Gingerbread houses tend to abound during the holiday season. Not all of the ginger-flavored molasses cake buildings are simple residences, though. Some are gigantic constructions built by teams using hundreds of kilograms of confectionery of all types. These chefs spend long hours baking and assembling their gingerbread creations, but in the end, they all agree that the joy their creations bring to them and others makes their labors of love worthwhile. These ten elaborate gingerbread houses indicate why they felt this way.

10 US Capitol Building

In 2013, the US Capitol building occupied the entrance to the Pentagon’s Army Executive Dining Facility. Made of licorice garland and candy adornments and decorated with icicles of sugar and melting drifts of “snow,” the replica building was 1.4 meters (4.5 ft) long and 0.9 meters (3 ft) wide and weighed over 23 kilograms (50 lb). Finishing touches included a lawn of green-dyed, crushed cornflakes mixed with melted marshmallows and inverted ice cream cone trees, tiny candles in the windows, and miniature wreaths made of green icing and festooned with red icing bows. Candy canes doubled as columns, and a Statue of Freedom carved by Sergent Kyoungmin Park topped the gingerbread building’s dome.

The Capitol was designed by Specialist Samantha Poe, whose family includes several engineers. Before joining the Army, Poe was a chef at five-star restaurants, and she enjoyed the mathematics that went into designing the gingerbread building to correct scale and proportions. Sergent Rose Picard, a pastry chef, assisted in assembling the gingerbread building. The project took the soldiers six days to complete, constructing it in addition to their regular duties. The Capitol impressed generals, who came to shake the soldiers’ hands.

9 Waddesdon Manor

In 2016, a team of Biscuiteers (a London cookie boutique) employees spent an astonishing 500 hours constructing a huge cutaway gingerbread replica of Waddesdon Manor, a French Renaissance–style chateau in Buckinghamshire. The gingerbread edifice showed off several splendid rooms, each constructed in astonishing detail.

The pink guest bedroom was furnished with a chest, a vanity, and a canopy bed. The paneled walls were decorated with carved wall molding and baseboards. There were also paintings, parrot statues, lamps, a mirror, curtains, and an elaborate rug.

The billiard room contained a billiards table, a red love seat complete with pillows, triangular windows with green panes, embossed walls, and a red carpet. The dining room featured a table set for ten, an elegant rug, a plank floor, and sideboards and was decorated with paintings, flower baskets, a clock, and other exquisite touches.

8 Town Hall Village

To create the gingerbread village that occupied the lobby of Melbourne’s town hall in December 2014, pastry chefs Deniz Karaca and Anna Polyviou enlisted the help of Karaca’s 12-member team and a number of volunteers, who spent 2,000 hours building the tiny town. The backdrop for the village required 800 miniature Christmas trees, according to Karaca.

The village’s buildings included such local landmarks as the Melbourne Town hall, the Melbourne Cricket Hall, Luna Park, and Flemington Racecourse. Polyviou and her team also constructed a gingerbread-brick house decorated with lollipops, M&Ms, chocolate freckles, and licorice. Visitors were asked to donate a gold coin; proceeds went to Make-A-Wish Australia.

7 Life-Size House

Each year, the gingerbread constructions of Scott Tennant, the executive pastry chef of Nemacolin Woodlands Resort’s Chateau LaFayette, are different. In 2016, he, his staff of ten, and the resort’s carpentry shop joined forces to create a house large enough for adults to enter. The house was edible, and some visitors tried to break off samples. Tenant found “a fingerprint in the piping, or candies missing.”

After the carpenters finished the base for the house, Tennant and his staff took over. After their regular hours, he and his team worked 600 night hours to create the house. Tennant gave away a few of his trade secrets: With a hand saw, he cut notches into cookies before slicing them to size. The resulting discs adorned the edge of a wall.

6 Two-Story House

In 2016, a 7-meter (22 ft), two-story gingerbread house was built over a wooden frame in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Chefs added 7,750 pieces of gingerbread as well as hundreds of kilograms of icing and candy. The hotel’s executive pastry chef, Kimberly Tighe, and her staff rebuild the house each holiday season. The construction materials are reused each year, and the uneaten edible parts are composted.

