Big! Bright! Bizarre!

American Gods inspires new interest in House on the Rock

by

Midway through the season two debut of Starz’ American Gods, protagonist Shadow Moon’s face lights up with wonder and the reflected glow of more than 20,000 incandescent lights.

The ex-con turned bodyguard is standing in a cavernous room dominated by what’s billed as the World’s Largest Carousel, a dizzying, 80-foot wide, 36-ton ride fitted with 182 chandeliers and a menagerie of 269 fantastical creatures including half-naked centaurs, zebras in battle armor, and leering mermaids and mermen. They spin to the sound of circus music from orchestra instruments that appear to play themselves.

That’s not all. The traditional wooden horses have been removed and splayed all over the walls like taxidermied trophies. A host of bare-breasted female angels in see-through nightgowns are suspended from the ceiling; upon close inspection they resemble department store mannequins with cheap Halloween costume wings glued to their backs. The only exit is through the gaping maw of a horned demon.

It’s like a dimestore Disneyland imagined by David Lynch.

“Feel the power, Shadow,” says Mr. Wednesday, American Gods’ charismatic conman.

There’s a lot that’s contrived about American Gods, the TV series based on Neil Gaiman’s award-winning 2001 novel of the same name. But the debut episode of season two was largely filmed on location at the real House on the Rock, the roadside attraction built atop Deer Shelter Rock, near Spring Green.

Founder Alex Jordan spent most of his life obsessively expanding the mansion-turned-museum and millions of curious tourists have paid to see the spectacle.

The House had somewhat faded from the public imagination after the passing of Jordan in 1989, but it’s experienced a resurgence in popularity and media attention recently, due to Gods. The attraction’s website traffic spiked after the “House on the Rock” episode aired in March, and the phone rang off the hook, according to current management. Some wanted to visit the place in person; others were simply curious to know if it was a real place or just a bizarre figment of Gaiman’s imagination.

Now that House on the Rock is in the news again, it’s worth asking: Is this attraction greater than the sum of its seemingly infinite number of random parts? Was Alex Jordan a prophet, a mad man, or something else?

I took a road trip there to see if I could solve the mystery.

Prince of The Driftless

The feeling that you’re crossing over into a land of fairy tales arrives long before reaching the summit of Deer Shelter Rock.

Once you drive an hour or so west from Madison, the landscape gets unruly. The glaciers that flattened a large swath of the Midwest like a pancake thousands of years ago didn’t drift here, hence the fanciful nickname “The Driftless.”

Some locals are convinced of the area’s supernatural qualities. “There’s an energy here in The Driftless,” a House employee named Kathryn tells me. She briefly closes her eyes as if trying to channel it. “It’s a powerful energy — like it’s a gateway to something.”

The Driftless’ magic spell is apparently the kind that drives people toward an obsession with collecting and crafting tchotchkes and oddities. After I inquired about House on the Rock at a dive bar during a pit stop in a wisp of a village called Gratiot, a sturdy man named Ted Thuli walked over and smirked. “Google me,” he said. When I did, I discovered that Thuli had incorporated so many salvaged parts from old gas stations, defunct movie theaters, and other nostalgic items around town into his Darlington home, it’s become a more modest version of House on the Rock.

Likewise, there’s the Don Q Inn, a surreal Dodgeville hotel featuring moon-landing-themed guest rooms. And Tom Every, the demolition expert turned outsider artist (who helped build the House’s carousel), invented the persona of Dr. Evermor and erected a steampunk sculpture garden near Devil’s Lake that he said would send him “into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam.”

Mystic energy or not, there is no definitive account of what led Jordan to build his castle of stone starting in the late ’40s.

The Alex Jordan Center, a labyrinth of vintage photos and placards explaining Jordan’s life, is the first exhibit you encounter after paying admission (and the closest thing the House has to a legit museum exhibit). Tom Kupsh, who worked as a sculptor under Jordan and until 2016 served as the House’s creative director, convinced the Donaldson family, the current owners of the attraction, to authorize a behind-the-scenes look at Jordan after his death. “I thought it would answer the questions a lot of people who visited asked. ‘Who did this? What’s behind it?’” says Kupsh.

