Weird architectural structures of buildings and places are quite noticeable and are commonly known by people. Generally overlooked are the places that have fairly common designs but have weird reasons behind their construction. As unusual as the reasons might be, they were reasonable enough for the people who built them. To know these bizarre motivations for building places, check out the list below that consists of 10 such places that were built for weird reasons.

1 A man named Horace Burgess built the world’s largest treehouse, which was 97 feet tall, claiming that God asked him to do so. It took him 14 years to build the treehouse, and it burned down in just 15 minutes in 2019.

The treehouse is also known as the “Minister’s Treehouse.”

Horace Burgess asserted in 1993 that God told him that if he would build a treehouse, he will never run out of material, and so believing this, he started building the largest treehouse in the world.

It was located just outside of Crossville, Tennessee in a still intact church. 

The minister spent $12,000 to build the treehouse. It was spectacular! It had five stories, 80 rooms, and a bell tower at the top. 

Burgess said that he never thought of it as private property because it was God’s house and everyone was welcomed there. 

In 2012, the magnificent piece of work burned to ashes in just 15 minutes. The reason why the treehouse caught fire is unknown. The police on the scene reported that the fire was so intense that they had to park at a distance of 500 yards. 

Of course, the treehouse was permanently closed after that. (1, 2)

2 The Queen’s Hamlet, built by Marie Antoinette, is a fake village with a working farm and fake villagers in the backyard of Chateau de Versailles. It was built so that she could pretend to be a “peasant” whenever she felt like it.

The place was like a private escape from the stresses burdening the French Queen. She was very much moved by ideas of naturalism in art, architecture, and garden design. She ordered her favored architect, Richard Mique, to build the Queen’s Hamlet, and it was built between 1782 and 1783. 

The Hamlet consisted of 12 cottages from which five were reserved for the Queen herself, and the rest were used for functional purposes like agriculture. The exteriors of the structures were very rustic, but the interiors were pretty luxuriously built for the Queen’s and her friend’s comfort. 

Whenever the Queen felt burnt out from being in the Palace of Versailles, she turned towards her private little village where she used to dress up like a young shepherdess and act like a commoner. (source)

3 H.H. Holmes was a serial killer in the 19th century in the US who opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself only to execute murders there. The hotel included soundproof bedrooms, trap doors, walls lined with blowtorches, human-sized stoves, gas chambers, and two incinerators.

Holmes was America’s first known serial killer. He became popularly known not just because of his murders but also for his “murder hotel” located in Chicago. The hotel was recognized by different names like “Murder Mansion” or “Murder Castle.”

Holmes admitted that he had killed 27 individuals in his sinister hotel, but there are controversies around the numbers that say the count may be as low as nine or as high as 200. 

During the construction and designing, Holmes continuously changed the builders and architects so no one could learn about his evil plans.

The building was very bizarrely designed. Some apartments had a lot of rooms, and some didn’t have any. One of the floors had a maze set up, and the other looked normal.

The hotel was built in 1892, and just within a couple of years, Holmes was behind bars after the discovery of the purpose of the three-storied, weird hotel. (1, 2, 3)

4 In a divorce settlement, the wife from the couple demanded her ex-husband build a replica of their family home, but she didn’t specify the location. So, her ex-husband built the house in the middle of a salt marsh and plumbed it only with salt water, making it uninhabitable. The house is called the “Plum Island Pink House,” and is situated in Massachusetts.

The couple divorced in the 1920s. Even if the house was inhabitable, it was used by the ex-husband’s family as a summer home. and a series of people settled at the pale, pink house after the owner sold it in the 1940s. 

The house is located on Plum Island, Massachusetts. It has been abandoned since the 2000s, and now is only home for birds like hawks and snow owls. 

However, the tale that the husband built the house for his wife is only considered a legend by some since a few of the locals say that the family actually lived in the house for a brief period of time, and the man then left the family and moved to Boston to live with another woman. (source)

5 During the Cold War, the Soviets built fully functioning replicas of American towns to train new operatives. The deep-cover, retired operatives taught the new trainees everything they needed to know about blending into American life inside the replicated towns.

Investigations say that some of the spies from the American replicated towns were women who were specially trained to lure powerful rich American men using sexual and intellectual methods.

These schools were mostly located in the southern part of the country, and they were exact replicas of American suburbs like Chevy Chase.

During the training, the trainees were asked to eat hamburgers at McDonald’s, watch American TV, go to an American movie theatre, and talk only in English. 

Once the spies were thought of as sufficiently Americanized, they were prepared to set off to the US. 

These towns never existed on maps, and the entire planning came out only after some of the spies were captured in the US. (source)