Children often sample the exterior of the house, but repair materials, in the form of peppermint canes, gingerbread men, jelly slices, Christmas tree marshmallows, and gumdrops, are on hand for the twice-daily, four-hour sessions the chefs spend replacing eaten items. The house features a balcony, an electric train that runs in and out of the house, cookie trim, a clock, gingerbread bricks, and icing mortar.

5 San Francisco Ferry Building

Angela Salvatore, the pastry chef of San Francisco’s Waterbar restaurant, has experience creating confectionery replicas of famous places, including Candlestick Park and the Palace of Fine Arts. But, in 2016, she outdid herself with her latest construction, a 1.8-meter-long (6 ft), 0.8-meter-tall (2.5 ft) tall replica of the San Francisco Ferry Building. Salvatore and her team toiled for 130 hours to create the massive replica.

Cookie reindeer pull Santa’s sled across the gumpaste flag–bedecked rooftop, Rudolph halting inches from the structure’s central tower. Down below, a farmer’s market is in full swing, as vendors sell fruit (aka Runts) and soap (aka Pez) as well as flowers, eggs, and ice cream made of candy. A snowman and a Christmas tree piled high with gifts add touches of good cheer. The gingerbread Ferry House helped to bring more visitors to the Waterbar.

4 Hotel Corque House

Again, in 2016, the lobby of the Hotel Corque in Solvang, California, was home to a giant gingerbread house created by baker Bent Olsen and his assistant, Louis Rojas. The children’s playhouse–size edifice wasn’t the first that the seasoned baker has created. “He’s been doing this since 1984,” the hotel’s hospitality manager, John Martino, said. For Olsen, variety adds spice to his art. Each year, he changes colors and designs.

The edible ingredients of 2016’s construction weighed 113 kilograms (250 lb). Olsen and Rojas assembled the house, which was then transported to the hotel lobby, where they put on the finishing touches. The house was on display throughout the holidays, and Olsen returned weekly to replace icing icicles that children broke off as samples.

3 Wrigley Field

A gingerbread replica of Chicago’s Wrigley Field created in 2016 measured 1.2 meters by 1.2 meters (4 ft x 4 ft) and weighed over 180 kilograms (400 lb). The construction taxed Gerald Madero’s math and carpentry skills and took him and his team 70 hours to complete. One of the trickiest tasks was shaping the walls by adding “curves,” Madero said, and making the gingerbread building work with the structural confines of the baseball stadium’s diamond shape.

Before he became the head chef at the Forest Hills Country Club in Rockford, Illinois, Madero was a carpenter, which helped him to figure out the angles of the stadium’s construction. Complete with a playing field, a gigantic scoreboard, and seating and festooned with peppermints and candy canes, the Home of the Cubs also featured Santa waving from his sleigh.

2 World’s Biggest Village

In 2014, his home’s kitchen and dining room were a mess, chef Jon Lovitch admits. They looked as if they’d been visited by Betty Crocker while high on mushrooms. Competing for a world record, Lovitch set out to build the planet’s largest gingerbread village, basing his community on the Clement Clark Moore poem, “A Visit from St. Nick.” His 45-square-meter (480 ft²) town weighed 2.5 tons and occupied a circular platform in the New York Hall of Science. A skylight above the platform brought sunlight to the village, called GingerBread Lane. Independent inspectors examined the complete village and reported their findings to Guinness.

Lovitch’s hard work paid off. His village, containing 1,102 buildings, won him the coveted honor, the third he has collected. Against a background of pine trees, his village wound around the wall of the Hall of Science’s elevated walkway behind a protective transparent plexiglas screen to guard it from children who may have wanted to see it a little too up close and personal.

1 School

Katie Wood, a Kansas art teacher, gave her place of employment a special Christmas gift in 2016: a gingerbread replica of Topeka High, where she teaches. The school, she said, is “a kind of magical place at times,” where she feels at home among her second family, the school’s students and her colleagues.

The gingerbread high school is 102 centimeters (40 in) long, 76 centimeters (30 in) tall, and 51 centimeters (20 in) wide. It is made of graham crackers, Tootsie Rolls, M&Ms, icing, and other ingredients. Inverted ice cream cones and upright miniature Hershey’s chocolate bars form part of the clock tower’s rooftop.

