We Visit a Mystery Castle

On the southern edge of town there is a small range of low mountains that is appropriately known as South Mountain. Built into the northern slope so that it faces the city is an eccentric house built by hand by one man during the 1930s. It is known as the Mystery Castle. Boyce Luther Gulley was an unaccomplished architect from Washington. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1930 the prescription, as it often was in those days, was to move to a warm, dry climate. So he packed up, left his wife and daughter behind and went to Arizona to die. Only he didn’t die. His symptoms disappeared. So then he needed a place to live and something to occupy his time. He got hold of a piece of land overlooking the Valley of the Sun and set about digging up native stones and cementing them together. Over the course of 15 years he built an 8,000 square foot house with a bar, a chapel, several guestrooms, a huge living room and a few porches and patios. As this was a lean time generally and he, specifically, didn’t have much money, he reused as much brik-a-brack as he could. The rims of car tires became window frames, wind shields were used as windows, old telephone poles became support beams and even parts of refrigerators turned into various other things. Cracked, melted and otherwise rejected bricks he picked up for free and used as architectural details on corners and in the patio railing. Apparently, the only thing he actually paid for was the concrete to stick it all together. He never mentioned all these efforts to his family or ever went back to them.

Upon his death in 1945 (of cancer) his will stated his house was to go to his daughter. A local lawyer contacted his family in Washington and told them about the house. This was the first they knew of it. Mary Lou Gulley was a teenager at the time and she and her mother moved down to Phoenix and took up residence. The only stipulation was that they wait three years to open the trap door that he’d built into the sitting room on the main level. They did wait and in 1948 when they opened the door to the “wine cellar,” a reporter from Life Magazine was on hand. The article was called “Life Visits a Mystery Castle.” That title resonated with the strangeness of the place and Mary Lou’s house has been called the Mystery Castle ever since. Inside the trap door was the deed to the house and the land, several hundred dollars and various personal mementos. Mary Lou herself still lives in the house, 60 years later. She was hanging out in the living room while we were there. She’s been showing people around (for a nominal fee) and renting out the chapel for weddings all this time. Now that she’s a little white haired old lady, she has friends and neighbors lead the tours for her.

While the story behind it is fairly unique, the look and feel of this house is similar to many other slices of Americana you might happen upon. The Coral Castle in particular comes to mind. While on one level Americana is appealing because it’s unique and different, on another level it is often a bit repulsive because it’s so dated and tacky. It’s like the difference between hand-made as in fine art and hand-made as in craft fair. Maya, in particular, was hoping to see a fine art type hand-made house. The Mystery Castle was definitely a craft fair type house. The large collection of teddy bears, the endless statues with gaudy paint jobs and big smiles, the cross-stitch samplers that somehow grew to wall-hanging size, none of it is stuff we would want in our home. There must have been some kind of time and space convergence of cultural expectations and technological innovations that resulted in the Americana look. In any case, it’s a look we just aren’t into for ourselves. We liked the glass blocks set into the patio that gave light to the room beneath and the snake motif mosaics set into the floors but we just weren’t impressed with the pebble-studded fireplace or the fake grave dug in the basement. It’s a mystery to us why anyone ever was.

Here’s some news on a castle closer to home: Castle Post (formerly Castle Martin) near Versailles, KY is apparently set to open as a luxury hotel sometime before the end of the year.