The displays describe Jordan’s early efforts to forge “an artists’ refuge,” a place of sober reflection in nature, to study art and literature. Some rumors claim the opposite: that the House was more a stylish party palace-cum-bachelor pad. (“It was his fuck nest,” one nearby resident told me.)

According to the muckraking 1990 biography House of Alex by former Wisconsin State Journal reporter Marv Balousek, the House was founded as a means of distraction, a way for Alex’s father to keep his son occupied somewhere that wasn’t Madison. In 1939, Alex Jr. was arrested attempting to blackmail a man he’d secretly photographed having sex with his girlfriend, Jennie Olsen, using an infrared camera. After Alex and Jennie were arrested for the honeytrap blackmail scheme and their mugshots were plastered all over the local papers, the incident became a public embarrassment to the family.

“I really think the father started it and Alex Jr. took to it and made it his own,” the now-retired Balousek told me over the phone.

The origin story now entrenched in popular folklore also originated from the pages of Balousek’s book. The late Madison folk artist Sid Boyum, the House’s former president and a personal friend of Jordan (before a messy fallout), told Balousek that Alex Sr. concocted the idea for the house in a fit of rage after one of his blueprints was rejected by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright at nearby Taliesin.

“I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop,” Wright allegedly told the elder Jordan, who in turn vowed to construct a Japanese-influenced house a few miles south of Taliesin.

It’s a good story. But it probably wasn’t true, says Kupsh, who documented the tale’s inconsistencies in the 2014 biography Never Enough: The Creative Life of Alex Jordan.

Even Balousek now admits doubt. “It’s a great story, but who knows?” he says.

The original house is clearly an homage to Wright’s work, but seen through a funhouse mirror. Wright’s Prairie Style evokes Japanese architecture with restraint, emphasizing clean lines and humans’ relationship with nature. Jordan’s Far East influences aren’t subtle — think oversized dragon statues, koi in freshwater ponds, and kabuki art.

But at least this early version of the House, built and rebuilt throughout the ’50s, still resembles a home, if a whimsical one. Thirteen low-ceilinged rooms include a functional kitchen, shag-carpeted couches, canted banks of windows that look down upon vistas of the Wyoming Valley, replica Tiffany stained glass lamps and other decorations that complement the interior. It’s a man-cave in the truest sense of the word.

The next stop on the tour, the Mill House, is neither a mill (the large spinning water wheel is purely ornamental) nor exactly a house. It was conceived as another Japanese-style addition, but Jordan junior gradually changed course and reimagined it as a medieval castle on the inside and an alpine chalet outside.

The Mill House marks the spot where Jordan stopped ambling in the footsteps of Wright. He was beginning to play show-and-tell with his growing collection of toys. Why is a 34-foot-long stone fireplace accompanied by glass displays of old timey guns, Victorian dolls, stuffed birds, and other objects?

Good question. The drastic transition in Jordan’s work remains a mystery; when Balousek interrogated the reticent founder about it in a 1988 interview, Jordan replied only with the cryptic line: “I don’t know what my feelings were at the time.”

A few events over the course of the ’60s may hint at the turning point. One was the paying customer effect. The House opened in 1960 to those willing to pay the 50-cent admission fee. By the next year, the attraction raked in $34,000 — which ballooned to $380,000 by the end of the decade and millions over the next. Jordan grew obsessed with growing foot traffic while increasing ticket prices.

A possible factor was the death of his parents, who played a quiet but substantial role in the management of the House. Alex Sr. was the president of the House of Wyoming Valley Inc. House on the Rock’s parent’s company, when he died in 1963. He oversaw early art installations at the House, with works by Rembrandt, Corot, Degas and others. Alex Jr. mothballed the collection after his father’s passing. When his devout Catholic mother died in 1969, Alex removed the Stations of the Cross and other religious iconography that lined the driveway and burned them.

