Into the Mouth of American Kitsch: Wisconsin’s House on the Rock

The author contemplating another round of phantasmagorical excess at the House on the Rock, Spring Green, Wisconsin. Photo by Rachel Hellman.

It is no wonder that Neil Gaiman, in search of the ultimate incarnation of phantasmagorical American kitsch, landed on Wisconsin’s House on the Rock. I haven’t seen everything our great and varied country has to offer, but it is hard to imagine anything being more of what the House on the Rock is. If the dark carnival from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes was permanently frozen in place and had grown a bit musty from lack of housekeeping, it might be this mildly disorienting, excessive attraction.

I just revisited the house a bit more than two decades after my first experience and this time lived somewhat vicariously through my wife’s first-time responses, the element of surprise being somewhat a part of the experience. The surprise is simply that anyone would build what the eccentric collector Alex Jordan and the successive owners of the site have wrought. And though I knew what was coming—it had been seared in my mind for twenty-three years—it is impossible to say I was not freshly taken aback or would not again be taken aback if I made the pilgrimage to the house again two decades hence.

It would be reductive to call the House on the Rock a museum (and perhaps an insult to both the house and actual museums), but it is certainly a theatrical cabinet of curiosities. It is hard to imagine that the Louvre houses a more extensive display of legendary and mythological creatures, but also that the Louvre staff would not spot and remove the fantastically garish creatures if one managed to sneak a few in there. The angels at the Louvre are not department store mannequins fitted with wooden wings and evening gowns from the 1970s; the grotesque chimeras are not lacquered carousel animals, however fantastical. If there is a female nude fitted with a unicorn head in any world class museum anywhere, please send me the details in a private message!

Crown of the Doll Carousel

When at the House on the Rock, one quickly learns that ours is not to reason why. Photo by Rachel Hellman.

Yet the house is not simply a strange collection of strange objects (though it is certainly that). For instance, the collection of (likely faux) scrimshaw tusks and horns, or (again, likely faux) historical firearms is not notable for any particular object, but rather that they are too numerous to fix on one in particular. With the historic firearms, for instance, one finds oneself walking down a corridor of seemingly ancient guns in cases placed end to end in rows starting at the floor and surpassing one’s height. It is as if the objects were a patterned wallpaper made three dimensional. Authenticity isn’t really the point, though everything that is meant to be real looks reasonably real to the layman. Not many of the objects are labeled anyway. Here multiplicity and particularity take on a spectacle of their own.

An Overwhelming Menagerie

The visitor can be disoriented and even overwhelmed by certain spaces in the House on the Rock. Photo by Rachel Hellman.

What the house does for large-scale legendary spectacle is probably also not to be outdone. Photographs do not really capture the scale of what is billed as the largest indoor carousel in the world, nor the sea battle between the giant squid and the whale, which one ascends a three story ramp around to appreciate the finer points. The very top was roped off, barring the view inside the whale’s mouth, but I recall a dinghy inside with an adult-sized bewhiskered mannequin dressed in a yellow fisherman’s rain hat and slicker. The carousel is populated only with exotic and fantastical beasts: mermaids pulling a carriage, a bare chested female zebra centaur and a myriad of other man-horses dressed as soldiers from various times and places, giant cats and dragons and elephants and unicorn sea horses. The point is that I knew this was coming, but beholding it again, in person, the scale of the thing, bedecked in red chandeliers racing by and seemingly several stories high, made me dizzy.

Gaiman's American Gods

The carousel becomes a portal to another dimension in the television adaptation of American Gods.

Author Neil Gaiman, who made much of the house in his novel American Gods, said in an interview that he came across it in 1992, five years before I did, and did not know what to make of it: “but I loved it.” He said he was determined to write a book and put the house in it. The conceit of the novel is that gods come into being when humans worship them, and when the world flocked to the North American continent, they brought versions of their gods with them that took on a distinctly American hue. In the old world, when people came across places that felt particularly powerful or magical, they would choose those places to worship. In these places shrines and temples and churches and cathedrals were built. But in America, instead of shrines, people built roadside attractions and the House on the Rock is one of the most powerful places in the country. Gaiman’s gods and human protagonist meet at the house and interact with several exhibits that are still there today and they end up at the great carousel, which transports them to another realm. I suspect that certain people who have been fans of Gaiman’s novel are discovering as they read this that the House on the Rock is a real place.

