In 1993, Tennessee minister Horace Burgess was praying when God told him, “If you build a treehouse, I’ll see that you never run out of material.” He set to work and spent the next 12 years building a house 97 feet tall, unofficially the largest in the world.

The house was closed in 2012 because it didn’t follow building and fire safety codes, and last October it burned to the ground. Burgess told the New York Times that in some ways this was a relief. Though it had been important to him for decades, “It’s always been a pain,” he said.