The Rock in the House

Wisconsin’s House on the Rock is one of the strangest, most incredible places on Earth, but a scant hundred miles away is a much simpler curiosity with a startlingly similar moniker.

Fountain City, Wisconsin’s Rock in the House is exactly what it sounds like: a massive boulder embedded in the side of an otherwise unremarkable riverside residence. Renovations on the small house on North Shore Drive had just finished in April of 1995 when calamity struck. The home sat at the base of a steep hillside and on April 24th of that year, a two-story tall boulder weighing 55-tons came careening down the slope, colliding right into the back of the back of the building. The couple that owned the place were home at the time of the impact and were almost crushed by the rolling stone. Luckily both were physically uninjured, although both had been sufficiently rattled to abandon the house almost immediately.  

The next owner of the property, instead of paying to have the boulder removed (no small feat since it was lodged almost entirely into the house), simply decided to shore up the residence around the new addition, and make it an attraction. Renaming the property the “Rock in the House,” playing off the name of the larger attraction, the boulder was opened for visitors.

Today, anyone visiting the site can still enter the unassuming home on a tour that doesn’t seem immediately remarkable until the bedroom door is opened and the claim to fame is revealed.