Now 59 years old, Neal grew up near 57th Street and Yale Avenue when houses in the area were new and most of the trees recently planted.

“They were just twigs, really,” Neal says.

He liked to climb. So his parents built a wooden platform in the backyard, and Neal used to lie on the flat deck at night and stare up the stars. At least, what few stars he could see from the bright city.

He owned the lighthouse for a couple of years before an epiphany hit him and he could finally answer the question that everybody — well, almost everybody — kept asking him. That he kept asking himself.

He called home.

“Mom, I bought my tree house,” he explained.

“Oh, I knew that,” she said. “I knew that all along.”

Living in Charlotte, North Carolina, Neal spends about one weekend a month on the platform, which has eight bedrooms and 6,500 square feet of living space. He briefly used it as an “adventure bed and breakfast,” but it proved too adventurous.

“It’s not an entirely safe place to visit,” Neal says. “I always had to worry about somebody falling overboard.”