Along State Highway 165 southwest of Pueblo, in Colorado’s San Isabel National Forest, stands a 160 foot stone castle with towers, wrought iron walkways, and arched windows, built almost single handedly by Jim Bishop. Born in Honolulu in 1944, Bishop bought the land at 15 for $450 saved from mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. In 1969 he and his wife Phoebe began building a one room family cottage. When he covered a metal water tank with cemented rocks to hide it, passing neighbors said it looked like a castle turret, and the remark changed the project entirely. He began hauling stone by the truckload and building upward.

In 1988 the Bishops’ four year old son Roy was killed in a logging accident on the property. Asked decades later why he kept building there, Bishop said, “What am I going to run to?” He fought officials for about 40 years over the rocks he took from the national forest, and in 1996 over his homemade highway signs, which ended with the state issuing official ones. Known for shouting blunt political opinions from the scaffolding, he drew warnings from roadside travel guides. After Jim and Phoebe were both diagnosed with cancer in 2014 and 2015, trustee David Merrill tried to take over and rename the site, and the couple spent $20,000 to win back clear title. Bishop died in Pueblo on November 21, 2024, at 80, and his son Dan now cares for the castle.

• A 40 year dispute over fees for truckloads of stone gathered in the San Isabel National Forest
• Merrill’s attempt, recorded in Custer County, to rebrand the site as Castle Church for the Redemption
• A March 28, 2018 electrical fire that destroyed the gift shop and guest house while the stone castle survived
• Volunteers and donations that let the attraction reopen the same week as the 2018 fire
• The 2026 Aspen Acres Fire forcing evacuation in June, with the castle unscathed and reopened in August