145.4 Spokane Valley Castle House

Update December 2014: Owner Jeff Jensen offers tours of the Spokane Valley Castle House! In exchange, he wants donations of building materials such as bricks, rebar, steel, concrete, iron, or lumber. Contact the homeowner only to arrange a tour in exchange for these items through the "reply" button on Jeff Jensen's post at Craig's List.

We found the Spokane Valley Castle House by Kismet. We were headed north on Pines road and needed to turn east on Broadway, to go to Walmart. Scott missed the right turn on Broadway and we turned right on the next street and made the first available right to turn around, and I said, "Whoa! Look at that bizarre castle house!"

I was so flabbergasted by the castle house that I took this video right then and there. If you watch it closely you can see the actual house amid all the towers. There were construction noises, so I think they were building on it even as I took this video, on Saturday, April 14, 2012.


The rest of the neighborhood is normal looking and middle class. There are small houses on either side of this decorated lot. I wish I had knocked on the door and talked to the home owner. I worked at California Renaissance Faires in DeVore, Agoura and Novato for six years. If these home owners are faire people or SCA people I would probably have a lot in common with them.

I would like living next to a cool house like this, but lots of people would be mad about its effect on their property values, I'm sure. I really should have talked to the owner of the castle house and to his neighbors, but we were in a hurry to get to Walmart and buy ammo so we could go practice shooting.

On my video's YouTube page, there's a comment by a young lady who says she lived next door to this house when the owner decided to start turning it into a castle. She says she was friends with the owner's daughter, and that the owner made this castle house because his daughter wanted to be a princess.

I found an entry about the Spokane Valley castle in a book where the author had interviewed the home owner: Washington Curiosities, 3rd: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff (Curiosities Series), by Harriet Baskas. It says Jeff Jensen, a welder, owns this lot and said it was OK for people to take pictures of his property but not for them to publish his address. Jensen also told Baskas that he started making his house look like a castle with building a trellis. He said he had so much fun building the trellis for his ivy that he built another decoration, and it just never stopped. Baskas also wrote that he told her the inside of the house looks normal, like any other house. On the right side of the house as you face it from the street, at the end of the video is my favorite part. There is a metal net of sorts above the driveway, with a metal line hanging down. It looks like something in Pirates of the Caribbean or any other pirate movie you can name. At faire I was in Sea Dogs, so I really love anything with a privateer or pirate theme.

This bizarre castle house also reminds me of the Winchester Mystery House because of the way Jeff Jensen is just randomly building more towers, with no plan or layout. I am glad to read that he is not building his castle house because of guilt or nightmares like the Winchester people had.

Isn't it easy to imagine a dungeon in the basement? Hehe! I wonder if kids would be scared of that, or if they would get a kick out of being sent to the dungeon if they were bad? Some of my friends who have little kids think this guy should put on a haunted house or give tours or something, at least for Halloween. Who is going to be brave enough to ask him to come see this page and maybe comment on if he will make a Halloween event of his house or not?

Spokane Valley is just east of Spokane, WA. It is sort of a suburb of Spokane. Spokane itself is on the eastern side of Washington State, almost in Idaho. We are actually closer to Coeur d'alene, Idaho than we are to any other cities in WA. Spokane is 280 miles east of Seattle, WA on I-90. 

If you are in Spokane Valley and you want to find the castle house, go north on University one block past Broadway. Turn right and then make the first available right. The castle house is on the left side of the street after you go about a block.