The Mystery of Mansions

My first mansion was a haunted one. The haunted one, at Disney World in 1989. It loomed large to my small frame, and I found myself desperate to go in, but also terrified of what I might see therein. That's probably the typical seven year old haunted house dilemma. But curiosity won that day, and in I went, with a parent firmly attached to each hand. My memories of that day are still vivid. The muggy Florida air, the large line outside of the brick and copper structure, the cool air as it hit our faces upon entering the building. From there it's a blur, but a beautiful one. Purple wallpaper, cobwebs, dark rooms, then dancing ghosts, singing ghosts, and room after room of pure magic. And right there, that's where I was hooked on mansions.

Interestingly enough, there is no textbook or architectural definition for what constitutes a mansion. I guess to me, a mansion would be a house with many rooms, some of which serve no real function in modern society. You know, a conservatory, a ballroom, any room listed in the board game Clue. I tend to picture them as older homes, possibly with stonework or lavish paintings or hardwood walls, anything that could double for a museum...or Xavier's School for the Gifted. Anything large enough to contain hidden passageways.

This obsession has been a consistent thread throughout my life, which is somewhat ironic since I grew up in a modest three bedroom home in a small mid-western town. With shag-carpeting. Which is just about as un-mansion like as you can get. I've never known anyone who lived in a mansion, and my only experience with them firsthand has been through tours or public showings.

Mostly, I collect them through films that I own, books that I buy, or hours that I spend in libraries and on the internet. In fact, mansions permeate our pop culture landscape. They appear frequently in movies, usually scary ones, but that's certainly no rule. They often grace our comic books, a la Batman's "Wayne Manor". There are even scads of video games set in mansions, of all different genres, from Resident Evil to Tomb Raider. All signs point to the fact that we, as a culture, love to spend time in mansions, and if we can't literally do that, we'll find other ways to go there. So what is it about these structures that has enraptured not only me, but the public at large for so long and in so many ways?

There's one thing I've learned about mansions that may set our feet on the path to discovery, and that is that these buildings almost never have a normal story. Whether it's the history of their creation or the narrative over their individual lifetimes. Mansions are inexorably linked to "the weird".

For example, there's the Winchester House in California, built by the famous Sarah Winchester, heiress to the rifle fortune. She spent her whole life building on her mansion, hiring a team of people to be building seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. She believed she was haunted by the ghosts of the people killed by her family's rifles, and in order to stay safe, she built a home to confuse said spirits so they could never reach her. Doors that open to sheer drops, stairways to nowhere, hidden rooms, secret entryways and exits in case she ever needed to make a fast escape. And in each room, you will find thirteen of something, thirteen light bulbs in the chandelier, thirteen windows, thirteen little doors. It's cliche, but the truth is stranger than fiction.

Even the most modest mansions contain at least one hidden element. The Lilly House in Indianapolis, a small affair when compared to the Winchester House, contains a hidden spiral staircase from the game room that connects to the second floor. (There's another artifact of times gone by, a game room.) And nobody can quite tell you the answer for why it was built or what purpose it served. Every time I have toured the house, each tour guide has told a different story about who had it built and why. Even today, the hidden staircase still keeps it's secrets.

But the tales of the weird aren't simply contained to the architecture of mansions. Sometimes, the houses themselves, even the mere suggestions of them, seem to bring out the stranger side of people. The Haunted Mansions at Disneyland and Walt Disney World are very popular places for loved ones to go during their grieving process, so they can spread the ashes of the deceased inside the rides. There is no way to confirm the number of times that this has happened, because Disney refuses to acknowledge the practice. They will sometimes acknowledge the spreading of ashes to the local news or eye witnesses, but they will never confirm to any news source that the ashes were human remains.

Each time this occurs EMTs are called and specialized Disney custodians show up with HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners and the rides shut down for at least two hours. But there are reports from the L.A. Times, The Examiner, World News, and countless other sources of this happening from as recently as May 2009. Disney has a "no arrest" policy on their property, and by the time that Disney security is called to the scene of these little funeral ceremonies, the people have often de-boarded the ride and are back in the anonymous sea of guests in the park. I wonder if these people know that they are not in fact in a mansion, but really a labyrinth of gears and employees and show lighting. Maybe they know and simply don't care, because the illusion is effective enough.

One of the reasons that mansions are so ripe for tales of interest is simply because they linger on this Earth for so long. They are, essentially, modern castles. Which means they're virtually indestructible. Which also means that at some point in time, they will become the plot of some drama regarding their sale, acquisition, worth, destruction, etc.

According to MORE Magazine, Caroline Magnus of Onibury, England was shocked when she learned that she had inherited a dreary 90 room stone manor built a century ago from a mysterious aunt. This home had out of date plumbing, almost no modernization whatsoever, and faulty wiring where there was any wiring at all. But Magnus left her steady career to take on the house, in a David and Goliath style challenge. (Magnus was the David, naturally.)

Everyone told her not to do it. That it was too much to handle, that the house was dangerous. But she renovated a small space for an apartment anyway, and quite literally, moved into this enormous challenge. If that wasn't plot enough for a film, she spent years renovating it, finally opening it up as a bed and breakfast and a location for weddings and parties. Only to be called on by Hollywood, who then rented it for the 2008 Oscar darling, "Atonement". Some mansions have happy endings.

Magnus wasn't the only one dealing with the problem of dreary old mansions. These magnificent structures have become a bit of a nuisance in London as well. According to the Wall Street Journal, these large and intricate homes serve as investments for the wealthy, who actually, "pay the bills to keep them empty" for tax reasons. This creates a problem for neighbors when the homes fall into disrepair.