My First Trip to Wisconsin

The author with castmate Emily Abraham in American Family Theater’s Robin Hood, 1997.

I first encountered the house right out of college while working in a touring musical theater production of Robin Hood. My small company had made a circuit from New Jersey, down the coast to Louisiana, into Texas and then north to Wisconsin, stopping in little towns at small and large venues across the American south and Midwest. Sometimes we played in restored (or moldering) vintage vaudeville era theaters whose verve the house seems to recreate. The billboard-sized vintage posters of magic acts of yore in the house’s strange little food court likely played in some of the same theaters (assuming the advertisements weren’t created whole-cloth for the house). The attraction seemed made for me at that particular point in my life, perfect for this group of young men and women who probably hadn’t seen too much of the world at that time. We made a meagre living dressed up in costumes, trucking a bunch of flat boards painted to look like an English forest. We loaded the faux forest into the theater, entertained the children, flopped in what seemed like the same cheap, but clean hotel room and then started the next long van ride to the next city. The house seemed at the time a great life event, a story I must recall the details of to share with friends at home. This was 1997 and I’d left my disposable cardboard camera in the van. If the house had a website at the time, too many images would have overburdened the computing power of modern technology. But you must understand: it didn’t feel like I’d only experienced a roadside attraction. It felt like I was the last witness to the burning of the Hindenburg and bore the awesome responsibility of telling the tale.

Twenty-four years later, and I’ve seen the actual Sherwood Forest and been to the Louvre, and seen many of the actual wonders of the world and yet, I still appreciated the house, even if I smelled the mold and saw the cobwebs the staff had allowed to accumulate, noticed the occasional broken fretwork of the (probably faux) wooden Japanese window screens. This time I encountered the house during a reunion of teachers who had all once won places in a Chaucer seminar in London. The day before revisiting the house I’d sat in an orderly Frank Lloyd Wright house, tasted champagne and partaken of a charcuterie board. In returning these many years later, I discovered I did a good job recalling those details that seemed so vital so many years ago, even if the whole delightful scene was a bit tawdrier than I might have recognized that long ago.

Heritage of the Sea Room

The author and his wife, Rachel, at the bottom and top of the epic battle between the whale and the giant squid. Photos by Rachel Hellman.

Instead of having to wait to share the experience, this time I had the perfect travel companion. Watching my wife’s jaw drop and yet retain its grin, hearing her repeated gasps and ejaculations of “Holy bananas!” told me that the house was still doing the job it was meant to do. Seeing the groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings doing much the same showed me that it wasn’t just us. Others seemed also to share our eventual fatigue, which I can only describe as the weariness one feels midway through a trip to Ikea, where even though one speeds up their pace to break free, there always seems to be another area to get through. We found a young man curled into a ball on a shag-carpet covered bench, likely only thinking he was pretending, as he muttered “It just doesn’t end…” as we entered the sixth or seventh period-themed room dedicated to mechanical instruments self-playing an orchestral suite (this one the Blue Danube) at the drop of a twenty-five cent token in the slot. Every one of these rooms is an overwhelming rococo grotesquerie producing a sensory overload and they just keep coming. Give me a good carnival calliope and I feel satisfied. Give me twenty and make each an immersive experience and my head starts to spin.

A Cacophony of Sound and Detail

A music box room performing music from the Nutcracker Suite. Photo by Rachel Hellman.

And, love it or hate it, all of this seems to be the point. Three hours later with sore feet and wondering whether I would ever want to return (I would, given a new person to watch experience it for the first time) we stumbled to our car, happy to be in the sunlight, happy to walk across something as mundane as a parking lot (even with the colossal vases covered in dragon sculptures that look vaguely as if designed by children). The House on the Rock is probably not for everyone, but for those of us looking for one of the more unusual escapes to a realm of the fantastic, it does transport.

To Catch a Catoblepas by the Tail

Detail of Sludge, the Catoblepas, a wall-mounted sculpture by author, paper mache and mixed media, inspired by an illustration by David A. “DAT” Trampier in the D&D Monster Manual, 1978.

When I was a child there was a dog on my street named Sultan. It was a big, loud German Shepherd; very territorial and on a short chain in the yard at the end of my street. The kids on the street said he used to have a brother named Satan and I was too little to know what Sultan meant, so it might as well have meant the devil. Sultan’s bark penetrated my little body, even from the sidewalk across the street. No one ever walked on the sidewalk in front of his yard. Even if you weren’t afraid of him, his bark would hurt your ears.

