. What will happen then? No-one will know.

The Aftermath

The Room overloaded our minds. Going on it was hard to be impressed by anything – the suits of armor, the Oriental room, the entire pavilion of circus memorabilia and the while 100-man orchestra consisting entirely of full-size mannequins holding mechanically-operated instruments. It was just too much. We stumbled through the History of Aviation, the snack bar and the gift shop and collapsed outside in the Wisconsin sunshine. Gaiman hasn’t disappointed and neither has Alex Jordan.