The third was Jordan’s trip to attend the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He’d expressed an interest in animation and was excited to see Walt Disney’s animatronic Abraham Lincoln deliver a speech at the fair’s State of Illinois Pavilion. Jordan later called Robot Abe “awe-inspiring.” Kupsh says the World’s Fair inspired Jordan, who pursued a robust expansion of the House with a new philosophy in mind.

The wizard of odd

For his next act, Jordan recast himself as a pure showman — a 20th century version of P.T. Barnum, a bizarro Walt Disney, Donald Trump without the political ambitions. But he was more reclusive than those impresarios and didn’t have the personal charisma. He let the stories about himself spread, let people wonder about the House’s mysterious founder.

All pretenses of house-building vanished over the course of the 1970s and ’80s. The next two major additions, identified as Section 2 and 3, are vast, ugly warehouses filled with objects and gadgets in a way reminiscent of Barnum’s American Museum — a mid-19th century mish-mash of exhibits in New York City that was part museum, part circus.

“In 1960, it was Shangri La with the natural views and the windows,” says Bob Searles, who worked as a sculptor for Jordan, according to Balousek. “I went back and was devastated... In 12 years it went from a place of tranquility into an adjunct of the Wisconsin Dells.”

The Streets of Yesterday exhibit opened in the early ’70s. It’s akin to Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A. in that it’s a theme-park simulacrum of a small town street of the past. But whereas Disney banished any hint of evil from his parks, Jordan embraced a playfully dark side of nostalgia.

The faux 19th century block is lit like it’s an evening in Dickens’ smog-covered London.

You stroll the cobblestones and peer into the display window of an apothecary selling fake snake oil cures, or a toy store hawking Victorian dolls with broken faces. Insert one of your House’s custom coins in a machine to summon Esmeralda, the coin-operated psychic, to tell your fortune.

Traverse more windy corridors and you reach “The Music of Yesterday,” Jordan’s initial attempt at aping Disney’s lifelike automatons. His artists and engineers built elaborate music machines in which stiff mannequins appear to bang drums, or violins bow themselves to play Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. It’s just out of sync enough to be discomfiting.

The bows move by air pumped through pneumatic tubes; look closely and you see they never actually touch the stringed instruments. Even the Gladiator Calliope is mostly fake; music from the horns and the strings comes from a computer playing the songs through speakers.

The fakery of House on the Rock is infamous. Many exhibits used to have explanatory signage, usually describing the alleged priceless or improbably rare qualities of the items. The elephant tusk carving? A celebrated “Tusk of Ranchipoor” from an unknown Punjab artisan. The Kitty DuBois pipe organ? Rescued from the oldest whorehouse in New Orleans. The Mikado music machine? Discovered by Jordan in a small town in Holland, where it was hidden from the Nazis during World War II.

But Jordan was no Indiana Jones. In reality, he contracted local artists to craft fabrications of these alleged discovered treasures. “It was bull, he was getting a lot of his stuff from Kmart,” says Balousek. “It was a fantasy world in which Alex loved fooling people.”

The Wisconsin Department of Justice was not amused. In 1978, it conducted a six-month investigation and found, for instance, that the Tusk of Ranchipoor was plastic and built by Mazomanie craftsman Richard Rahn. The name was a play on “Rahn is poor,” a veiled shot at Jordan for paying Rahn so little for the work. The state forced the House to scrub the fictional histories of the faux antiquities.

Even now, illusion is at the heart of the House experience. Are you seeing authentic antiques or cheap knock-offs? The sheer volume of unusual sights and sounds flood the brain with sensory information. In the dungeon-like lighting, your brain fills in what it can’t make sense of. Called the Tinkerbell Effect, the House takes advantage of the fact that what we anticipate often determines what we see.

Consider the World’s Largest Carousel. Bigger was always better for Jordan and so he had workers weld additional rows to the frame of an early 20th century carousel. But the original could not sustain the weight. Tom Every compensated by installing 18 wheels from a truck along the edges of the platform, a fact that is disguised by staging.