And yet I stood and made faces and danced and managed to get Sultan crazy more than once. I never threw anything at him. I could never have gotten close enough. One day Sultan got loose and chased me under the porch of our house. It had slats on the sides and you really weren’t supposed to be able to get under there, but we cut one slat with a saw to make a secret fort. It was dank and full of spiders so this might have been the one time it was useful. I hid under the porch and Sultan paced around, ready to kill me. When he wandered far enough away, I made a break for the stockade gate to my backyard. Sultan got to me before I reached the gate, but he only nipped my little boy's leg.

This is the context in which I first read about the dreaded Catoblepas. I had played Dungeons & Dragons with my friends across the street as early as I can remember. I could have been seven or eight. The Monster Manual was the most thorough encyclopedia of anything I would have read at the time, a most valued guide of creatures from myth and legend. And amongst its much loved pages was artist David A. “DAT” Trampier’s Catoblepas. Trampier’s grumpy, rumpled creature looked like the offspring of a warthog and a brontosaurus. It had the look of having had a few too many rough nights drinking. If a Catoblepas lived on my street, or in the swamp behind my elementary school, it probably would have killed me.

The Catoblepas, by David A. “DAT” Trampier, from a celebration of his art from Heavy Metal’s “The D&D Monster Manual Art of Dave “DAT” Trampier”. Trampier’s story is a poignant one. His art is iconic and recognizable to players of a certain vintage, but despite his success in his 20s, he left behind illustrating and disappeared from public life. After being discovered in a college newspaper story he refused offers to return to the industry until he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2014.

The strange nature of Catoblepas was that its gaze could kill you, but its name came from the Greek verb meaning “to look downward,” Romanized from Κατωβλεψ, because its neck was thought to be too weak to hold up its head. So it was very unlikely to look up at you. And therein, I believe, was its charm to me. I had seen Ray Harryhousen’s Clash of the Titans and would not have dared to seek out Medusa. She was fast and wily and very scary (in addition to turning one to stone.) But Trampier’s Catoblepas was a sluggish looking creature and I would have tried to sneak up behind it and whack it with a stick. Which is why it would have probably killed me.

Images of the Catoblepas From Natural Histories

Images of the Catoblepas from historical natural history texts, (left) Der Naturen Bloeme manuscript, 1350, from the National Library of the Netherlands; and (right) by Jan Jonston, from Historia Naturalis de Quadrupedibus, 1614, Amsterdam.

The strange Catoblepas has a strange history. It was not dreamt up for Dungeons & Dragons, or told of in Greek or Roman myths, but was written of quite seriously by Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, in the first century of the common era in a serious text, Naturalis Historia (Natural History), a ten volume text that would become the model for encyclopedias. It told of everything that needed to be known about the natural world including animals, but also botany, astronomy and mathematics, and many other topics. Pliny wrote that the Catoblepas was to be found in Ethiopia near the head of the Nile. Pliny’s Catoblepas seems to have been picked up as a verified creature by future natural historians, who added to it a dangerous fiery or poisonous breath. The creature is depicted by some artists as a sort of wildebeest, which may have been its model. Leonardo da Vinci, in the 15th century, gives an account of the creature that is similar to the rest: “It is not a very large animal, is sluggish in all its parts, and its head is so large that it carries it with difficulty, in such wise that it always droops towards the ground; otherwise it would be a great pest to man, for any one on whom it fixes its eyes dies immediately.” In the 19th century, the creature reared its head (or tried to) in the novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Gustave Flaubert wrote that its neck was as “long and loose as an emptied intestine.” In the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges, that lover of things whose veracity may be questioned, included the Catoblepas in his wonderful The Book of Imaginary Beings (which I have also found entirely in a free pdf online).

The Catoblepas Sculpture Project

Various steps towards having a hangable piece of art. For more images, check out the Catoblepas page of this site. (Photos by the author and the author's wife.)