Imagine, living in a neighborhood with your very own abandoned mansion...the possibilities seem endless to me. But they irk the locals, who have hired a patrolman, Paul Palmer, to walk this architectural graveyard as a kind of, mansion security guard. He strolls 22 homes daily in various neighborhoods, shooing out transients, reporting on graffiti, and acting as a general calming presence for those worried about what's going on in these abandoned homes.

But these stories aren't limited to England. Americans aren't always keen on these iconic abodes cropping up either. Particularly not in Visalia, California where locals were troubled by what they called the construction of a, "monster house". Gilbert Marroquin, a farmer who struck it rich with multiple businesses over the years, started building a home covering 8 lots of property in 2000.

It was to be 25,310 square feet with two elevators and room for 85 people. Why all the room? Marroquin wasn't aiming for a spot among America's financial elite. Rather he intended to use the home for missionaries to rest after their service in other countries and to provide sick and dying children with a free vacation destination. Alas, he never got the chance to host any missionaries or children, as his unfinished house was burnt down by a still unknown arsonist later that same year.

I think there's something about these large structures that's innately intimidating. For some, the mystery of a mansion is alluring. For others, the possibilities of the secrets kept within can be terrifying. What you see in a mansion is a bit like what you might see reflected in some kind of psychological mirror, like an architectural Rorschach test. Maybe our tendency to project is one of the reasons why they always end up as the main villain in horror movies.

There's the Overlook Hotel from, "The Shining" and the terrifyingly alive Hill House from the 1963 film, "The Haunting". In both of these movies, the houses are the reason for a crucial crack in a main character's psyche. Both are locations of multiple traumas, both carry imprints of these traumas, and both consume at least one person alive. Houses with body counts. Because there's nothing scarier than a bad guy you can't face down, can't run from, and have to turn your back on every night as you sleep. And perhaps there's nothing that will break you down more quickly than being alone in a cavernous space with nothing to do but face down your own personal demons.

Whatever the reason, films featuring mansions, especially scary ones and adventures, always go over like gangbusters at the box office. Not that comedies haven't seen their fair share of days in mansions as well, as the Marx Brothers were always frolicking in them. Turning the terror of the unknown into perfectly timed prop comedy and sight gags, with plenty of jabs at the upper class, the usual inhabitants of these grand homes, thrown in for good measure. Just another lens through which to view an iconic location.

Then there's the real life horror film that took place in Murder Castle during the 1933 World's Fair. Mr. H.H. Holmes built himself this homegrown mansion on 63^rd street in Chicago when he bought out an entire chunk of city property which was over a hundred and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide with three floors and a basement. While this initially reads like your average urban real estate listing, it was what Holmes did to it after he acquired it that still sends chills down the spine today.

Inside this massive structure, he built walled up rooms, secret passageways, and trap doors. All of which he used to hide his many murder victims in, which can never be fully counted because of the lime and acid in the basement, which he used to dispose of the bodies. Most of us think of mansions as a geometrically ordered place to be, a series of rooms, each with a purpose of their own in a formal layout. But Holmes took to his mansion like some kind of a burrowing insect, moving within for sinister purposes and ignoring the logic of what a mansion should be, the way it should've worked on even the most basic levels.

Mansions have the power to hide or to trap, to keep something forever safe or damn a person to their final resting place. It's not the houses themselves; it's what we get to be when we're inside of them. Mansions offer cover and space. Space to do with as you please. Whether you are a charitable saint or a mass murderer. After all, a house is only a house, it's what one chooses to do with all that space that colors the bricks, mortar, and wood with a character all their own.

They're just another form of blank canvas on which we get to see the strange and colorful brushstrokes of humanity play out. They're mythical settings, like castles or palaces. That's why so much of our media takes place inside these enormous stages. Life is too big, there's too much to think about, too much to consider. But place your story in the fantastic microcosm of a mansion, and you have an instant diorama. A slice of life. We're fascinated with these structures because we're fascinated with people and what they choose to do with their life, their time, and their space.

Also, let's not forget the elephant in the secret room. Mansions are all about money. Typically reserved and owned by the upper class, they represent a kind of freedom that most of us average Janes and Joes could only dream of attaining someday. There's the Biltmore estate, the Playboy Mansion, and countless others that have been renovated and turned into modern spectacles. There places we can only go in our minds or in fiction, because we know we'll never get behind the velvet rope. For every unsinkable Molly Brown and unexpected heiress, there are a hundred thousand tourists viewing the White House, never even daring to hope to approach that lavish standard of living in their own lives.

And speaking of spectacles, comparison is a natural state of being, and all too natural when we see or hear of the rich surroundings of others. We see what others have and we wonder what our lives would be like if we had what they had. When I settle down to read a Batman comic or watch, "Tomb Raider" or thumb through a book about the behind-the-scenes of the Haunted Mansion, I'm just wondering what I would do with all that space or all those resources. And I can tell you, because I've spent hours thinking about it.

There would be theme parties, and murder mystery dinners, and family reunions, lavish family holidays, ridiculously accurate recreations of movie and television sets, some form of orphanage, movie theaters and entire wings dedicated to animal rescue work. And when I say that's what I'd do with a mansion, I of course mean that's what I would do with money, a mansion, time, and complete creative freedom.

Taking the time to imagine what you would do with such a resource is kind of like that old guidance counselor trick, "If someone told you tomorrow that they'd pay you a million dollars to do any job you wanted, what would you pick?" Then whatever you pick is what you're supposed to do, your calling in life. Well, considering what would you do with a mansion is something along the same lines.

We love mansions because they offer us windows into our own minds. What scares us, how does the other half live, what do we think is beautiful, what excites us, how did people used to live, what do we really want to do with our time, our lives, our money, and what are other human beings capable of doing with theirs? Not to mention, everyone needs a secret passageway or two...