The House on the Rock

“TOUR CONTINUES”

Tourist attractions, or tourist traps to my mom and most other people, seem to be a uniquely American construction.  They’re sideshow creations, generally just off the highway, that are scattered across the country.  They range from the innocuous to the dangerous and with everything else in between, and for the most part, have exactly one goal: make as much money as possible by scamming it out of gullible travelers.  Sometimes they’re genuine labors of love that got transformed into cashgrabs somewhere along the line, and sometimes they were cashgrabs from the very beginning.  Most of them fall somewhere in the hazy middle ground, and perhaps my favorite example of this is the House on the Rock.

The House on the Rock is this batshit crazy place in south-central Wisconsin that’s basically a vortex of madness into which you can never escape once you enter.  At first it’s just a house built on a rock, but once you move on into the deeper sections of the place you realize that you’ve accidentally entered the mind of the house’s creator, Alex Jordan Jr., who is kept in stasis beneath the rock for the express purpose of sustaining the dream through which we traverse upon entering that cursed building.  Should he ever wake, the space around the House will collapse into the vacuum left behind and south-central Wisconsin will cease to exist.  We wouldn’t be losing much, except for Devil’s Lake.

The reality of the place, of course, is more mundane than I make it sound. Unless you’re actually there, in which case anything could be true.  The House on the Rock itself is a house, designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed on top of a rocky hill in a Wisconsin valley.  Alex Jordan Jr., the builder of the house, constructed it in the 40’s and 50’s and opened it to the public in 1959 as a tourist trap.  And he apparently made a killing off of it because his business venture financed his exploding collection.  He must have had some sort of OCD or hoarding tendencies, because after he built the house he started collecting things.  And he never looked back.

The history of the house is kind of wacky because there isn’t a whole lot of information on Jordan.  He was apparently pretty reclusive, and didn’t write much in regards to his life.  He stayed out of the spotlight and instead built an infinite number of things in his house, like a crazy person.  The current House has the Alex Jordan Jr. Center, which practically deifies the man into an architectural and creative genius, but it doesn’t really have a whole lot of facts.  The place and its construction are shrouded in mystery, perhaps designed to give it more of an attractive mystique to guests.  But it doesn’t need to curate that sense of mystique, since it really should be relying on the absolute insanity inherent to that place.  And American Gods already helped them with that mystique, anyway.

The property is broken up into a few main parts.  There’s the house itself, the gardens and the Alex Jordan center, and the various warehouses.  And I do mean warehouses in the most literal sense; enormous metal buildings built with the express purpose of holding cramped, exponentially-expanding collections of nonsense.  And there’s like four of them, but you can only go in two, I think.  They might be building a third one.  And everything in them is steeped in madness.

The house itself is actually pretty cool.  The gardens are well-constructed and immaculately manicured, from what I remember.  They’re built in a traditional Japanese style, with koi ponds and rock formations and tiny trees.  They’re nice, but not particularly unique.  My school has gardens that are just as good.  But then, going into the house, you start to get a sense of the kind of eccentric man that Jordan was.  The house is dozens of twisting rooms that somehow manage to be stacked on top of each other and spread out next to each other at the same time.  There’s stained glass and fireplaces, shag carpets and 70’s porn couches, broken windows and old books, and a bunch of other stuff you’d find in a regular house except turned up a notch on the crazy.  And there’s the Infinity Room, which is a sort of perception trick that makes it look like the room goes on forever.  It bears no relation to the Infinity Gauntlet.

I quite liked the house when I went there a few times.  I’m a huge fan of crazy, nonsensical architecture.  Videogames like The Norwood Suite or What Remains of Edith Finch have the kind of buildings that I someday want to build, and the House on the Rock is the living, breathing embodiment of bizarre architecture.  It doesn’t have any kind of unity of design to it, like you’d see in the real buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, and it’s functionality is secondary to form, but that doesn’t change the fact that I absolutely adore it as a concept and as a building.  I’d love to have free range of the place and poke around and see what’s inside.  Actually, I’d love to have free range of the entire complex to see what it has.  Though I think if I were to explore the warehouses in their entirety, eventually I’d become Alex Jordan.

The warehouses, the additional sections of the property that are not the house, are where things start to get really strange.  I believe they’re the physical embodiments of the man’s psyche, curated and customized to attract paying guests.  But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re fucking weird. 

When my brother and I first went there, many years ago, there were no windows, barely any exit doors, poor lighting, and this haunting sign around every corner that just said “Tour Continues.”  There was no escape, and by the end of it my brother had broken down crying.  He was like ten at the time, though, so it’s okay.  The management of the place has made it better since then, adding windows and better lighting.  But it’s still crazy.

For example, there’s the Streets of Yesterday.  It’s this long model main street, complete with shops and stores and houses like it were the 19^th century in the Midwest again.  It’s a pretty detailed façade, complete with seemingly-accurate relics of the past.  For a little bit, it is almost like you’re in an idealized town dreamed up by a knockoff Ray Bradbury.  But there’s a catch, and there’s always a catch with places like this; no one knows what’s real and what isn’t.