When I met my wife-to-be, we discovered that we both owned jackalopes, small faux-taxidermized rabbits with horns. If that isn't a sign of finding one's soulmate, I really don't know what is. Given that she was a fan of Portland, Maine's International Cryptozoology Museum and I had already had several small art pieces depicting things like the Yeti and a giant squid attacking a ship, we decided to create a cryptid wall. Rachel recently described our décor style as “A Night at the Museum”; we have a suit of armor, tapestry prints, several globes and a collection of fantastic maps of this world and a few fictitious ones. So we weren't far off from having a set of faux-taxidermized fantasy creature wall-mounted heads before we bought our home.

My art projects generally begin when I want something that does not already exist or if it does exists, I can't afford to buy it. To my knowledge, there are no other wall-mounted sculptures of a Catoblepas, but there are some wonderful artists to be found selling fantasy sculpture on Etsy and their own sites and when we started decorating our house, I quickly bought some beautiful pieces that were within my price range and then ran out of options. My Catoblepas project was inspired by the extraordinary art of Dan “the monster-man” Reeder of Gourmet Paper Mache. Reeder’s web tutorials and his Paper Mache Dragons led me step by step through sculpting a head with cloth and paper mache. Of course, Reeder does dragons, and I had already bought a dragon head for my wall. I looked through my trusty Monster Manual for inspiration and found Trampier’s Catoblepas.

Reeder’s resources came close to solving all of my problems, but my Catoblepas needed a long sloping neck and somewhere in my process I thought the creature’s tusks should be made of a polymer clay that ended up being quite a bit heavier than I expected. I did not expect a paper or cloth mache shell to hold it up as far away from the wall as I wanted it so I needed to engineer something that I thought would hold it and yet allow me to bend it to the shape I wanted. This and my worrying about the paint stretched my process out a bit longer than a year, but I finally finished and got it hung!

I named him Sludge because the black and dark blue swirls of his paint looked oil-like to me and because the Catoblepas has come to represent the wastelands, to be a symbol of life contaminated by pestilence. And he looked like a Sludge. He took his place with several other creatures in my barn. Sometimes people suggest that the trophy-like heads lead to the logical conclusion that I hunted these creatures and killed them, but I don’t think of it that way. I am not a hunter and would not kill real animals to mount on my walls. I don’t think of Sludge or the others as dead either. I like to imagine them having conversations when we are out of the house. I also like to think of them as protectors. And because Sludge hangs opposite my front door, I like to think that if anyone comes in who shouldn’t, the intruder will have to roll against death ray or I will find the corpse when I get home.

The Endless Hunger; Confronting Grief With Gilgamesh

Statue of Gilgamesh at the University of Sydney (based on an ancient bas-relief at the Louvre) and Herbert Mason's Epic of Gilgamesh.

If you are like me, you’ve wanted to read the Epic of Gilgamesh. Maybe you own a copy that you’ve picked up over the years, but struggled to really get into it. I bought my first Gilgamesh in 1998 and it languished on bedside tables and bookshelves, perhaps to be picked back up when I moved apartments and thought I should give it another try. This would go on for about twenty years until I picked up Herbert Mason’s verse translation, published in 1971. My argument here isn’t that you should read Mason’s translation because everyone should really know Gilgamesh. You should read Mason’s translation because it will strike you to the core, make you weep, and remind you of what it is to be human in a way that perhaps you’ve never seen articulated as clearly. You will be grateful you read it. I certainly was.

I first heard about Gilgamesh from an episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation that aired in 1991, and then learned a little about it and marveled that no one taught it to me in school (and no one ever would!) The Mesopotamian epic is perhaps the oldest human story to have survived and be passed down, considerably older than books of the Bible or the Homeric epics (all of which show evidence of influence from elements of Gilgamesh.) How could anyone think themselves educated without knowing it? But, again, these points aren’t part of my argument for why to read it.

Don't make them wait till their 40s. You can start your kids on Gilgamesh early with Ludmila Zeman's lushly illustrated Gilgamesh Trilogy. Gilgamesh (right) embraces his friend Enkidu.

And quiet suddenly fell on them

When Gilgamesh stood still

Exhausted. He turned to Enkidu who leaned

Against his shoulder and looked into his eyes

And saw himself in the other, just as Enkidu saw

Himself in Gilgamesh.

