An Inspiration

...He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked into the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostrils of the hippo's hollow head, making a whiny snarfling noise sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on roof fixing slates.

Inside the house were such things as trouble antique dealer's dreams: ...

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I think this influenced me at an early age. "The Face in the Frost", John Bellairs.

My weathervane is whales, thanks to my brothers. It doesn't snurfle.