The Riddles of Coral Castle

Summary

Haunted Cosmos: The Riddles of Coral Castle Hosted by Ben Garrett & Brian Sauvé

Introduction

In the January 1, 2025 episode of Haunted Cosmos, Ben Garrett and Brian Sauvé delve into one of the modern world's most enigmatic structures: Coral Castle. This episode explores the life of Edward Lee Skalnin, the mysterious Latvian immigrant who single-handedly constructed the Coral Castle in Florida, and investigates the myriad theories surrounding its creation.

Ed Skalnin’s Journey from Latvia to Florida

The episode begins by tracing Ed Skalnin's tumultuous early life in Latvia. Raised in impoverished conditions, Ed became involved in socialist revolutionary activities, which ultimately led to his brother Otto's imprisonment and Ed's own escape from an oppressive regime. [02:01] Ben narrates Ed's arduous journey to the United States, highlighting his relentless pursuit of a better life despite numerous setbacks, including language barriers and transient employment in the Pacific Northwest.

Establishing Coral Castle in Florida

After relocating to Florida City, Florida, Ed purchased a modest two-acre plot with the help of a land speculator. His meticulous selection of land, guided by dowsing rods and esoteric techniques, suggests he was searching for specific energy densities or ley lines conducive to his grand architectural plans. [48:37] Brian explains how Ed began constructing Coral Castle overnight, moving and carving massive limestone blocks without the aid of heavy machinery, sparking widespread intrigue and speculation.

The Architectural Marvel of Coral Castle

Coral Castle is a testament to Ed’s exceptional skill and possibly otherworldly abilities. The hosts describe several of its most impressive features:

• Nine-Ton Gate: A massive stone gate that silently swings open, seemingly without any visible mechanism. [90:26] Brian shares an anecdote about how the gate remained functional for decades with minimal maintenance, only to require extensive repairs years after Ed's death.

• Polaris Telescope: A 27-ton obelisk that aligns perfectly with the North Star, demonstrating Ed’s profound understanding of celestial mechanics. [74:17] Ben emphasizes the precision required to position such a massive structure accurately using only rudimentary tools.

• Sundial and Moon Fountain: These structures not only serve aesthetic purposes but also align with mythological and celestial themes, hinting at deeper, possibly mystical, intentions behind their design. [90:05] Ben notes that the sundial can indicate the time, month, and even the day within the year, showcasing Ed’s intricate planning.

Theories Behind Coral Castle’s Construction

The episode explores various theories attempting to explain how Ed managed to construct Coral Castle single-handedly:

1. Naturalistic Explanations:

   • Mechanical Advantage and Traditional Tools: Ben suggests that Ed utilized pulleys, levers, and other simple machines to move and carve the heavy stones. [118:30] This theory posits that Ed’s knowledge of mechanical principles enabled him to achieve what seems impossible.

   • Ancient Cement Techniques: Another natural theory involves the use of ancient cement methods, allowing Ed to cast and shape oolite limestone effectively. [119:59] This would suggest that Ed rediscovered lost technologies to facilitate his construction.

2. Esoteric and Supernatural Theories:

   • Cymatics and Sound Manipulation: Ben and Brian discuss the possibility that Ed harnessed sound frequencies to manipulate physical objects, referencing cymatics—the study of visible sound vibrations. [73:24] They speculate that Ed might have used sound to alter the density or weight of the stones, making them easier to move.

   • Ley Lines and Magnetic Energies: The hosts introduce the concept of ley lines—hypothetical alignments of energy across the Earth. [48:05] They theorize that Ed constructed Coral Castle at a nexus of these ley lines to harness and manipulate electromagnetic fields.

   • Occult Practices and Familiar Spirits: Ben mentions that Ed’s incorporation of six-pointed stars and solitary, mystical practices could indicate involvement with neo-paganism or occult rituals. [123:27] This theory suggests that Ed may have employed witchcraft or other supernatural means to construct Coral Castle.

3. Extraterrestrial Involvement:

   • While briefly touched upon, the idea that aliens assisted in the construction of Coral Castle is deemed less convincing due to the lack of concrete evidence and observable phenomena. [126:18] Brian expresses skepticism, highlighting the absence of typical extraterrestrial signatures accompanying the building process.

Ed Skalnin’s Writings and Hidden Messages

Ed authored several books and pamphlets, blending lucid explanations of magnetism with cryptic moral teachings. His most notable work, “A Book in Every Home”, features intentional blank pages, leading to speculations about hidden codes and secret knowledge embedded within. [117:01] Ben and Brian explore the possibility that these omissions serve as conduits for readers to decode additional information about Coral Castle’s construction, though no definitive conclusions have been reached.