Gary Pullman lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His 2016 urban fantasy novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt, was published by The Wild Rose Press. An instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he writes several blogs, including Chillers and Thrillers: A Blog on the Theory and Practice of Writing Horror Fiction and Nightmare Novels and Other tales of Terror.

For years it’s been pretty standard to use wood or bricks, maybe some siding and shingles, if you want to build a house. That’s far from all you can use, though. Turns out there can be quite a lot more diversity in making houses than you’d at first believe.

10.  Coffee

Every day Americans take in about 400 million cups of coffee. That’s a heck of a buzz. But rarely do any of us think about what making coffee entails. Yes, we’re more aware of free trade coffee and responsibly getting rid of Keurig pods and so on, but what about the actual process of refining coffee from a plant in the ground to a hot cup in your hand? 

One step people don’t appreciate is the removal of the coffee husk. Every coffee bean is in a paper-like husk that needs to be discarded. It’s small and insignificant on its own, but when you need enough beans to make 400 million cups per day, that’s a lot of paper husks. Where does all that stuff go? Now it can go into a house.

Combining the husks with plastic, a company in Colombia is using the coffee waste to make panels for prefab housing. You can get one for as little as $4,500.

The point of the husk houses is to make a durable but lightweight material for homes and schools. The panels can be set up in rural and hard to reach areas, places where transporting large quantities of brick or lumber would be difficult and cost-prohibitive. 

The husks are stronger and drier than many other materials, and you can literally transport it on the back of a donkey if you need to.

9. Embalming Fluid Bottles

Anyone who owns a funeral home has to look at life a little differently than everyone else. Making a living out of death maybe makes you appreciate things in a different way. That seemed to be the case with David Brown. 

When Brown retired from the funeral business back in 1952, he was left with a massive quantity of empty embalming fluid bottles. Enough to do something remarkable. And, with the help of some friends in the business who donated their old bottles, he ended up with over half a million of them.

Brown set about making a house out of the bottles, using the square glasses vessels exactly the same way you’d use bricks. They are stacked and layered, held together with mortar, and the end result is a full sized and beautiful home reminiscent of a small castle.

The house is a tourist attraction in Canada and can be visited during business hours, if you’re so inclined. Word is that when you go inside, there is a distinct odor, however.

8. Mushrooms

Is there anything mushrooms can’t do? They can feed you, kill you, and even turn some lower life forms into fungal zombies. And now they’re primed to be places you live. Looks like the Smurfs knew what was up after all.

In order to make a mushroom brick you don’t chop up mushrooms like you might do to make something out of wood fiber. Instead, corn husks are mixed with mycelium, the filament-like vegetative part of the mushroom. The mix is put into a brick shaped mold and in five days it has grown into a solid, lightweight brick. No carbon footprint and no waste material.

The bricks don’t have to be grown from corn husks, they can grow from the waste husk of any crop really, like rice. That means the method can adapt easily to any place in the world. 

The bricks are resistant to fire, mold, and water. They are also stronger than concrete, pound for pound, but much lighter. Material costs are much lower as well, meaning making a mushroom house in the future could make things considerably cheaper.

7. 3D Printed Mud

When 3D printing first arrived, it promised to usher in a new way of designing and creating almost anything imaginable. And while the process has been slow to roll out in a way that is practical to most people in the real world, that promise was not exaggerated. 3D printing really is changing the way we produce everything, even houses. Take, for instance, houses printed with mud.

The idea of 3D printing a house out of traditional materials has its own merits – we’ll look at that later – but for people who live in countries where resources are scarce and the infrastructure to build homes from concrete is not readily available, a new method has been developed.

An Italian company has created a 3D print capable of producing a house using mud and natural fiber as the construction material. In many parts of the world, this mixture is common for building homes, but it is also a labor-intensive job that is usually done by hand.

The 3D printing method makes building from mud more efficient. Greater surface area allows the mud to dry faster, and also the printer is able to lay out the material in a way to increase the strength and durability.

