Historic Architectural Oddities from Around the World

Capela dos Ossos, Évora, Portugal (1500s)

In Évora, Portugal’s oldest district, within the ringed road that used to be a city wall, lies the Capela dos Ossos decorated in a most unusual manner.  The shocking chapel is covered with human bones.  The skulls, femurs, and other bones are arranged artistically to create elaborate wall patterns.  This is all the work of Franciscan monks tending the Évora chapel and cemetery in the 1500s.  Évora was having a real estate crisis.  The dead were using up too much space around the city.  But instead of re-burying them, they put the bones on display, cemented into the wall. Two partially mummified bodies, an adult and a child, are on display.  An estimated 5,000 bodies decorate the chapel’s interior.  The monk’s hope was that visitors, upon seeing the bones, would reflect on their mortality.  The eerie message above the door reads, “We bones that are here, await yours.”

The Pineapple, Dunmore, Scotland (1777)

John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, served as governor of Virgina in the early 1770s.  In November of 1775, he issued Dunmore’s Proclamation, granting freedom to indentured servants, African slaves and slaves of African descent, and others held in bondage.  In return, they would agree to fight for the British against American troops in the Revolutionary War.  Historians estimate 800 to 2,000 enslaved men took him up on the offer, flaming already-rising tensions between the colonists and the British government in the colonies.  But this failed to give him the enough troops, so he returned to Scotland.  But he carried with him some traditions he learned in Virginia.  Sailors would place a pineapple on their gatepost to let the neighborhood know they’ve returned home.  Lord Dunmore decided to do the same thing, by creating a tower on his home featuring a giant, bold pineapple to announce his return.

Hameau de la Reine, Marie Antoinette’s Little Village at Versailles (1783)

Marie Antoinette, wanting respite from palace life at Versailles, desired a little haven of her own.  She commissioned Richard Mique to develop a small little faux town where she could retreat alone or with friends.  The resulting village represents many eras and styles of rural French architecture arranged around the little lake.  The little hamlet of buildings was more than just her playground, despite Marie Antoinette’s reputation.  While the grounds were a place for her to relax, entertain guests, and escape the atmosphere of the palace, it was also a fully functioning farm, with a working dairy, a fisherman’s cottage, food-bearing gardens, and a barn.   After the French Revolution, the Little Village fell to ruin.  Napolean’s efforts to restore it resulted in some of the dilapidated buildings being removed, but restorations in the 1930s and 2006 have restored a significant amount of the village buildings.

Sedlec Ossuary/ The Bone Church (1870)

The cemetery at Sedlec Monastery in the (now) Czech Republic was one of the most desired burial spots in the region for centuries, as the 13^th century Abbott of Sedlec Monastery had scattered holy soil he had acquired in Jerusalem over the land.  But by the 1870s, space had run out.  Bodies were compacted into a crypt to make space.  In 1870, local woodcarver František Rint came up with a way to manage the roughly 40,000 skeletal human remains at the site.  He created a chapel using the hand-bleached bones as artistic material.  He crafted candelabras, chalices, bone swags hanging decoratively from the ceiling, monstrances, chandeliers, and even a family’s coat of arms out of the bones, ensuring the remains would stay on the sacred land without overcrowding the space.  While the idea of human remains being used as decoration may seem creepy, it is a place of peaceful reflection.

Ideal Palace, Palais Idéal du Facteur, Cheval, France (1879 – 1909)

The legend behind Ideal Palace says in 1879, French postman Ferdinand Cheval tripped over a rock during his regular mail route.  He picked it up, and instead of tossing it aside, he looked at it closely.  The odd shape of the rock was so captivating, he was inspired to create a whimsical palace full of its own twists and turns like the rock.  With no architectural training, he learned through self-study how to turn the building of his imagination into something real.  He endured the teasing of neighbors and challenging manual labor collecting and stones to use in the building.  Once he completed the building, he found the critics quiet, especially as tourists began coming to his Palace for a look.  Cheval wrote, “You start wondering if you have not been carried away into a fantastic dream with boundaries beyond the scope of imagination.”

