The Mystery Castle
Lance Motta-Vilensky
Tsunami like waves rolled in from the sea, first damaging only the castle’s façade, but then the turrets fell and the walls crumbled. Finally, there was nothing but an empty shoreline and the relentless sea. In anguish, a young girl cried; her sandcastle was no more. She asked her father to build her a real castle someplace where it could never be destroyed by water, perhaps in a desert. The father, Boyce Gulley, later left his wife and daughter in Seattle and settled in Phoenix. It was in the late 1920s that he started building a whimsical home, a castle. It’s constructed of, among other things: stones, adobe, cement, telephone poles, auto parts, glass blocks, broken bottles, railroad tracks, scrap metal and local artifacts including petroglyphs. Mr. Gulley died in 1945, never having seen his wife or daughter again. Notified of his death and told they’d inherited a castle, they soon moved in and learned of a mystery. Mr. Gulley had left information about a trap door in one of the rooms, with instructions not to open the trap door until two years after his death. Life Magazine did an article on the Mystery Castle in 1948 when the trap door was opened. Mr. Gulley’s little girl, Mary Lou, lived in the castle until her death in 2010. Today you can visit the castle (see mymysterycastle.com to plan your visit) and learn what was revealed when the trap door was opened, though that’s certainly not the only mystery in the Mystery Castle. That a man could abandon his child but then be compelled to build a dream of hers into reality proves that, sometimes, love is a mystery.