Had enough? HA HA HA. Make a turn out of that room and suddenly you’re in the Heritage of the Sea building, where you meet a 200-foot sea monster that looks like a whale but has killer dinosaur teeth. From there, you walk through several floors of nautical-themed collections, including model ships and collections of artifacts from famous wrecks.

sea monster 1 copy

Most of the HOTR is lit dramatically (and rather creepily); one (literally) glaring exception is the food court in the basement, where Jen and I retreated to gather our wits and get some pizza. There are no windows in the food court, which, coupled with the bright lights, gives it a prisonlike vibe. Sitting under huge vintage posters advertising 19th-century traveling magicians, we snarfed our pizza in silence, too stunned by everything we’d seen so far to speak, except for when Jen would periodically shake her head in disbelief and mutter, “Whoa, dude.”

Duly fortified, we continued our journey through this ridiculous maze of a home. Did we want to see the world’s largest indoor carousel? Of course we did! We walked down a hallway and caught the faint sound of circus music that got louder and louder until we entered a vast cavern of a room containing several floor-to-ceiling organs piping deafening circus calliope tunes, and then—there it was: a huge, brilliantly lit carousel, with 269 animals (not a single horse, though) whirling in an endless loop, 182 chandeliers, and 20,000 twinkling lights. It looked like a Moulin Rouge fantasy/nightmare. Needless to say, we were dazzled. We could totally see why this carousel is featured in Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods, playing the gateway into the mind of the god Odin. All you have to do is stand before this carousel to understand that if there were a portal to another dimension, this would be it.

Image via

Image via Incidentally.

Closeup carousel

The music doesn’t ever stop, and if you look up, you see full-size mannequins wearing angel wings floating far above your head on wires, dressed in fancy dresses.

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A cool thrill of fear shivers through you when you start turning and looking and realizing there are hundreds of mannequins floating above you. This was the second room we saw kids crying in.

Can we talk about the doll carousel? LET’S TALK ABOUT THE DOLL CAROUSEL. Actually, there are two doll carousels; each one is like an enormous five-layer cake atop which float hundreds of elaborately dressed dolls striking weird and eerie poses, STARING INTO YOUR SOUL. Jen and I stood, thrilled and horrorstruck, in front of those doll carousels for a long time. A little girl next to me whispered, “This is not right,” and reached up to grab her mother’s hand.

Image via Magpie Waltz.

Image via Magpie Waltz.

Did I take a video? YES, I TOOK A VIDEO.

Speaking of dolls, the House on the Rock actually features a whole warren of rooms devoted to dollhouses—the finest, most elaborately decorated dollhouses I’ve ever seen, with tiny food on tiny tables and mini doll families arranged in lifelike poses. And get this: NONE of them were dusty. WHO DUSTS THIS STUFF? I do NOT want to think about being on staff here, dusting dollhouses for hours when the crowds have left for the day.

There’s more, you guys. There’s so much more—Alex Jordan apparently just needed to collect anything that wasn’t nailed down. In the last section, when you’ve been in this house for more than four hours and you don’t think you can walk anymore, a winding path leads you around and among hundreds of lamps that have been wired together to create super-lamps, spiral staircases leading to indoor treehouses, old carousel horses nailed to walls in strict columns, statues and figurines everywhere, and more mannequins dressed in vintage showgirl costumes.

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Fun/terrifying fact: Every single mannequin I saw had her nails painted to match her dress.

There is no obvious exit out of the House on the Rock. There aren’t really any signs anywhere pointing you toward anything—visitors are free to wander, and sometimes they get lost. Under a super-lamp glowing with an intense red light, Jen and I began to quietly panic. Where was the exit? How long had we been here? Our phones were dead from taking so many pictures, and there were no windows, and there were no clocks. What if much more time had elapsed than we’d noticed? What if the House on the Rock had closed hours ago and we were…LEFT THERE OVERNIGHT? What if we were ALREADY DEAD, and the House on the Rock was a kind of purgatory, a waiting room for lost souls?!

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We passed two exhausted-looking women sitting on a bench, quietly conferring with each other about how much farther the end of the house might be. They wondered aloud whether they should go find someone who worked there who could help them, or if they should just stay seated and rest up for the last stretch of their tour. We flashed them sympathetic looks as we passed. “Let us know if you find the exit,” one of the women called to us. “We’ll be here.”

Not 20 seconds later, the floor stopped in front of a wall, a door suddenly opened from the middle of the wall, and out of the door emerged a woman in a House on the Rock vest. “You made it! Right through here!” she said, gesturing toward the door. Blinking as if waking from a dream, Jen and I walked down a well-lit hallway and out into the sunshine. The door shut behind us. Y’all: THE WOMEN ON THE BENCH HAD GIVEN UP HOPE 10 FEET FROM THE EXIT.

We walked to our car in silence. Once inside, we just sat there, stunned, for several minutes. Finally, I looked and Jen and said, “Do you…remember…the doll carousel?”

“You know,” Jen said, “I don’t think I can talk about it for a while.”

We drove for an hour before either of us spoke.

If y’all are ever, ever in Wisconsin, you know what to do. THE HOUSE ON THE ROCK. GO GO GOOOOOO! ♦