Lucy the Elephant, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA (1881)

Lucy the Elephant is the brainchild of engineer and inventor James V. Lafferty, Jr, hoping to attract visitors and property buyers to the south Atlantic City area.  Lucy the Elephant was a curious attraction, standing 65 feet (19.7m) high and 60 feet (18.3m) long.  Visitors could pay to climb the 130 stairs to the observatory on Lucy’s back.   In 1902, tours ceased when a doctor from England leased Lucy as a summer home for his family. They subdivided Lucy’s interior into four bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen, a parlor, and converted a closet into a bathroom.  Lucy has been used as a tourist attraction, rooming house, tavern, speakeasy, and apartments.  Over time, Lucy has survived nearly burning, hurricane and storm damage, and threat of demolition in 1969.  Lucy was donated to the City of Margate (formerly called South Atlantic City) and relocated to a site overlooking the beachfront.

Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, California, USA (1884 – 1922).

Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating rifle wealth, had already experienced tragedy when she moved to San Jose, California.  Upon her arrival, she purchased a modest eight-room farmhouse.  Winchester cut herself off from society around her.  She concentrated her attention on a continuous home expansion project, one that never ceased during Winchester’s lifetime.  Within her 160-room, 24,000 square foot masterpiece, she directed builders to create curiosities like doors that opened to walls, stairways that ended at the ceiling, and secret passageways.  Legend has it, though unconfirmed, that she believed herself haunted by the spirits of those killed by her family’s guns, and a psychic told her that these spirits would catch up with her if she stopped building her house.  In 1923, after Sarah’s death, the house of curiosities opened for tours.  It has attracted over twelve million guests in the 101 years of tourist operation.

Corn Palace, Mitchell, South Dakota, USA (1892, 1921)

Each year, about 500,000 tourists traveling along Interstate Highway 90 through South Dakota hop off the highway in Mitchell, South Dakota.  They seek out a treasure, the only building of its kind in the world.  They seek the Mitchell Corn Palace, fascinating visitors since 1892 as a tribute to agricultural prosperity.  The Corn Palace was first built in 1892 as a community fall festival space.  By 1921, the community built its third Corn Palace, having outgrown its previous two buildings, and stands today as the community’s most famous landmark.  Its onion domes cap the real attraction of the Corn Palace, the stunning murals that cover its exterior.  The murals are made of corn naturally colored yellow, orange, blue, red, brown, white, black, and other hues naturally found in different corn varieties.  The corn murals are changed each year, designed by students at Dakota Wesleyan University’s Digital Media and Design program.

Casa Milà, a.k.a. La Pedrera, Barcelona (1906 – 1912)

When Pere Milà contacted architect Antoni Gaudi about building an apartment building above his ground-floor home along the high-status Passeig de Gràcia, he knew Gaudi was going to break the conventions of traditional architecture.  Antoni Gaudi designed Casa Milà, commonly known as La Pedrera or “stone quarry” to break free from the classical Beaux Arts and other classically-inspired designs popular at the time, using few straight lines and favoring curves and waves.  The building ignores conventional architecture, resulting in mockery and compared to a zeppelin garage.  The building continuously courted scandal and controversy.  Gaudi ignored local building codes, conflicting with the City Council about the built volume, a pillar extending into the public right-of-way, and maximum height.  It was to be Gaudi’s last residential work.  In the end, Gaudi’s work, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, remained intact, and it is still a residential and office space.

Witch’s House, Beverly Hills (1921)

Hidden among the sprawling Beverly Hills landscape, the Spadena House, more commonly known as the Witch’s House, looks like something from a fairy tale.   In 1921, the Willat Studios, based in Culver City, needed offices and dressing room space.  In 1934, after Willat Studios closed down its operations, the Spadena family moved into the building, converting it into their home.  Throughout the building’s history, its owners have maintained its storybook style, a trend in the 1920s and 1930s that brought fantasy buildings to life, with exaggerated roof lines, asymmetrical windows, steep-pitched gable roofs, and exaggerated medieval influences.  The building remained a residence until it went on the market in the 1990s.  The quirky home found a potential buyer, who wanted to tear it down.  The real estate agent, Michael Libow, bought the property himself specifically to preserve the building, saving this unique treasure from a cruel fate.

