Wyoming’s ‘Crystal Castle’ Is Made From 30,000 Glass Embalming Fluid Bottles

Some people have claimed that Wyoming’s Crystal Castle, a cabin that sort of resembles a dwarf castle about 23 miles west of Cheyenne and 2 miles from Crystal Lake Reservoir, must be haunted.

From the outside looking in, that seems a reasonable belief given that the miniature castle is made mostly from 30,000 glass bottles that once contained formaldehyde, most commonly used by morticians for embalming.

But take it from owner Vicki Fisher: There’s no trace of any formaldehyde left in the bottles, and there’s no trace of any ghosts either.

“There’s like a million newspaper articles saying there are ghosts there and stuff like that,” Fisher told Cowboy State Daily. “But I’ve never noticed anything haunted. No ghosts at all.”

Fisher doesn’t live full-time in the tiny, one-bedroom home. It’s her vacation cabin, a home away from home when she feels like getting away from it all. What better escape than a once-upon-a-time Crystal Castle not far from a place called Crystal Lake?

“The bedroom is on one end in one of the round parts of the house,” she said. “And then the other side there’s a living room. The kitchen, dining room and fireplace are right in the middle. And it has views of (Granite Springs).

As cabins go, the Crystal Castle is quite comfortable, Fisher said. It has plaster walls, which hide the bottles from view from inside. And the bottles actually do a pretty good job of keeping things insulated, though who knows what the R-value of a glass embalming fluid bottle really is, let alone 30,000 of them.

What Fisher has noticed is the cabin is warmer in winter than the ambient air and quite cozy thanks to the fireplace whenever she decides to visit. It’s also cooler than ambient air in the summer — about 15 degrees cooler, without turning on any air conditioning.

It’s even a bit colorful, which is fun.

“In the entryway, there are some colored bottles,” Fisher said. “And they put off colors inside the cabin.”

Inspiration For The Crystal Castle

The Crystal Castle was built in the late 1960s by a man named J.H. (Harry) Widholm.

According to a newspaper clipping about Widholm that Fisher shared with Cowboy State Daily, the one-time mechanic was inspired by a bottle house he’d seen in 1946 at Knott’s Berry Farm in California.

Bottle houses were once common during California’s Gold Rush days in the early 1900s. Building materials were mighty scarce then, but liquor bottles were quite plentiful, particularly for miners whose claims weren’t panning out as hoped.

Knott’s Berry Farm’s bottle house was inspired by those bottle cabins of old. They used 3,082 wine and whiskey bottles to build a little cabin in 1944, patterning it off a bottle house built by a miner in 1905 in Rhyolite, Nevada.

Widholm wasn’t the only one inspired by the Knott’s Berry Farm bottle house. The Wimberley Bottle House built in 1960 as part of a pioneer town in Kimberley, Texas, also was inspired by Knott’s Berry Farm’s bottle cabin, and who knows how many other bottle houses they’ve inspired. A quick Google search reveals bottle houses in Canada, North Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, Massachusetts and many other places.

Life Gets Busy, But Dreams Don’t Die

Widholm didn’t build his bottle house right away. In fact, he kind of forgot about the idea for a while. Life gets busy, and he needed a little reminder that there was this dream he’d once upon a time had of a bottle house.

That reminder appeared as a little classified ad in a newspaper, advertising the sale of a few cases of empty embalming fluid bottles.

Embalming bottles are square, Widholm thought, and he instantly remembered that he wanted to build a cabin — a miniature castle really — with round turrets for his home away from home. So, he called the guy up to tell him he’d buy all of the bottles, every last one.

According to the newspaper clipping, as Widholm was picking up the bottles, the mortician became a little curious and wondered what in the heck Widholm was going to do with these embalming fluid bottles.

“I’m building a house,” he told the mortician without a second thought.

The mortician, however, had plenty of second thoughts himself, which Widholm could plainly see in his quizzical you-must-be-crazy eyes.

“A house?” he said, clearly perplexed. “You’re going to need a lot more bottles than this.”

That was absolutely right, Widholm agreed.

“Do you know where I might buy some more bottles?” Widholm asked.

The mortician suggested checking in with area morticians. Maybe some might even give their bottles away just to get rid of them.

That is exactly what Widholm did. He called all of the morticians for miles around and picked up case after case of embalming fluid bottles until he had just enough to build his little dream castle by the lake.

A House For A Mere $3,500

It took at least 30,000 bottles to build the Crystal Castle, according to the book “The Bottle House” by John and Helen Harper. The total cost for all the materials, including cement and other supplies, was a mere $3,500.

For comparison, median home values for an average house in 1960 were closer to $12,000, so he saved a significant amount by building it himself with his novel glass “bricks.”

Widholm treated his bottles the same way a bricklayer would, except his bricks were much longer than bricks normally would be. And they couldn’t be placed with the long side against the front of the house, either.

This is, unless one wanted to the house to sound like ghosts every time the wind blew.

So, he laid each bottle down in the mortar with the tops of the bottle facing inward and the square bottoms out.

The bottles in the finished cabin are not readily visible from a distance. Casual passersby might not even notice that the little quirky house is made of something unusual.

But if the sun catches a bottle just right, there’s a sparkle, and when one gets closer, jaws drop and eyes get as round as quarters, realizing that the house has been made with row upon row of glass bottles, all the way up to the roofline.

Fisher noticed the cabin as a little girl playing at her parents’ cabin, which was right next door to the Crystal Castle. She never got to play inside the castle as a little girl, but she always longed to see the inside of it.

When she grew up, she kept an eye on the little castle cabin, and asked the owner to let her know if she ever decided to sell it. The answer was always not yet. Until finally one day, the woman called Fisher up and asked if she was ready to buy the cabin.

Fisher didn’t hesitate a second. Getting the chance to buy the Crystal Castle felt just like happily ever after.

The cabin cost $60,000 at the time, but the hard part wasn’t buying it, Fisher found. It was insuring it.

No one could figure out its replacement value.

“I mean, how do you replace something like that?” she said.

Taking A Few Hits

Over the years, despite her care for the little glass cabin near the lake, some of the Crystal Castle’s bottles have broken.

“We need to figure out how to either fill those with cement or something,” she said. “Because you can’t take them out.”

There used to be a fenced driveway made of glass bottles, too, but those have since fallen down.

“That was kind of pretty,” Fisher said. “There’s still part of it up there now, but I mean, just the weather, and it being empty for a while.”

Fisher’s been working on a solution for a retaining wall after the cabin’s garage, which was built into that wall, fell apart.

“My husband just passed away, so I’m not sure when we’re going to be able to get that done,” she said.

But people are always stopping by the Crystal Castle, Fisher said.

“They used to have something on the outside of it that had like an enclosed glass thing, where you could pick it up and find a guest book,” she said. “And I’d like to maybe do that again someday.”

But she also worries that some people might not be kind to the house, which is special to her.

“I’ve got cameras there,” she said. “But there’s also broken glass everywhere, because some bottles have broken. Every time we go up there, we try to clean it up. So, there’s always glass, and you just want people to be careful.”

People aren’t the only visitors to the Crystal Castle, and that’s one of the other special things about the vacation home.

The deer and antelope seem to love the little glass castle near the lake.

“They like laying up against the house,” Vicki said. “So, I have pictures of deer laying up by the house.”

It’s exactly as one might expect from a modern fairy tale. And just one of the many things that Fisher has loved about owning her own Crystal Castle, a cabin like none other anywhere else in Wyoming.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.