A school teacher's massive and terrifying self-built castle.

Location: 45.6035, -79.4652

It is often the case that school teachers have a very different life outside of the classroom, but few teachers have as interesting an extracurricular hobby as Canadian secondary school teacher Peter Camani. Since the mid-1970s besides being a teacher, he has also been building a massive, and rather frightening, castle.

Inspired by druids and ancient Briton, Camani has filled the castle and its grounds with fire-breathing dragons, arches shaped like gaping mouths, and an eerie forest of tree-shaped sculptures. The castle even has a dungeon. The most distinctive feature of the Midlothian Castle, however, are the hundreds of screaming concrete heads that he has placed throughout the grounds, including a giant one on top of a castle tower. In the words of the artist, “Amidst the heads and disks, the solitude of the park envelopes the visitor in a peculiar silence, a silence both quieting and disquieting, penetrated only by the eerie scream of the peacock.”

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