The Perpetual Motion Holder and Black Box Mysteries

One of Coral Castle’s most baffling features is the black box atop a tripod and the perpetual motion holder—devices whose functionalities remain obscure. [80:14] Claims that Ed might have created toroidal plasmoids or utilized zero-point energy challenge current scientific understanding, adding layers to the mystery of Coral Castle’s construction methods.

Local Legends and Eyewitness Accounts

The episode recounts local folklore and eyewitness stories, including sightings of floating stones and mysterious nocturnal activities by Ed. [74:23] These accounts, though anecdotal, contribute to the aura of mystique surrounding Coral Castle, reinforcing the allure of its solitary creator.

Conclusion: The Enduring Mystery of Coral Castle

Ben and Brian conclude that the true methods behind Coral Castle’s construction remain unresolved, blending plausible natural techniques with tantalizing esoteric and supernatural possibilities. [129:58] The episode underscores the enduring fascination with Coral Castle, inviting listeners to ponder the intersection of human ingenuity, lost technologies, and the inexplicable mysteries that continue to baffle historians and enthusiasts alike.

Notable Quotes

• Ben Garrett [02:01]: “Had he known what the rest of this tablet contained, he may have stopped and appreciated it for a while longer.”

• Brian Sauvé [48:37]: “Ed, going first through Eastport, Idaho on his way towards Spokane, found it a difficult place to adjust to.”

• Ben Garrett [73:24]: “Cymatics. I have three words. Cymatics. One word.”

• Brian Sauvé [84:27]: “It's cymatics.”

• Ben Garrett [119:23]: “A torus is just a donut. It's a very stable structure, and it occurs when different types of fluid…”

Final Thoughts

Haunted Cosmos masterfully intertwines historical narrative with speculative theories, offering a comprehensive exploration of Coral Castle’s mysteries. For listeners intrigued by unsolved enigmas and the blending of ancient wisdom with modern myth, this episode serves as a compelling examination of one man's extraordinary legacy.

Transcript

[Ben]

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Gray Toad Tallow Kingsridge Elderberries Stone Crop Wealth Advisors Indigo Sundry Soap New Dominion Design Co. Backwards Planning Financial Squirrelly Joes, Kendall Technologies and our [e-mail].

[Brian]

It'S it's.

[Ben]