Ennis House, Los Angeles, California, USA (1924)

By the 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright, pioneer of the Prairie Style, experimented with forms inspired from ancient cultures.  He is well known for his love of traditional Japanese culture, but he also integrated Mayan designs into his work.  Design for the Ennis House is one of the most famous applications of Mayan Revival design in architecture.  And he did it by using a strange building material for residential homes at the time – concrete molded into a modern take on Mayan patterns.  Built for Charles and Mable Ennis in 1924, the Los Feliz building is one of the most expensive pieces of private real estate in the region; in 2019, it sold for $18 million.  Its price is driven up due to its location in Los Angeles overlooking Griffith Park, its affiliation with Wright, and its popularity as a filming location for television and movies.

Carbide and Carbon Building, Chicago, Illinois, USA (1929)

When owners of the Carbide and Carbon company, developers of the first dry-cell battery, was looking for a new headquarters, they found a site in Chicago and hired Hubert Burnham and Daniel Burnham, Jr., sons of the famous architect Daniel Burnham, to design their landmark. While never fully confirmed, legend says the Burnham brothers designed the Carbide and Carbon building with rebellious intent.  The 40-story green terracotta stretch of the skyscraper is capped with gold leaf and bronze Art Deco designs at the top, capped with a narrow, gold tower on the roof.  The overall appearance of the building resembles an Art Deco champagne bottle.  It was, according to tales, the Burnham Brothers making a very public statement against Prohibition’s severe alcohol restrictions.  The Burnham Brothers never confirmed nor denied the rumor, but the colors, design, and timing just make the rumor seem credible.

Big Duck, Suffolk County, Long Island (1931)

Duck farmers Martin and Jeule Maurer came up with a creative way to sell their ducks to motorists passing by Riverhead’s West Main Street.  Taking a nod from a building they saw in California shaped like a giant coffee pot, they decided a duck-shaped building was the perfect way to gain notice.  The Big Duck represents the Mimetic architectural movement at the time.  Mimetic architecture replicates every day, non-architectural things like household items (like the coffee pot), animals, even planes and zeppelins.  Businesses used this form to gain notice from potential customers.  Ice cream shops are good, but an ice cream shop shaped like an ice cream cone would attract more attention.  So it was with the Big Duck.  After a relocation to Flanders, Long Island and ownership changes, Suffolk County received the Big Duck as a donation in 1987, converting it to a duck-themed gift shop and tourist center.

House on the Rock (1945)

Artist Alex Jordan built a weekend retreat house on Deer Shelter Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  His 13-room haven was strange, with low ceilings, spaces that turned inward rather than taking advantage of the scenery outside, and full of his personal artistic collections.  The design of the house, just minutes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, drew curious spectators.  Jordan requested 50-cent donations.  More visitors came.  The donations Jordan requested were used to add to the collection or to expand and maintain the house.  The money was enough that Jordan didn’t need additional sources of income.  Jordan’s collections grew, and the retreat expanded to house and display them.  The House on the Rock is now a popular tourist destination, with bizarre rooms full of curiosities like a giant carousel where none of the seats are horses, a faux historic Main Street, and musical instruments that play themselves.

Haines Shoe House (1948)

Shoe salesman Mahlon Haines needed to drive up business for his shoe store.  Taking a cue from the Mimetic architectural form gaining popularity across the country. He built his two-bedroom house in the shape of a work boot.  The house is five stories tall, with the living room at the toe and the kitchen in the heel.  Two bedrooms lie within the ankle, and there is a recreation room in the instep.  A shoe-shaped doghouse lies just outside.  He operated the shoe-house as a rental property until his death in 1962.  For the next twenty years it was a tourist destination and ice cream parlor, but the building started to deteriorate.  In 1987, Haines granddaughter bought the property, keeping it as long as she could maintain it.  As of 2024, the property once again runs as a rental property, and has appeared on many documentaries about unique living spaces.

Marina City, Chicago, Illinois, USA (1967)

After years of suburban flight, where those with the means to do so moved away from the inner cities, Chicago’s downtown worked with architect Bertrand Goldberg to attract people back to the downtown housing market.  Goldberg designed two residential towers meant to be a city-within-a-city, a return to mixed use housing that had been tossed aside in the era’s sprawling suburban developments. He created two towers, each with 19 stories of parking on the lower levels so residents could still have the convenience of their car.  The building included office and retail space, a gym, a pool, an open roof deck on the top of each tower, a theater, even a place to park a boat.  The city itself would serve as the backyard.  Residents could walk to work.  Marina City’s unusual circular design and patterns of curved balconies and openings gave it its common nickname, the “Corncob Building.”

