Jim Bishop, King of Bishop Castle, Has Died

The king of Bishop Castle has passed away. Over the years, Jim Bishop weathered numerous setbacks, including an attempted legal takeover of his magnificent roadside attraction and a fire that destroyed its gift shop, but his health finally gave out before he could finish his lifelong project.

The news was reported on the Bishop Castle Facebook page: "It is with a heavy heart that the Bishop family announces the passing of James Roland Bishop (Jim Bishop Castle Builder). Jim passed away early November 21st in Pueblo, surrounded by his loved ones. Services will be announced at a later date."

Bishop was just fifteen in 1959 when he paid $450 for a two-and-a-half-acre parcel of land at 9,000 feet in the San Isabel National Forest, just outside the tiny town of Rye. "It was money saved from mowing lawns, throwing newspapers and working with his father, Willard, in the family ornamental iron works,” according to the story on bishopcastle.org. “Jim had dropped out of high school that year over an argument from his English teacher, who yelled at him, ‘You’ll never amount to anything, Jim Bishop!’”
But Jim Bishop had towering ambitions. For the next ten summers, he and his father would work together at Bishop Ornamental Iron Shop, then head up to the mountains, where they’d camp and think about building. In 1967, he married Phoebe, and “in 1969, at the age of 25, he decided it was time to start building a cabin in the mountains they so loved. Since rocks were plentiful, everywhere, and free, he chose to start building a one-room stone cottage....”

And it grew, and it grew, as Bishop hauled tons of rocks to the site to create not a modest cottage, but a castle in the middle of nowhere next to Highway 65, attracting the attention of tourists as well as an unusual con man in the process.

Back in 2015, when the Bishops were both battling health problems, David Merrill, a man they considered a friend, talked Jim into making him a trustee of Bishop Castle. Soon, Merrill was claiming that he owned the property and was turning it into Castle Church – for the Redemption, according to the Custer County Clerk and Recorder’s Office.
The Bishops hired a lawyer and won back their castle, but they acquired some big legal fees in the process. And then in 2018, a fire destroyed the Castle's gift shop...the sole source of income for Bishop Castle, since visiting the place is free.

Still, Bishop kept on, always adding to his 160-foot-high castle and chatting with visitors who'd heard about the place on travel shows and in roadsideamerica.com. As recently as the summer of 2023, now working with his son Daniel, he had sky-high plans for more turrets, a bigger balcony, and even a roller coaster.

Bishop Castle was included in Charmaine Ortega Getz's book Weird Colorado: Your Travel Guide to Local Legends & Best-Kept Secrets. When she visited Jim Bishop again a few years ago, he was graying and a little stooped, but still vigorous. "I asked him if he intended to go on with this project for the rest of his life," she recalls. "He said, 'This is what I want to be doing on the last day of my life.' He promptly lay down flat on the ground, stretched a hand and put one pebble on top of another. And smiled."

Now Jim Bishop is gone, but his castle lives on — a true towering achievement, created one pebble at a time.