After checking into a downtown hotel, they decided not to wait for morning. Curious, Mary Lou and her mother set out to see for themselves. He shared his secret that he had been building a home in Phoenix. I left home not because I wanted freedom but because I had tuberculosis." Then, as if from the grave, a final letter arrived: "Dearest Mary Lou: Can you forgive me? It wasn't art I wanted, it was you. In 1945, a telegram brought news of her father's death. Mary Lou hoped he would return someday, but it wasn't to be. "It broke my heart that he left us."Ī few years after his disappearance, letters began to trickle in, postmarked from Arizona. "He said he wanted to pursue his dream of being an artist," Mary Lou once recalled. She was living with her parents in Seattle when her father suddenly deserted his wife and 5-year-old Mary Lou. Her tale of the castle traces to the late 1920s. 3, she cherished the castle, remaining in awe of the gift that would forever haunt and dominate her life. Mary Lou, then about 22, moved in and made the strange abode her own. Mary Lou marveled at the whimsy of the 18-room creation, a composite of desert boulders and misshapen brick, telegraph poles and refrigerator glass, a bar made from half of a covered wagon and a wall studded with the wheels of a Stutz Bearcat. There, amid the rocks and crevices, rose a five-story castle, the fulfillment of a promise her father, Boyce Luther Gulley, finished not long before he died. PHOENIX - On a moonlit night in 1945, Mary Lou Gulley took a taxi to the base of South Mountain and discovered the secret her father had been keeping for 16 years.
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