6. Seaweed

If you live on an island or near a beach, sometimes the natural resources available for home building can be limited. Traditionally the homes of island people were often made from things like palm. But thanks to the efforts of a Mexican inventor named Omar Vázquez Sánchez, there may be a superior alternative for people near the sea, or anywhere, really. Sanchez has developed a way to make bricks from seaweed.

Similar in concept to making bricks out of other plant-based materials, the bricks are about 60% seaweed, and the rest is natural clay or adobe. The end product is very similar to a traditional adobe brick, and just as good at regulating heat, but half the price. And it also provides a secondary benefit by helping clean up beaches, which in many areas are becoming overrun with sargassum seaweed.

Sanchez made the bricks by hand, and by foot, stomping the seaweed into pulp with bare feet before mixing up the bricks concoction. When finished, the bricks are strong, waterproof, and devoid of any seaweed stink, which is something most of us wouldn’t think about.

5. Newspaper

They say you can only fold a piece of paper in half 7 or 8 times, depending on the size of it. While it may be weak and easy to damage when it’s thin, when it folds enough it becomes damn near impenetrable. And maybe that’s part of the inspiration for the Rockport Paper House. That there’s more to paper than meets the eye.

The house was built in 1922 and is still standing today. The frame, walls, and roof are made of wood, but the walls are another matter. About 100,000 newspapers were layered together with homemade glue and then varnished to make the walls, doors, and even furniture in the house. You can even read the papers if you want.

The house, which is a museum these days, even features a functional clock made of paper and a fireplace. The fireplace is also technically functional, though it seems unlikely anyone has ever used it.

4. Cardboard

As a kid, nothing was cooler than your parents buying something like a new fridge and then giving you the giant cardboard box to play with afterwards. It may not have been a full sized house, but it made a cool fort. These days cardboard construction has evolved. Cardboard houses are real and pretty amazing.

The Dutch design company Fiction Factory came up with a creative and industrious way of using cardboard to produce houses that are functional and attractive, despite the cheap material. Basing the construction around a prefab frame, massive rolls of corrugated cardboard are glued together and wrapped around the frame like wrapping paper. Twenty-four layers come together to produce a strong and well-insulated structure.

The final product has to be treated to make it waterproof, and then a layer of wood panelling is secured for added protection and also just to make the whole thing look like a house. 

The whole house can be produced in a day, and it can be designed to custom specifications. Since they’re modular, you can add bits and pieces to meet your needs. 

3. Industrial Waste

As much as houses are always being built, it’s worth remembering that they are often being torn down as well, along with many other structures that end up in industrial landfills. So what happens to all that old concrete and brick that was once a useful building but is now just trash? It gets a second chance.

Dutch architects have started recycling industrial waste making new bricks out of the rubble of old buildings, which is something so obvious it seems curious no one had really thought of it before.

Old materials including things like ceramic and glass were all forged together to make new bricks so that the end product wouldn’t look like a mosaic of long dead buildings. For their first project, 15-tonnes of waste was turned into the facade of a new house in Rotterdam that matched the style and aesthetic of local architecture. 

2. 3D Printed Concrete

While 3D printed mud homes have been making a difference in less industrialized parts of the world, in America and other Western countries 3D printed concrete homes are becoming a threat to traditional housing construction with its fast and cheap alternative to the old school method of house building.

Printed houses can cost as little as $10,000 and the end product is all but indistinguishable from a traditional house. That said, the first 3D printed house offered for sale in the United States was listed on Zillow. The home featured 1,400 square feet of living space including 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a 2-car garage. Just because it’s a cheap construction method doesn’t always mean the savings will pass on to buyers, though, as this particular house was listed at $299,999. But for an identical house produced traditionally, it would have cost much more.

Using an elaborate 3D printing rig, a machine called the Autonomous Robotic Construction System, or ARC, is able to lay a foundation, interior and exterior walls, and even include space for pipes and vents according to a schematic. The entire process to lay a house from start to finish takes 6 to 8 hours.

The printer puts down layer after precise layer of concrete. The final product is incredibly strong and durable, but also as much as 50% cheaper than a traditional construction job. Unfortunately, local building codes are not very lenient when it comes to how homes can be built, and the 3D printing method is not permitted or permitted with tight conditions in many places. 

