One day in 1993, Horace Burgess, a minister in Crossville, TN, received a message from God that if he built Him a treehouse, he would never run out of materials.

So Burgess started building a treehouse that almost twenty years later would end up ten stories tall and only cost him around $12,000. All of the wood was salvaged, and the structure is built around 7 trees that act as supports. Burgess worked on it as he found materials, stopping and starting as supplies or time allowed.

Visitors report that the rambling structure reflects this stop-and-go construction method, with hallways ending in sheer drop-offs because there aren’t walls at the end, or floors ending suddenly at ladders, which leads me to wonder how on earth this thing was built, and is operated (about 500 tourists a week), without being anywhere near up to code, but honestly that’s got to make visiting it a whole lot more fun.

Check out the gallery for more pictures of this insane structure.

Top banner images (1, 2) by Charles Sutherland on Flickr.

• Tweet