The man who played Sherlock Holmes 1,300 times built a million-dollar castle above a Connecticut river

The Sherlock Holmes star’s real-life fortress

Two hundred feet above the Connecticut River, a 14,000-square-foot stone castle sits on a wooded hill in East Haddam. It looks like something lifted from medieval Europe and dropped into New England.

The man who built it played Sherlock Holmes more than 1,300 times on stage, shaped the way the world pictures that character, and then spent a million dollars turning his retirement into something no one would forget.

About 300,000 people visit each year.

Most of them come expecting a curiosity and leave wondering why they’d never heard of this place before.

The actor who made Holmes famous

William Hooker Gillette was born in Hartford in 1853 and spent 30 years on stage playing Sherlock Holmes. He didn’t just perform the character.

He built him. The deerstalker cap, the curved pipe, none of that came from Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories.

Gillette invented that look, and it stuck so hard that most people today still picture Holmes that way. He grew up in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood, where his neighbors were Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain.

He had one more act left in him after the stage.

How a houseboat led to a hilltop

Gillette didn’t plan to build in Connecticut. He originally set his sights on Long Island for his retirement home.

Then he took his 144-foot steamship, the Aunt Polly, up the Connecticut River and spotted a chain of hills the locals called the Seven Sisters. He changed his mind on the spot.

The southernmost hill, rising 200 feet above the water, would become the site of his castle. He lived aboard the Aunt Polly while construction ran from 1914 to 1919, watching it take shape from the river below.

A million-dollar castle built from scratch

Gillette didn’t hire an architect. He designed the entire castle himself and stayed on site to oversee every phase of construction.

The mansion went up in fieldstone pulled from the local land, anchored by a steel framework underneath. A crew of about 20 workers, including five master carpenters, spent five years on the job.

The building firm, Porteus-Walker Company of Hartford, was run by Gillette’s childhood friend Robert Porteus. When the final bill came in, the project had cost over $1 million, a sum that turned heads even then.

Forty-seven doors, each one a puzzle

Step inside and the first thing you notice is the woodwork.

Every one of the 47 doors in the castle is different, and each one has a hand-carved wooden latch that works like a puzzle you have to figure out to open.

The light switches are carved to look like backstage theater levers and railroad controls.

Gillette built a desk chair that rides on rails, a table that slides along a track, and built-in couches fitted into the walls.

Some of the light fixtures were made by Tiffany and Co. The whole interior runs on his logic, not anyone else’s.

Secret passages and a homemade caller ID

The castle came with a few tricks. Hidden corridors let Gillette move between rooms without being seen, and he used them to make dramatic entrances when guests were least expecting it.

Mirrors placed at precise angles in the Great Hall let him look out from his upstairs bedroom and see who was arriving at the front door below.

The Friends of Gillette Castle call it his version of caller ID. Near the entrance, a hidden door opens to a passage.

In his study, a short square door in the wall conceals a safe.

And then there’s the liquor cabinet, locked with a mechanism Gillette reportedly enjoyed watching visitors fail to crack.

Three miles of private railroad in the backyard

In the late 1920s, Gillette built a quarter-scale railroad on his own property.

Three miles of narrow-gauge track wound through the grounds, crossing bridges and running through tunnels.

He ran two engines, one steam and one electric, along with several passenger cars and a station he named Grand Central. Albert Einstein rode it.

So did President Calvin Coolidge and Charlie Chaplin. After Gillette died, the trains went to Lake Compounce amusement park, where they ran for years.

The restored electric engine eventually came back and now sits in the visitor center.

Hike through a train tunnel

The hiking trails at Gillette Castle follow the old railroad bed through the woods, and the route still has the bones of the original line.

The purple-blazed Train Trail runs about 1.5 miles and takes you over wooden trestles spanning up to 40 feet, across stone-arch bridges, and straight through a 75-foot tunnel that goes completely dark in the middle.

That tunnel draws a crowd on its own.

The blue trail branches off toward the riverbank, where at low tide you can spot the wreckage of Gillette’s Aunt Polly, resting on the bottom where it burned on Dec. 20, 1932.

The man who ran the castle for 40 years

Yukitaka Osaki arrived from Japan and spent more than four decades as Gillette’s valet, secretary, and closest companion.

He was among the earliest permanent Japanese residents in Connecticut, and Gillette built him a small cottage on the property that still stands along the blue trail.

His brother, Yukio Ozaki, served as mayor of Tokyo and helped arrange the gift of cherry trees to Washington, D.C. In tribute to that connection, the Japan Society of Greater Hartford later planted cherry trees at the park.

The cottage is easy to miss, but worth finding.

Bald eagles on one of the East’s wildest rivers

From the castle terrace, you can look out over the Connecticut River and see nothing but water and trees. No cities, no ports, no development crowding the banks.

The Connecticut is the only major river in the northeastern United States without a large city at its mouth, held back for centuries by shifting sandbars.

Bald eagles work this stretch of river regularly, according to the Connecticut Audubon Society.

The park also has picnic tables at a converted version of Gillette’s old Grand Central station, and river camping is available, but only if you arrive by canoe or kayak.

Arrive by ferry across the Connecticut River

One way to get to the park is to skip the road entirely.

The Chester-Hadlyme Ferry has been running since 1769, making it the second oldest continuously operating ferry in Connecticut and one of the oldest in the country.

The current vessel, the Selden III, has been on the water for more than 75 years and carries up to nine cars and 49 passengers across the river.

It runs seasonally from spring through fall, landing at the base of the park’s hill. A trail climbs straight from the ferry dock up to the castle.

How a famous last wish saved the castle

Gillette died in 1937 and left behind a will with a line that people still quote. He wrote that the property should never fall into the hands of “some blithering saphead.”

Connecticut took that seriously. The state bought the castle and grounds in 1943, and the park opened a year later.

A four-year, $11 million restoration finished in 2002 and brought in a visitor center and a museum.

A volunteer group, the Friends of Gillette Castle State Park, keeps the grounds going and runs holiday programs from Thanksgiving through Christmas, when the whole place takes on a different mood.

Visit Gillette Castle State Park in Connecticut

You can find the park at 67 River Road in East Haddam, and the grounds are free to walk every day of the year from 8 a.m. to sunset.

Castle tours run daily from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, and on weekends through Columbus Day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Groups go in every 15 minutes and spots fill up, so book in advance through the official reservation site.

Holiday tours run Fridays through Sundays between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Free all-terrain wheelchairs are available by advance reservation, at least two days out and no more than 30 days ahead. Pets on leash are welcome on trails and in picnic areas but not inside the castle.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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