Riverside's Castle Park: Southern California's Minigolf Mecca

We walk to the top of the ramp beneath the mountain of artificial rock, and peek between the bars of a little wooden door. Two miners toil away inside. No one really knows the miners are there, and you can’t see them from any other vantage. This doesn’t bother the park’s owner, the lore goes, as long as he knows they’re there. In one of the graveyards, Bart the miner’s boots stick out of the ground beneath his tombstone. Nearby, a rusted boiler, several old railcars and some abandoned locomotive parts have collapsed exhausted onto the grass. A sign reads: “Hidden away for all these years and discovered by Castle Park right where the workmen put down their tools . . . ”

Other secret gems are unplanned — like the pair of peacocks that showed up one day. “They owned the park. Then one of them disappeared. We don’t know what happened. Someone took him, we think,” Moody says, though it’s tough to picture a golfer walking away with a squawking peacock stuffed into his backpack. “In this industry, you have to stay connected. You have to know what your guests are experiencing.” Moody stops to examine the terrain at course four, hole 17, his “arch nemesis,” and picks up a tiny leaf that has fallen onto the fairway.

Rena Kosnett

Bridge to the 19th century

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More About

• Rena Kosnett
• Don Nelson
• Jeff Moody
• Bud Hurlbut
• Taj Mahal

Neighborhood cats meander in from the apartments across the way to make summer homes in all the miniature structures. During duckling season, workers often arrive in the morning to find the 18th-hole pond, where all four courses converge, transformed into the grisly scene of a crime. Another duck bites the dust. Someone will have to clean up the feathers.

Caring for Castle Park’s environs is a monumental job akin to the year-round painting of the Golden Gate Bridge. Landin starts pruning the trees and trimming the grass on one end of the golf course, and by the time he works his way to the other end, it’s time to start the whole endeavor again. Those bushes don’t shape themselves into rabbits, you know.

And who is the best minigolf player among the workers?

“Jeff probably is,” Nelson says.

“Don probably is,” Moody says.

“I have a question,” a girl says. “The massive catapult in the corner, is it real?”

“Yes, I believe so,” Moody answers, proudly. “It was in The Ten Commandments.”

The girl scrunches her nose. “Um, were there catapults in ancient Egypt?”

Nelson, after toiling in the trenches of the minigolf industry for so long, knows there are up times and down. Grooving his hand in a sine-wave motion, he says he feels this is an up time. The economy may be in the crapper, but it hasn’t deterred the minigolfing population.

Nighttime, he believes, is when the course is prettiest. “It’s like a totally different place in the evening,” he says. A single candle flickers in the Haunted House, whose howling-wind audio makes more sense at night. Lamps glow from deep within the mine, while the remaining resident peacock settles into his roost atop Burton’s Mill. At night, the windows of various miniature buildings light up from the inside, as if invisible inhabitants are going about their evening routines. The tiny world seems painted with light.

You don’t hear the cars rushing by on the 91 freeway, just the golf course’s endless looping soundtrack: The tapping of Morse code in the Western Union telegraph tower. A steam engine shrieking. A train station’s bell clanking and muddled voices of waiting passengers. The accordion music blaring from the windmill, waging cultural warfare upon the Native American teepees in the valley below.

I imagine that Hurlbut, as king of the Castle, must have loved it here at night, when shadows smooth out the imperfections. During his heydey, he used to bring in his small black-and-white dog. Or rather, dogs. Each time a dog died, Hurlbut would replace it with another of the exact same color and breed and name it Terry. Nelson remembers the Terrys fondly.

It’s much the same with people. He’s seen basically the same players during his tenure, he claims, “just with different faces.”

From his perch behind the golf check-in counter, Nelson gazes toward the Ghost Blaster ride across the way, where a sign warns, “Welcome to Bleakstone Manor! Ghost eviction in progress,” and sighs eloquently, like a man who has made his peace with his lot in life. You shoot at the specters that jump out at you.

People don’t build minigolf courses like this anymore, he says — ones on multilevel, non-wheelchair-accessible terrain. Courses that have been constructed with a borderline-psychotic attention to detail. Courses inextricably connected to a person, or persona. Bud Hurlbut allegedly kept his office in the Gypsy wagon parked beside the castle’s Dragon Treats sweetshop, an authentic one “imported into the U.S.A. for your enjoyment,” built in 1880 and used “for many years” in Europe. But really, with property values skyrocketing, people aren’t building minigolf courses, period.