1. Lego

There has probably never been a single kid in the world who had access to Lego that didn’t build at least a basic replica of a house. Even if it was just a box with a door, it’s nearly impossible to resist trying it out. For some people, this compulsion got a little too intense. That led to a life-size, fully livable Lego house.

James May, from the show Top Gear, assembled a team in 2009 to construct a life-size house out of Lego. WIth over 3 million bricks, the home had all the expected amenities, including a working toilet and a shower. 

One thousand volunteers helped assemble the 20-foot tall structure at a vineyard in Surrey. Unfortunately, after it was done, the vineyard wanted the land back to use it for anything other than housing a Lego house. So the work of finding a homeowner began.

Weirdly enough, the house caused a bit of controversy because it was intended to go to Legoland, but May says the Legoland people backed out of the deal because moving it would be too expensive. Legoland, for their part, said they were shut out of the construction. And the vineyard gave a deadline for someone, anyone, to take it lest it be hacked apart with a chainsaw.

Legoland is the only company allowed to display Lego in Britain. That meant no charity or other attraction could display the house publicly. Likewise, they couldn’t even disassemble it and give the bricks away to kids because the bricks were donated and legally they can only be given to a charitable cause. Rather than have it chainsawed, the pieces were taken apart and given to charity, so at least some good came from it.

You can’t deny it. There is something quite chilling about moving into a place that many others have passed through before. Who knows what you might find? If you’re lucky, maybe it’ll be some expensive artwork, secret passages, or strange remnants of past lives. But if luck isn’t on your side… well, stick around to find out.

This list covers ten “what the hell” cases of people who have made very bizarre and sometimes disturbing discoveries within their own four walls.

10 From Russia to New York

After George Davis passed away, his family sorted through his belongings only to find a mysterious box in the attic. It held a small Fabergé figurine which experts later identified as a gift from none other but the Russian Czar Nicolas II to his wife, Empress Alexandra. The hardstone portrait figure was of Nikolai Nikolaievich Pustynnikov, a loyal personal Cossack bodyguard to the empress. The valuable item had little sapphires in the eyes, a little gold trim and gold braid, and elaborately inlaid and enameled double-headed imperial eagles.

They valued the 100-year-old figure at $800,000 but clearly underestimated the public’s interest. At the auction, a jeweler from London bought it for a whopping $5.2 million!

Surely, George Davis’s family didn’t see such an inheritance coming.^[1]

9 The Roman Bath

Many Americans dream of a trip to Europe, but when Mark and Jenny Ronsman moved into their new house, they didn’t know that Italy would be only one floorboard away.

Once they removed the reliable Wisconsin wood in their office, they were amazed to discover a fully intact Roman-style bath. The striking blue mosaic really was the last thing they had expected, but they were more than excited. They spent hours removing the leveling material, whitening the grout, and sanitizing the tub.

Mark Ronsman said online: “I was truly shocked and overjoyed that something so beautiful was in our house!” And we agree. Even Caesar would have been jealous of that discovery. ^[2]

8 Soldier in Love

Oh, how romantic it would be to find decades-old love letters!

When Phil Mathies decided to give his bathroom an upgrade in 2014, he involuntarily became the side character of a real-life rom-com. The contractor he hired ended up finding dozens of love letters that dated back all the way to 1918. The bizarre part? They were hidden inside the attic wall!

The letters told the story of a WWI soldier named Clement and his beloved Mary. When Phil Mathies tracked down Clement’s relatives, they were thrilled to receive the letters. As Phil learned, Clement and Mary did end up together and had their own family. It was true love.

But how the letters ended up in the walls of this Indiana home will forever remain a mystery.^[3]

7 Pure Cash

What would you do if you found seven grand inside an abandoned house? Be sneaky and keep it? Not on Dave’s watch!

Dave, an urban photographer, really only wanted to take some pictures of antiques for his blog. But what he found behind an old mattress probably made his heart jump. Stuffed inside a yellow Home Hardware bag was almost $7,000 in cash, tightly rolled up in bundles. The notes were held together by elastic bands, which marked dates from the mid-1960s to the 1970s.

Dave decided to track down the granddaughter of the previous owners to hand back the money. Naturally, she was thrilled and told the photographer that her grandparents likely earned the money with the fruit stand they owned. They must have collected it over decades.^[4]

6 Two for One

This case gave us major horror movie vibes.

