Wyoming’s Crystal Castle, made from embalming fluid bottles, is for sale for $325,000

JH (Harry) Widholm built himself one Crystal Castle at Crystal Lake in the foothills of the Laramie Mountains in the 1960s. It is a fairytale house, built from 30,000 bottles of embalming fluid.

Finally it is for sale. The owner, Vicki Launer Fisher, told Cowboy State Daily she is selling the unique vacation cabin because she hasn’t used it much since her husband died.

The 766-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath home sits on 3.34 acres. The price for this house? It’s a modest $325,000, according to the #1 Properties listing, and that includes the furnishings.

Those who tour the Crystal Castle may be more surprised by the inside of the house than the outside, with its curvy lines constructed entirely of bottles and its steeply sloping roofline. The inside is surprising because the embalming fluid bottles in the house are not really visible, aside from just a few decorative bottles placed in the foyer.

“They spread colors around the cabin,” Launer said.

That was just for fun though. The rest of the bottles are hidden behind plaster walls, making this cozy cabin feel like any other home inside.

One thing the castle’s new owner may wonder is how well insulating bottles containing embalming fluids are.

Turns out they’re not bad, Launer said.

She doesn’t know what the R-value of the bottles is, but the cabin is always warmer than the ambient air in the winter, and in the summer it’s usually about 15 degrees cooler before the air conditioning turns on.

The house also has a fireplace in case more heat is needed. And it has all the other amenities you’d expect in a modern lake cabin.

There is a kitchen, dining table and living room, as well as a bedroom and a bathroom. It’s small, but perfect for a vacation cabin near Curt Gowdy State Park, a beautiful place with plenty of outdoor adventures.

Inspired by Knott’s Berry Farm Bottle House

Widholm was a mechanic who became a bit obsessed with bottle houses after seeing one at Knott’s Berry Farm in California in 1946.

Many bottle houses are inspired by the Gold Rush days in California at the turn of the 20th century. Building materials were scarce at the time, but bottles were plentiful, especially for miners whose claims did not materialize.

Knott’s Berry Farm used 3,082 wine and whiskey bottles to build their small cabin in 1944, using as an example a bottle house built in 1905 in Rhyolite, Nevada.

Their work inspired a number of other bottle houses at the time, including the Wimberley Bottle House built in 1960 in the pioneer town of Kimberley, Texas.

Widholm had kind of forgotten about the bottle house in California until one day he saw an ad in the newspaper offering to sell several cases of empty bottles of embalming fluid.

Those bottles aren’t round, they’re square, Widholm thought, remembering the old bottle house he’d seen in California.

On a whim, he called the newspaper’s advertising number and told the man who answered that he would buy all the bottles. If the man knew of any other bottles of embalming fluid, he would buy them too.

Widholm knew he would need an awful lot of bottles to build an entire hut. In fact, it would take a total of 30,000 of them to build the hut, which he designed to look a bit like a castle, with short turrets at each end.

Once he had all the bottles he needed, he treated his bottles like rocks – albeit fragile rocks that could break if mishandled.

He had to devise a special mortar for this task, one that would stick to the bottles. He made sure that each bottle was placed facing inwards so that the wind would not whistle into the bottle, making the house sound spooky.

According to the book “The Bottle House” by John and Helen Harper, the total cost of the bottle house, including the bottles, cement and other supplies, was only $3,500. The average home value at the time was around $12,000, so his project was not only new and beautiful, but also affordable.

Even the deer and antelopes love the Crystal Castle

The Crystal Castle glitters like diamonds from a distance when the sun shines right on it, although it isn’t until you get much closer to the building that you can tell that it is made entirely of glass bottles. These continue to the roofline.

Fisher first saw the unique lakeside castle when a little girl was playing in her parents’ cabin, which was next door. As a girl, she was never allowed to play in the castle, even though she always wanted to.

She knew she would buy the castle one day. She kept an eye on it for years until the owner finally decided to sell. She didn’t hesitate to record it. After all, it’s not every day that you can own a crystal clear castle on a crystal lake.

Even though she is now selling it, Launer finds it a joy to own the Crystal Castle. People always stop by to see the unique cabin, which is like no other in Wyoming, and several media outlets have featured the house over the years, including HGTV.

Even the deer and antelopes seem to love this fantastic little glass house, just as you would expect from a modern fairytale castle.

“I have pictures of deer lying around the house,” Launer said. “They like to snuggle up against the house.”

Renee Jean can be reached at [email protected].