The Melancholy Zoo of Arbor Vitae Coil

Arbor Vitae Coil is a house that winds back on itself, a labyrinth of interconnected wings built around a central, now-shattered greenhouse. This abandoned Victorian house is singular for its intense, deliberate focus on housing life—not people, but creatures. The atmosphere inside is overwhelmingly damp and earthy, smelling strongly of dried peat moss, old leather, and a faint, acrid scent of abandoned nests. The silence here is unnatural; it is the silence of an empty zoo, creating an eerie sense that the air is heavy with the echo of hundreds of forgotten chirps, clicks, and rustles. The architecture itself feels like a massive, coiled trap.

Doctor Eldred Caine: The Collector of Life

The resident and designer of Arbor Vitae Coil was Doctor Eldred Caine, a wealthy, eccentric zoologist and collector of exotic species. Eldred was obsessed with the minute complexity of animal life, believing that animals possessed a pure emotional truth that humans had lost. He built the mansion in 1865, creating habitats throughout the house for birds, small mammals, and reptiles, driven by a melancholy need to study life without the complication of human interaction.
Doctor Caine vanished in 1889. His disappearance was not violent; all the animals in his collection were simply found gone—no cages opened, no tracks, just total, inexplicable absence. The house was immediately sealed by his surviving nephew, who refused to enter it. The local whisper was that Eldred had finally achieved the perfect, pure simplicity he sought and had somehow joined his collection in their inexplicable departure. The house, his biological archive, preserves the final, cold silence of a life that chose animals over mankind.

The Vivarium’s Final Molt

The main gallery of the house is the Vivarium, a long corridor lined with empty glass tanks and enclosures. This chamber is intensely cold, the air thick with the memory of humidity and heat lamps. The focus keyword, abandoned Victorian house, is here a frame for glass enclosures.
On a low, overturned cart used for carrying food, lies Doctor Caine’s final taxonomy journal. The entries detail his increasing frustration with the limitations of observation—he could study their bodies, but not their pure emotional state. The journal ends abruptly with a final, bolded line written in shaky ink: “The coil is complete. To truly know their silence, one must cease being the observer and become the observed. The separation must end.”

The Aviary’s Empty Nests

The climax of Arbor Vitae Coil is the central Aviary. This two-story conservatory is entirely caged with rusted wire mesh. The space is a monument to flight that has vanished. Hundreds of small nests cling to the high rafters, all perfectly preserved, and all empty.
Resting on the floor beneath the largest, most ornate cage is a small, silver-plated whistle, clearly belonging to Doctor Caine. Attached to the whistle on a fine chain is a single, small, rolled-up parchment. It is not a document, but a meticulously drawn map of the house, labeling the location of every single cage and enclosure. The map has been annotated with one final, haunting word scrawled over the entire floor plan: “Release.” Arbor Vitae Coil stands as a monument to a beautiful, strange obsession, preserving the eerie silence of a man who chose to dissolve the boundary between observer and subject, leaving behind only the melancholy echo of a vast, shared freedom.