See, there was some sort of lawsuit against the House on the Rock in the 70’s, claiming that the place practiced fraud and false advertisement.  And it was true; most of the “antiques” in the house are replicas built specifically for the House on the Rock, many of which Jordan himself had a hand in designing.  The Gladiator Calliope doesn’t date from 1895.  Most of the instruments on the music machines don’t actually play.  None of the suits of armor are real.  The carved elephant tusk isn’t actually ivory, so on and so forth.  Some of the stuff is real, and the management of the place does admit to the fact that a lot of it is replica and recreation, but there isn’t really a clear distinction between what is and what isn’t genuine.  The management suggests that this is so that visitors can make up stories for themselves, as Alex Jordan would have wanted, but I propose it’s actually because no one knows for sure anymore.

It think it’s kind of like the Oldest House in Control, I think.  Or the SCP Foundation.  It exists, and there’s stuff in it, but no one knows how far down it goes or where it came from.  Things pop in and out of existence, and there isn’t a complete list of what’s in the place because even the management barely has a grasp on this shifting whirlpool of lunacy that they’ve monetized.  Somewhere at the source of it is the eldritch monstrosity that Alex Jordan became when he touched the Truth Beneath the House, but until then it’s just a labyrinth of stuff.  And it is absolutely worth the trip.

The Streets of Yesterday are cool, but pretty tame compared to the other exhibits.  There’s the “Heritage of the Sea” room, which is dominated by a life-sized(?) model of a sperm whale fighting a giant squid.  It might even be larger than an actual whale.  Either that or I’m underestimating the size of whales.  There’s also the world’s largest indoor carousel, with some 20,000 lights and over 200 animals, housed in a room that is coated from floor to ceiling with angels, dolls, and other carousel animals that aren’t on the carousel itself.  And don’t forget the doll room and the doll house room, which is exactly what it sounds like and is exactly as unsettling.  Maybe that’s where the idea for Hereditary came from.

And there’s the galleries, which have those fake suits of armor that I mentioned.  I guess it makes sense that they’re replicas, because if they were real, the House on the Rock would have the single largest collection of Medieval armor in the world.  Or something like that.  The man was wealthy, but not that wealthy.  There’s also the music rooms, which have different giant music machines and calliopes that play different songs, and those are pretty cool.  But there’s also the organ room.

The organ room is maybe my favorite room in the warehouses because it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before.  It’s essentially a winding, twisting walkway through a forest of giant organ pipes, kettle drums, and what I can really only describe as distillation vats.  The whole room is covered in brass and copper and seems almost to be one big instrument in and of itself.   It’s huge, it’s weird, it’s totally alien, and I love it.  I suspect that, in another world, you could fit all the pieces together and whole thing would summon the God of Theater to grant you musical ability beyond your wildest dreams, except everything sounds like a ducks farting and you can only play songs from Phantom of the Opera.

This doesn’t even include the special Christmas exhibits.  Actually, to a certain extent, the entire place becomes one big Christmas exhibit in the winter because the management breaks out over 6,000 model Santas to display around the house and warehouses.  If anybody ever tells you that their neighbor’s gone overboard with the Christmas decorations, you should direct them to the House on the Rock, because they rocketed passed “overboard” forty years ago and never stopped.

If I had to describe House on the Rock in one word, “overwhelming” is the best choice.  Because it is incredibly overwhelming.  It’s also disorienting, confusing, ludicrous, and oftentimes frightening on a deep, instinctual level of the human mind that abhors clutter and dark spaces.  My mom says that the entire place just gives her the need to dust everything.  But besides all that, in my experiences there, the place is also mesmerizing and dream-like in its appearance.  It’s not like anything else I’ve ever seen before, and the reason that I keep describing it as some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare is because, if you ask me, it’s the closest that society’s ever gotten to turning someone’s mental illness into a tourist trap.  Because there’s no way in hell that Alex Jordan didn’t have some sort of hoarding disorder.

It’s a place of insanity, of single-minded ambition and the drive of a man who never settled for any single project, and in the process didn’t really finish any of them.  It’s a work in progress, even today, and it continues to expand outward.  It’s a monument to consumption and a desire to own everything, even those things that you’ll never be able to get.  It isn’t a healthy place.  You need to go in there with a critical eye, to look beyond the gauzy, whitewashed veil that it exists under.  It’s the kind of place that requires emotional preparation and subsequent decompression to visit, or at least that was how I felt when I went there the first time.  And maybe it’s still like that, or maybe it’s better since I was there last, and since I’ve gotten older.  Or, perhaps, my aging and gaining of wider experiences will make the place all the more unnerving.

But I’ll be damned if I said I didn’t want to go there again.  Because I do, and because beyond everything else, it is fun to explore and walk around in.  It’s madness, but it’s a (mostly) fun madness.  It’s worth at least a visit once in your life, if crazy architecture and human eccentricity are your thing and you’re in the south-central Wisconsin area.  I like it. With some reservations.  Because still, at the end of the day, it is in Wisconsin, and besides the Mars Cheese Castle, what else is there to do?