Boston City Hall (1968)

In the early 1960s, the City of Boston held a design competition for the redesign of the Government Center complex.   The winning design, from Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles, broke free from the more traditional entries and the boxy, curtain-wall styles found in so many of the other 256 entries.  They offered a grand Brutalist structure.  Brutalism is a divisive style, evoking a ‘love it or hate it’ sentiment.  One of those in the “hate it” camp was Boston Mayor John Collins.  When the design was revealed to him and his team, Collins gasped in horror.  One of his team blurted out, “What the hell is that?”  While it has its defenders, its critics include the people who work in the building, who find it to be dark and unfriendly.  The Boston public also tends toward the ‘hate it’ faction, mocking the building and finding it unpleasant and dystopian.

Casa do Penedo, “Stone House,” Portugal (1972)

In the rolling hills of northern Portugal, four boulders stand strong against the elements, part of nature, but hiding a curious secret.  A home has been built using the massive boulders as part of its architecture.  In 1973, the Rodrigues family took a trip to Fafe Mountain. As the family explored the mountain, the parents found the spot an ideal place to build a mountain retreat.  The family, whose patriarch was an engineer from Guimarães, purchased the boulders, each one of which had a different owner.  The stone sanctuary served as a vacation home.  In 2014, the property was featured on a website, Strange Buildings of the World, where viewers could vote on what they considered architectural anomalies.  The media came calling.  Tourists and visitors began seeking out the house.  The Rodrigues family opened the property for tours, but return to the property to enjoy their holiday home.

Bondurant’s Pharmacy (1974)

In 1974, pharmacist Joe Bondurant collaborated with architect Daniel M. Brewer to create a building that would not only serve the medication needs of Lexington, Kentucky, but would serve as a visual advertisement for the services he provided.  Designers created a building in the Mimetic form, a style that makes architecture look like a non-building thing.  Mimetic architecture is useful as an advertisement, as the Duck Building and Haines Shoe House proved.  It explains the business affiliated with the building, but it also serves as an attraction or destination.  Bondurant Pharmacy, using a mortar and pestle design, evokes earlier years when pharmacists mixed their own medications.   Today Bondurant’s Pharmacy is occupied by a liquor store, but the new owners got into the spirit of the building’s mimetic roots.  They have painted it to look like a giant cocktail, complete with maraschino cherry poking out of the top.

Wotruba kirche (Church of the Most Holy Trinity), Mauer district, Vienna (1974 – 1976)

The Brutalism movement gained steam around the globe in the 1960s and 70s. It made its mark in the Mauer district of Vienna, Austria, at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity.  Designed by sculptor Frtiz Wotruba and architect Fritz Gerhard Mayer, the building looks like a pile of children’s toy blocks.  Behind this simple and curious form is a masterwork of design and engineering.  The walls are made of 152 modular cubes cast in concrete.  The irregular pattern of the building, with most windows hidden in less-than-obvious places, gives the building a heavy, abstractly profound appearance.  The blocky theme continues inside the building, with the squares and rectangles fighting each other for space as they do on the exterior.  Like Boston City Hall, this Brutalist structure was not initially received well.  Over time it has gained support as a grand work of art by a renown abstract sculptor.

Flintstones House, Malibu, CA (1976)

Architect William Nicholson’s three-story design is resembles something from the popular Flintstones cartoon show.  While the home looks like it was carved out of a boulder, its architecture is much more complicated.  American houses had been using balloon frame designs for housing for over a century, framed with extended studs that run from ground level to the rafters.  But the Flintstones House took ‘balloon framing’ quite literally, using monolithic dome construction.  A wire mesh frame reinforced with steel rebar is constructed over balloons.  The balloons are inflated.  The frame, supported by the balloon, was then sprayed with a concreted, called gunite.  When the concrete hardens, the balloons are deflated and what was left was a sturdy, bulbous structure with rounded walls.  While the neighbors aren’t fond of the design, and the building has suffered from cracking due to water runoff, it continues its life as a single family, private home.