The Carousel Room, opened in spring 1981, marks another crossroads in the overall design and aesthetic of the House. Creepy or not, early rooms like Streets of Yesterday feel grounded by a kind of internal logic. Starting here, chaos creeps in.

“The transition between somewhere that’s kind of weird, and ‘I’m not even sure I’m on planet earth anymore,’ is this carousel,” Gaiman said in a 2010 interview on To the Best of our Knowledge.

Built over the course of the 1980s, Section 3 is a Byzantine series of halls and red-carpeted ramps that go nowhere. The biggest dollhouse collection in the world is side-by-side with circus memorabilia for some reason. An oversized cannon replica made of wood and painted foil is parked next to carousels of dead-eyed dolls.

The closest that Jordan came to a coherent artistic vision in his later years was a space initially planned as an Inferno Room, inspired by 19th-century engraver Gustav Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the grand interiors of 18th-century Italian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. According to Kupsh, it was planned as a walking tour through the circles of hell amid animated sculptures of the damned, as a giant theatre organ played ominously in the background.

But Jordan lost patience or perhaps inspiration. The Inferno Room evolved into the Organ Room — a confusing conglomerate of industrial machinery, religious statues, chandeliers, pipe organ parts, decorative beer jugs, seen from meandering ramps, all lined with the House’s signature musty red carpeting.

Paradoxically, Jordan ended up making his own version of Dante’s Inferno by subjecting visitors to the House on the Rock in its exhausting entirety. It’s a three-and-a-half hour descent into a sinister maze that literally ends with Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse statues hovering near the exit; a trio of decapitated heads hanging from Famine’s saddle, like trophies.

House on the sand

What does it all mean? What’s Alex Jordan’s true legacy?

Balousek believes Jordan found a kind of fulfillment in fooling people and screwing them over. “He loved lording over people,” he says.

Kupsh sees the House as a 20th-century version of a Cabinet of Curiosities, one that doesn’t necessarily reflect the psyche of its maker. “The dark side is there. But it’s like a horror movie. Not everyone who makes a horror movie is a bad person.”

In the gospel according to Gaiman, the Gods assemble at the House on the Rock because it’s one of the most powerful places in the new secularized America, a prism through which to see our unquenchable and self-destructive appetite for stuff. The Jordan of American Gods is like a high priest of materialism, the House on the Rock his cathedral, and us the congregation.

“I thought if I could only understand the House on the Rock, I would understand this entire country,” Gaiman said in a 2017 interview with Wisconsin Public Radio. And in theory, the newfound celebrity of the House reinforces American Gods’ lofty conception of the attraction.

In April, I found an infestation of hundreds of ladybugs in the glass cases of the Heritage of the Sea exhibit crawling all over model ships, and mouse droppings on a shelf. The musty, moldy old library smell is stronger than ever and paint is peeling off more of Jordan’s fabulous machines and automatons. An out-of-order sign next to the full symphony populated by robotic mannequins notifies visitors that it won’t be working until fall 2019.

In early June, I inserted a House on the Rock coin in the Kitty DuBois boudoir room and the machine glitched its way through a discordant version of the novelty song “Yakety Sax.”

“This room is the worst,” a repairman at the House told me as he fiddled with some circuitry. “The later stuff breaks more because it’s a mix of old and new technology.”

Jordan was a multi-millionaire for much of the last two decades of his life but his diabolical commitment to frugality led to all kinds of sins documented in House of Alex: OSHA violations, tax fraud, employees cheated out of money, and artists cheated out of credit for their creations. It also meant that the House — especially Section 2 and 3 — were not built to last.

There’s a parable in the Bible, the holy book of one of the Old Gods, about the House on the Rock. The gospel of Matthew warns us about the foolish man who builds his house on sand because when “the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, it fell, and great was the fall.”

The wise man, Matthew says, built the foundation of his house on the rock. And that’s ultimately what Alex Jordan did.

But the Bible doesn’t say a word about the wisdom of a man who keeps adding on to that house with cheaply constructed warehouses filled to the brim with flimsy junk.