Affordable living space is rare in New York City, so just imagine how Samantha Hartsoe must have felt when she found out that she had access to more rooms than expected.

It all started with cold air coming from behind her mirror. Once she investigated the draft, she found the entrance to an entire vacant unit! On her TikTok, Samantha Hartsoe documented her trip beyond the wall, and several million people joined her, waiting for what was behind the next corner. Why does this apartment not have its own door? And why is it connected to Smanatha’s flat through only a small hole?

Let’s just hope there aren’t any unexpected neighbors.^[5]

5 A Gamer’s Paradise

We all enjoy board games, but some people take their love for Chess, Backgammon, and others to a whole other level.

In 2021, a Reddit user shared his in-laws’ discovery when they decided to remove the carpet in their new home. What did they find underneath? Another Roman bath? Hah, no. Somebody had drawn an entire Monopoly board onto the floor!

It had all the streets, a jail, and even a community chest! Weird, right? Actually, no. According to other Reddit users, XXL board games weren’t that unusual back in the day. They were a popular way to decorate playrooms and could be found in many basements.

Well, the next game night at this user’s in-laws’ place will be one to remember.^[6]

4 A Mysterious Painting

Okay, bare with us because this case is way more interesting than watching paint dry.

In 1970, a private collector purchased a Van Gogh painting but was left beyond disappointed when the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam told him that it was a fake due to the lack of a signature. But years later, with the help of modern technology, that statement was refuted. The collector was holding a real Van Gogh in his hands. It was the first full-size painting to be discovered in 85 years!

In letters to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh wrote about the painting and how he was unsatisfied with the result. According to the artist, Sunset at Montmajour was not what he had hoped to create; therefore, he didn’t sign it.

And this poor artwork had been hidden in a Norwegian attic for over a century because, more than once, people thought it to be a counterfeit. Sorry, Vincent.^[7]

3 Oh, Honey

So far, the people on this list have gotten quite lucky, but not all surprises are pleasant.

When Justin and Andrea Isabell found something dark dripping down the walls, they first thought of water damage as their area had just witnessed a tropical storm. But it wasn’t water. Instead, real honey was running down the walls in their Pennsylvania home.

Yes, you read that right. Honey.

Justin and Andrea Isabell then went on to check their attic, only to find a massive bee colony that housed 20,000 to 30,000 bees! Imagine all that aggressive buzzing. It’s a surprise they never heard anything downstairs. Despite their sons’ wishes, they decided to not keep the bees. First, the swarm fled to a neighbor’s tree before a beekeeper rehomed their colony.

No more free honey for the Isabells.^[8]

2 A House within a House

The typical horror movie. You move into an old, abandoned property and climb the stairs up to the attic, only to discover a creepy dollhouse that has been left behind for some reason.

Just that this time, it was not made for dolls. Instead, the owner found a full-sized house. In the attic. Yes, we know how crazy that sounds.

The Redditor shared pictures of his findings that showed intact windows, light fixtures, and a bathroom. There even were some abandoned belongings lying around. Creepy! The Redditor theorizes that the abode used to be part of a two-story building until the owners—for whatever reason—decided to build an attic around the top floor.

Was that really necessary? Attics are already scary enough as is!^[9]

1 The Tragic Story of a Child

We decided to end this list with a very disturbing and heart-breaking case that ended up inspiring its own horror movie.

Laurie and Jeff Dumas’s new house had more left-behind demons than they had gambled for. In the attic, they stumbled upon a room that was separated from the rest of the building. The deadbolts on the door really tried their best to keep the couple out, and once Laurie and Jeff Dumas made it inside, they found that the floor was entirely made of metal.

As Laurie Dumas started looking for an explanation at the local library, she was told that she owned a disappointments room. This was a room in which parents used to lock their disabled children to keep them out of sight.

The former owner had been a judge who imprisoned his daughter, Ruth so that her disability couldn’t tarnish his reputation.

Laurie and Jeff Dumas shared this horrifying and disturbing discovery on an HGTV episode of If Walls Could Talk. In 2016, Director D. J. Caruso retold the story with his movie The Disappointments Room.^[10]