This passage occurs after Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight “like wolves,” “like bulls bellowing,” like “horses gasping for breath.” Gilgamesh is a story about your first friendship. Think all the way back to the first one. You didn’t know what a friend was yet or how valuable that friend would become. Friendship is not a category when we are that young. Friendship is that friend. And everything that friendship brings is wrapped up in that friend. To lose them unexpectedly for a summer’s day, even for the morning when you didn’t know they were going to the dentist was apt to bring misery. To discover their family was going on vacation for a week was heartbreak, the darkening of the whole world. You have to think all the way back for this to ring true. This is what Gilgamesh is really about, and why it is so rewarding.

Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu, Ludmilla Zeman.

Gilgamesh wept bitterly for his friend.

He felt himself now singled out for loss

Apart from everyone else. The word Enkidu

Roamed through every thought

Like a hungry animal through empty lairs

In search of food. The only nourishment

he knew was grief, endless in its hidden source

Yet never ending hunger.

Reading Gilgamesh’s anguished state reminds me of foolish letters I wrote to lost lovers trying just to survive the next hour; phone messages I should have regretted right away, but didn’t. It is a loss you will feel because Mason's verses are that good, and because this epic is more about discovering oneself to be human than it is about fighting monsters and taking a good hero’s journey to the underworld (although both of those things happen as well.) Gilgamesh doesn’t care about the typical things heroes care about on their quests (honor, glory) because his heart is broken and nothing can put it back together. Gilgamesh’s only recourse is to bring Enkidu back, but it is a doomed quest, and we are all the better for living it with him.

If it can be arranged for you, who are,

So blind with love of self and with rage,

To reach the other side,

It will be through his help, his alone.

Thus speaks Siduri, the barmaid at the edge of the world, in frustration at Gilgamesh’s monomania about his loss, trying to help him reach Utnapishtim, who becomes Gilgamesh’s Wizard of Oz. It is worth saying that Gilgamesh begins his story a king and a demigod who knows no equal and has no empathy for his human subjects, for anyone. And without being as literal as Mary Shelley, Gilgamesh is a being in the body of an adult superman, who only begins to experience life as we know it with the meeting of Enkidu. Like Shelley’s creature, Gilgamesh responds to pain the way a child does, and that is perhaps what makes his loss so universal. I am fortunate in not having suffered the death of someone I was very close to, but Gilgamesh’s pain speaks directly to my experience of the sense of loss and panic every child feels when they imagine that they have lost a parent, when that parent has only locked the bathroom door to take a shower. For that reason, the character Gilgamesh, to me, reads psychologically like the protagonist of a story for very young children. I’m thinking of Jon Klassen’s “I Want My Hat Back,” about a bear who asks everyone he sees about his missing hat. A missing hat, like a missing wubby, is no joke to a child, and for that reason, I believe this story of a loss and the adventure to overcome it will affect us all.

I can’t tell you much more without feeling I have spoiled the ending for you, which is definitely worth the time. Mason’s Epic of Gilgamesh is just short of a hundred pages and can be read in a single cathartic afternoon or over a couple of nights. My knowledge of the original text is still scant. I think I should actually say texts, as translations of Gilgamesh seem to be cobbled together from various cuneiform tablets first discovered in the 1850s, which have been added to seemingly ever since. For the person looking for the absolutely literal word-perfect translation, I cannot help you determine how much poetic license Mason takes. I suspect there is some license at least, but I made little progress reading the other Gilgameshes because they are very literal and fragmentary; generally speaking: …..very…..translation….hard yet to………[read?] Mason writes in an afterword that experts in the text will complain of his depiction of Utnapishtim (the Mesopotamian Noah) as being written as a monotheist. I have read complaints that his text reads a bit too Christian in tone, but it certainly has all the references to the gods and Gilgamesh is part god, and I think this is all probably small beer to the beginner. If you never read another Gilgamesh, you will benefit from this one, not as a dry, academic exercise, but as one who has endeavored to eat the fattest orange: with the juice dripping from your chin.

On a personal note, Mason’s Gilgamesh was a shibboleth on my dating profile. My wife (before she was my wife) read it in the library where she worked after our first date. She wrote me an instant message to tell me she was crying in the stacks. She recommended it to her boss, who said “Gilgamesh? Really?” I don’t know if her boss read it, but I married Rachel the next year. So, no pressure, but this book could change your life.

What do you think? What have you heard about Gilgamesh? Have you succeeded where I failed in reading one of the fragmentary editions? Should I give another translation a try? If so, which one? You can let me know in the comments below. And if you pick up Mason’s Epic of Gilgamesh particularly, definitely let me know if you think I got it right.