Robot Building, Bangkok, Thailand (1986)

Bangkok’s twenty-story Robot Building opened as the Bank of Asia headquarters.  Its Mimetic form was less about blatant advertisement and more about capturing the eye of the world.  Its design was meant to demonstrate the bank’s commitment to modern technological innovation.  It marked the rise of economic prosperity in the 1980s, and innovations in postmodern design in Asia.  But the state of the iconic building is currently in flux.  The Robot Building is undergoing a change, but there has been little said about its plans.  The building’s owners say they are going to modernize the building, opting for sustainable features while respecting the building’s original design.  Hopefully, this means a bright future for Bangkok’s robot, but the future is unclear.  Plans shown to the original architect, Sumet Jumsai, were met with dismay.  He has sent pleas to current owners UOB Thailand to reconsider their plans “before it’s too late.”

“Crazy House,” Hang Nga, Dalat, Vietnam (1990)

Artist Dang Viet Nga wanted to create a unique work of self-expression, something completely original from anything before it.  In 1990, she put her doctorate in architecture and creative drive to work to use in Dalat, Vietnam.  She envisioned a work that would never be completed.  It would forever evolve, changing with her imagination.  Instead of using blueprints to bring her ideas to light, she illustrated her imagination in a series of paintings.  Her vision reflected the wonders of nature, with various sections of the building resembling natural settings such as caves, seas, and woodlands.  The building, used as a hotel and functional art piece, has no right angles; it has the curves and imperfect lines found in nature.  Dang Viet Nga told CNN Travel, “With this form, you have to try to free your mind.  There are no rules – aside from basic structural principles, it’s all about self-expression.”

Dancing House, Prague, Czech Republic (1996)

Prague’s classically styled architecture is interrupted by this wavy, asymmetrical design by renown Croatian-Czech architect Vlado Milunic, working with famed architect Frank Gehry.  The site, once a house bombed during World War II, was adjacent to property owned by Vaclav Havel, a community leader who would later serve as president of the Czech Republic.  Havel contacted his neighbor, architect Vlado Milunic, about developing the neighboring vacant site.  Dutch insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden financed the building, but they asked the pair to collaborate with American architect Frank Gehry.  The architects conceived a plan for two very different buildings, one static and one looking dynamic, ever moving and twisting, to symbolize the Czech Republic’s transition from a communist country to a parliamentary democracy.  It looked different than the buildings around it, but its deconstructivist style has gained the area a great deal of attention and accolades.

Longaberger Basket Co. (1997)

In 1978, sparked by the success of similar companies like Mary Kay and Avon, the Longaberger Basket Company created an empire through the multi-level-marketing sales model.  By the mid-1990s, the company had 8,200 employees and 70,000 direct sales affiliates.  Built by founder David Longaberger as headquarters for the Longaberger Basket Company, this building is a grand advertisement for its product and a unique features on the east Newark, Ohio landscape.  It is a Mimetic form of their most popular product, a woven basket with a wooden handle.  The basket-shaped building opened its doors in 1997, but its iconic building wouldn’t house the company for long.  In 2016, with sales suffering and employee numbers down, the company moved out of the basket.  The Longaberger company went out of business in 2018.  But the basket building remains, an icon of Newark’s once billion-dollar industry.

Kunsthaus, Graz (2003)

In the middle of Graz, a modern art museum interrupts the traditional architecture of the Styrian capital around it.  The Kunsthaus of Graz (also called the Friendly Alien), with its blue acrylic panels, resembles an internal organ taken from a monster.  Designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, it is part of the ‘blobitecture’ movement, a postmodern design where a building doesn’t fit into the traditional square and rectangle form.  Instead, it has random curves and rounded forms all over, rarely with any sort of corner or straight line.  Blobitecture is possible thanks to advances in computer aided drafting (CAD) technology, giving designs like the Kunsthaus its unique, seemingly impossible shape.  It is, in essence, a sort of creature with no specific ‘body’ to it.    This shocking design is meant to be noticed and to stir up controversy, something this building has accomplished on both fronts.

