It arrived as a vision.

It reached to the heavens,

and it disappeared in flames.

For 14 years.

For 14 years, the world's biggest treehouse stood in Central Tennessee.

It was 97 feet tall, as tall as a 9-story building.

It attracted visitors from around the world, but nobody ever made a dime off of it.

One man built it all by himself, because God told him to.

But he never had a chance to say goodbye to his towering treehouse temple. Temple.

I'm Dylan Thuris and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're remembering the minister's treehouse in Crossville, Tennessee.

We'll talk to the pastor Horace Burgess, the minister himself, about his creation and

we'll hear from several people who visited this lost wonder, including me.

More. After this. Horace Burgess built his very first treehouse back in the 1980s.

It was in nine trees. It was five stories high and I lived in it for three years.

The treehouse was on his family's farmland in a town called Crossville.

It's about two hours east of Nashville, Tennessee.

And Horace was struggling with addiction at the time.

So before long, he says the treehouse became a bad place for him.

It was just evil. I mean they were no good about it. It was you know just drugs and

party all the time and I realized that I was wasting my life and I was trying to change it and people wouldn't let me.

But then he says he got a message from God and it was simple to destroy the tree house.

...