I’m almost done with the pictures from my road trip. Promise! This one was too much fun not to share.

When we left Eureka Springs, Arkansas, heading for home the last day of our trip, we were barely out of town when we saw a sign for “Quigley’s Castle”—not something we’d heard of before, so naturally we had to stop! We followed a gravel road, all the while humming the theme to Deliverance.

We pulled into a small gravel lot and saw this sign. After about five minutes a very grumpy woman showed up at the gate. Again, I watch too many horror movies. I immediately saw her as a gatekeeper to a Hell Mouth, and wondered if we should worry about the fact no one knew where we were. However, I was too curious at this point and followed her anyway while she led us inside a secret garden and to a shaded area in front of the “castle”.

There we heard the story about the house, which she told in a monotone without a single expression. After she finished her little story, she told us to make our own way through the house and the gardens, and then she disappeared. I just knew she hurried off to sharpen her ax!

Her grandmother was Italian and moved with her American husband to the Ozarks. I forget when but assume it was early-ish in the last century. They lived in a crude wooden building with five children and the wife nagged the husband to build her a stone house. When he didn’t act quickly enough for her taste, she and the five children pulled apart their wooden home one day when he went to work and moved into the chicken coop. Hubby got the message and broke ground on a new home for his wife.

It’s built of concrete. The wife collected wagon loads of all sorts of rocks from a nearby creek, which included quartz. As he made the concrete bricks, she imbedded the side of the brick facing outward with pretty stones and crystals. Note all the greenery in the front windows? The entryway of the house is a two-story indoor garden.

This is a view of the indoor garden from the first floor.

And from the landing on the second floor.

This is a glance down the steps. The frames on both sides contain arrowheads she found in the river.

The rooms inside the house aren’t large or lavish, but she decorated everything with stones. In her bedroom, one wall was covered in this picture that’s a decoupage of what looks like art work from magazines and books, personal photos, and real moths she captured and set in resin.

Here’s a closeup.

Outside the house is a garden that wraps around the house with outdoor furniture and garden art made from more concrete, shells and rocks. She was a little more than obsessive, I think.

Here’s the outdoor patio.

There were seven bottle trees scattered throughout the garden.

Just to show you what she did, here’s a closeup of a little decorative arch she made for one flower bed.

That’s Quigley’s Castle. An American oddity, and one we would have missed if we hadn’t been willing to take a chance and follow a little sign down a rocky path.