Mystery Castle

Mystery Castle is a house in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, in the foothills of South Mountain Park. It was built in the 1930s by Boyce Luther Gulley for his daughter Mary Lou Gulley. After learning that he had tuberculosis, Gulley moved from Seattle to the Phoenix area and began building the house from found or inexpensive materials. He died in 1945, and Mary Lou and her mother were notified by an attorney that they had inherited the property, moving in shortly afterwards. Their story attracted attention and gave the house some renown: an article in Life magazine on 26 January 1948 ran under the headline "Life Visits a Mystery Castle: A Young Girl Rules Over the Strange Secrets of a Fairy Tale Dream House in the Arizona Desert", with a photograph of Mary Lou posing atop the cantilever staircase leading to the roof. That same year she and her mother began offering tours of the house.

Where it is

Mystery Castle is a historic site near Tempe, in Maricopa County. It is one of the historic sites in this database, and appears in the statewide ranking of Arizona attractions.

How this ranking was reached

No official visitor count is published for Mystery Castle, so its score rests on public interest and tourism significance, and is capped below the level a measured attraction can reach. That is why the medium confidence above is not higher. The weighting is explained in full on the methodology page, and every axis is broken out under Facts and sources at the foot of this page.

Note on the data: No official visitor count is published for this attraction.

Sources

• Public interest: Wikimedia pageviews (en.wikipedia, human traffic), 2024
• Coordinates and designations: Wikidata(opens in a new tab)
• County: U.S. Census geography via FCC Area API, resolved from coordinates

Record last verified 2026-08-12.