Kindergarten Wolfartsweier, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011)

Designed by Tomi Ungerer and Ayla Suzan Yöndel, the Kindergarten Wolfartsweier has been delighting children since it opened in 2011.  The interior looks like a standard kindergarten, with coat hooks along the wall for the one hundred children who attend the school.  Above the hooks, brightly colored children’s artwork hangs proudly on the walls.  A staircase extends down the middle, under the light of the large, round windows.  But the outside is where the building shines.  It looks like a large, gray cat ready to playfully pounce on the children.  Students walk into the building through the cat’s “mouth,” a front door hidden under a protruding nose decked out with whiskers.’  The large, round windows viewed from the inside are the cat’s eyes.  And one of the best part of the building is actually in the back; the cat’s tail, which children can use as a slide.

LucasFilm building in Singapore (2014)

In the early 2000s, fans of the Star Wars franchise in Singapore were greeting by a new building that looked oddly familiar.  If they looked at the building from the right vantage point, it looked like the Sand Crawler vehicle featured in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.  Despite the rustic vehicle it is built to resemble from the movies, the building’s nine stories, designed by Andrew Bromberg of Aedas, are arranged around a bright, spacious courtyard filled with lush greenery and water features.  Lucas’ Industrial Lights and Magic division sold the Sandcrawler building to Blackstone Real Estate in 2021, and Disney shut down the Singapore studio as a cost-saving measure in 2023, so it is no longer associated with the prolific studio.  Despite its change in ownership, the building still gleams as an icon of Star Wars come to life.

Bund Finance Center, Shanghai (2017)

In 2017, Shanghai contracted with Foster + Partners to help develop a mixed-use building to serve as an arts and cultural center and define the end point of the Bund, one of its most famous streets.  The goal was to revitalize the Shanghai waterfront area.  It did more than that, it became a notable step in creating a building in constant motion.  Buildings that appear to be fluid or in motion captivate the eye by creating undulations in their design.  In this case, the Bund Financial Center in Shanghai is actually changing depending on the time of day.  Inspired by traditional Chinese weaving, six hundred and seventy-five overlapping magnesium alloy tubes are suspended on a track around the exterior of the building.  The tubes move around the building, continuously changing its appearance, with each ‘tassel’ appearing to come together, then move apart.

Architectural oddities are a statement

Whether meant to be reflective like the Sedlec Ossuary, unintentionally unusual like Marie Antoinette’s little village, to advertise like the Mimetic forms, or to shock like the Brutalist forms or Ideal Palace, architecture has been used to make a statement as long as people have slapped a roof on four walls.  The architectural oddities reflect not just the owner but the society they come from.  The Ossuary couldn’t be built today, as the idea of using human remains as wall décor would be decried as barbaric and ghoulish.  Mimetic forms are still being built, but they are more than roadside curiosities.  They are a way for corporations to draw attention to themselves, turning skyscrapers into mimetic monoliths against the skyline, like the Robot Building.  The architectural oddities are more than just an interesting thing to behold, they tell the story of an individual, and their culture.

Where did we find this stuff?  Select references and readings

Bones of 30,000 plague victims decorate this church.  Christine Bednarz, National Geographic, 26 October 2017.

Brutalist architecture:  Everything you need to know.  Katherine McLaughlin, Architectural Digest, 12 July 2023.

Cool School: Cat-shaped kindergarten makes us all want to go back to school.  Isabelle Khoo, Huffington Post, 7 August 2015.

German Kindergarten designed as a giant cat.  Pinar Noorata, MyModernMet.com, 18 August 2013.

History of the World’s Only Corn Palace.  Troy Magnuson, SDPB Radio, 25 July 2023.

“It’s a blob”:  An exploration of blobism and blobitecture.  Tom Brennecke, Parametric Architecture, 22 May 2023.

‘Lost its soul’: Campaigners decry renovation of Thailand’s iconic ‘Robot Building.’  Oscar Holland, CNN, 5 November 2023.

Ohio’s Longaberger basket-shaped building faces an uncertain future after the company’s bankruptcy.  Alexandra Charitan, Roadtrippers, 23 August 2023.

The history behind that creepy bone chapel you saw on Reddit.  Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience, 2 November 2017.

The story behind Vietnam’s ‘Crazy House.’  Kate Springer, CNN Travel, 25 August 2019.

The true story of the Winchester Mystery House, the creepiest mansion in the U.S.  Hadley Mendelsohn and David Nash, House Beautiful, 15 September 2023.

The house the postman built.  Heidi Ellison, Paris Update, 1 March 2023.