The forest that is one tree, the city without a government, and the house built by a ghost story

The clone has a name, Pando, from the Latin for I spread. Botanists studying western aspen gave it that name in the early 1990s, when they nominated the grove as the heaviest known living organism and drew wide attention to a plant that had been hiding in plain sight as a forest.[4] It grows beside Fish Lake in the Fishlake National Forest, spreading over roughly 106 acres, some forty-three hectares, with a combined mass estimated near six thousand tonnes.[2][1]

How old the organism is remains genuinely uncertain, because the visible trunks are young while the root system beneath them is ancient, and a clone leaves no rings to count. Any given stem lives only about a century and a third before it dies and is replaced.[5] Estimates for the root system itself range from several thousand years to perhaps fourteen thousand, with some genetic work pushing the possible figure higher still, so the honest answer is a wide range rather than a single number.[1][5]

The pressing fact about Pando is not its age but that it has largely stopped renewing itself. A study reading seventy-two years of aerial photographs found that the grove has been thinning for decades, because the young suckers that should replace dying trunks are being eaten before they can grow tall.[1] The browsers are mule deer and elk, whose numbers have risen as their predators have thinned and who find the tender new shoots easy grazing.[1] Where researchers have fenced deer out, young aspen springs up in dense thickets; where the fences are missing or breached, almost nothing new survives.[1]

That patchwork of protection has begun to split the single organism into uneven pieces, a well-fenced portion recovering, a partly fenced middle still losing ground, and an open remainder in the steepest decline.[3] The scientist who mapped those zones cautions that fencing alone would only turn a wild thing into something closer to a zoo, and that the real repair is a healthier balance of deer, predators, and people around the grove.[3] In the meantime Pando has yielded one last surprise. A sound artist lowered a hydrophone into a hollow among the roots and recorded a faint, weather-driven rumble, the trembling of countless leaves carried down the trunks and through the shared root system, the closest thing the organism has to a voice.[5][6]

Its strangeness began with a legal accident. The site had held a small Chinese garrison and its walled yamen, and when Britain leased the surrounding New Territories in 1898 the agreement quietly left the fort under Chinese jurisdiction.[1] Neither power then chose to govern it in earnest, and the walled ground became a pocket where colonial Hong Kong stopped and no other authority reliably began.[2] Into that gap, over the following decades, people poured and built.[2]

By a 1987 government count roughly thirty-three thousand people lived on about two and a half hectares, a density of well over a million to the square kilometre.[1] They lived in some three hundred buildings that had grown together into one continuous structure, most raised without an engineer, none rising much above thirteen storeys because the block sat almost under the flight path into the old Kai Tak airport.[1] Between and through them ran a lightless maze of stairwells and passages a metre or two wide, threaded with dripping pipes and tangled wiring, so that a resident could cross the whole city without once coming down to the street.[1]

The lawless years were real, especially at mid-century, when triad gangs ran gambling dens, brothels, and opium parlours in corners the police preferred not to enter.[1][3] Yet the darker legend flattens what the place actually became. After heavy police raids in the 1970s the gangs’ grip loosened, a residents’ association looked after shared affairs, and photographers who spent years inside found less a den of crime than a working neighbourhood of families, workshops, and small kindnesses.[2][4] Its economy was famously practical, including scores of unlicensed dentists whose cheap chairs drew patients from across Hong Kong, and food workshops turning out noodles and fish balls for the city beyond the walls.[3][5]

Britain and China agreed to clear it in 1987, and after the residents were bought out and moved the towers came down between 1993 and 1994.[1] A quiet park now occupies the ground, its restored yamen and old cannon almost the only things left of what stood here.[1] What endures instead is the photographic record and the lesson inside it, that people handed an ungoverned space did not simply descend into chaos but improvised a city, wires and pipes and dentists’ signs and all.[4]

The widow was Sarah Winchester, whose late husband was heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms fortune and who came into great wealth after his death in 1881.[6] In 1886 she bought an unfinished farmhouse south of San Francisco and set about enlarging it, and the work went on in one form or another until she died in 1922.[2][6] What she left is a rambling mansion of about a hundred and sixty rooms, studded with the dead ends and blind doors that later made its name.[2]

The popular tale supplies a tidy motive. In it a medium in Boston tells Sarah that the ghosts of everyone shot with a Winchester rifle have cursed her, that only ceaseless building will keep them at bay, and that she holds nightly seances in a special room to take their instructions.[4][2] It is a story that fits the strange house almost too neatly, and much of it appears to have been assembled after her death, once the place opened to paying visitors in 1923.[2]

The historian Mary Jo Ignoffo, who worked through Sarah’s letters and papers for a full biography, found no contemporary evidence for any of it.[1] No record shows Sarah believing in a rifle curse or consulting such a medium, and the Boston seer at the centre of the tale cannot be traced in the directories of the day.[1][3] The room later sold to tourists as her seance chamber was, by the account of people who knew the house, a gardener’s bedroom.[3] Far from building without rest, she sent her workers away for months at a stretch.[3]

The odd architecture has quieter explanations. There was no master architect and no overall plan, only an owner with money, a real interest in building, and decades in which to experiment, remodel, and change her mind.[3] The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 wrecked the upper floors and a tower, and rather than restore them Sarah simply had the ruined sections sealed off, which is why some stairs and doors now lead nowhere.[2] The severe arthritis of her later years accounts for the shallow, easy-rising steps.[2] The house survives on the National Register of Historic Places, and its real oddity may be how thoroughly a paying attraction rewrote a shrewd, private woman into a haunted one.[5][1]