Horma's Drossum brushed away the lingering specks of dust on the surface of his new discovery. For decades, he had busied himself with the findings of ancient things in the region of Sumer and Babylon. In the beginning of his career, every little fragment of tablet or tool sent waves of excitement through him. But in his later days, the days of his brushing this particular dust off of this particular chunk of limestone, only the big things motivated him. Palaces and colonnades and massive carvings of pieces of literature. He had already found the oldest known recording of a cataclysmic flood event. He had already dug up the breadcrumbs that would lead to the palace of Nebuchadnezzar the Great and the famed ancient wonder of the world, Babylon's hanging gardens. He had done all of this, and much more to usher in the golden age of Middle Eastern archaeology. And so, as he held another chunk of cuneiform writing in his hand, he regarded it with little interest and quickly moved on to the next thing, content to let his aides finish digging up this tablet's remaining pieces. Had he known what the rest of this tablet contained, he may have stopped and appreciated it for a while longer. Not long after he shuffled away to something else, the aides finished digging out the rest of the pieces to this fine discovery. Two halves had split apart sometime in its burial, and six smaller fragments had broken off on one side. All the pieces were gathered, and the puzzle was put back together with care. The result was a puzzling thing indeed. Surely it was something an archaeologist of Rossum's caliber had seen plenty of times before. But to his aides, the image was new. Perhaps it's good that they were the first to see it in full. Had they not, the mystery it presents us with may have been forgotten, or worse, may never have been known as a mystery at all. It's called the Tablet of Shamash. Its precisely perforated edges frame three columns of cuneiform writing on the bottom two thirds, and a striking picture carved into the upper remaining third. There, the Mesopotamian sun God Shamash sits enthroned inside of what seems to be a sort of stationary palanquin. He wears a horned and spiraling turban on his head, and flowing robes cover his enormous body. His Throne is ornate and carved with images of lions dancing in honor of the God. Shamash holds out the enigmatic rod and ring, a symbol that has been posited to imply lordship in Mesopotamia, Egypt and ancient Greece, and he points it toward a group of beings on the other side of the tablet. These beings, most likely humans, are notably shorter than the God. Even seated on his throne, the three men depicted barely reach up to Shamash's waist. The God is a giant, close to triple the size when standing. Of the humans. In between the three men, one of whom is likely a king and the God, there is an altar with a round symbol of what looks like a sun on top of it. This round thing is being supported by what looks to be two ropes hanging down in front of the God from the top of his palanquin enclosure. Carved into the disk is the distinct shape of two concentric circles in the center, with star like points emanating from the circle's four poles. Between these points there are four waves, like water or sound or light waves propagating outwards to the edge of the disk. It is a symbol that scientists have taken for granted over the generations as clearly being reminiscent of the sun in honor of Shamash, the sun God. However, it's odd that it this weird disk stands in between two parties that would otherwise seem to be interacting with one another. With the altar and the disk included, though, it appears rather that the three men to the left and the one God to the right are instead interacting with it as if they're doing something to it or with it. It's set on something, it's being hung by something, and it radiates this distinct image on its surface. That is the most fine and precise looking part of the entire tablet, excepting arguably the God himself. It's undeniably strange. What does it mean? Is it just rote symbolism made up whole cloth and layered onto this drawing by the ancients? Does it ultimately mean nothing? We don't think so. If you have a stereo at home or in the back of your car, there is a fun experiment you can do that allows you to visualize sound. You can place a thin metal plate over a speaker and pour sand onto it. Once the sand is covering the plate, you can play different sound frequencies through the stereo and watch as the sand organizes itself into repeatable patterns, each of which correspond to a certain frequency. This is cymatics, the study of the visible representations of sound and vibrations. In other words, different sound waves manifest themselves in different physical patterns. Sound moves things and inclines them to order themselves in certain ways. One day, a man did a cymatic experiment and shuffled through some higher frequencies, high enough to be almost imperceptible to older human ears. He'd been studying the tablet of Shamash recently and had the image of that central disk stuck in his head, wondering what it could really mean. Eventually he reached a frequency of 3835Hz and without paying too much attention anymore, looked apathetically down at the plate of sand. What he saw struck him and sent him nearly stumbling backwards. There in the sand was a virtually identical layout of the carving inside the disk of the Shamash tablet. The sound had moved the sand into the same pattern the ancient Mesopotamians had carved into this important tablet of a sun God and a group of men interacting with what is clearly a massive object between them. The man, not settling for it to be a coincidence, got to thinking of a story he'd once heard. The Incan creation mythology largely hinges on a God known as Viracocha. He came on the waves of the deluge to the shores of pre Incan lands and gave people and animals and stars and civilization to the world. He was the light skinned son of the sun, who, in addition to these gifts already mentioned, also built great cities for the newly minted men. One city was named Tiwanaku, and in its center was the megalithic gateway of the Sun. This massive archway measures nearly 10ft tall and 13ft wide. And it was carved from a single block of stone weighing over 10 tons, which was quarried 62 miles away and over 12,000ft down in elevation from its final resting place in the Andes. For the ancient people there, the legend was passed down from those who saw Viracocha to future generations, that in order to move these massive slaves stone such great distances and up such great heights, the giant sun God used a magical golden trumpet which, when blown, picked the stone up and caused it to fly over the crags and hills. All of it makes one wonder. See the boy, gaunt and aged in appearance, though only a youth, he works the farm his family rents under the watchful eyes of four older brothers and a mother and a father. Around him stretches rolling fields of rye that the people dance in during the summer solstice. He lives in a peasant's home in the Latvian countryside, which also sits on rented land. There he receives what meals the family can afford and little else. His education ceased after the fourth grade, and the boy named Edward Lee Scalnon now relies on the unreliable narration of facts offered up in Passing by those around him. Ed's is a life of impoverished want that he knows little of. In his youth he fails to regard the helplessness of his situation. But as he grows, he starts to see it more clearly. In his teenage years, Edli Skalin started to notice a change in his home. Where the rolling hills of Golbeen, Latvia had been so inviting and full of life as a boy, they now seemed gray and still and somewhat cold even all year round. As it happens, Ed realized at this time that that according to all the people around him, he depended on for his education, his home was not actually his home. Rather, he grew to understand that his home had been ruled over by a swelling Russian empire to the east. He learned that not everyone in the world was a poor farmer serving a life of functional serfdom. He learned that though his childhood memory was filled with people smiling and enjoying themselves, that was seldom the case in a young adult or adults reality. His people were suffering. He learned that he was suffering too. But he also heard tell of a spark, a change in the wind and a turning of the tide for the liberation of his people. Socialist ideals mixed in with autonomous nationalism and created fertile ground for revolution in Latvia's upcoming generations. They did not want things as they were to change. They wanted new things altogether together. They didn't want Tsar Nicholas II to stop forcing them to live in squalid conditions. They wanted the Tsar utterly out of their lives and them out of his. These hungry young men formed the Social Democratic Workers Party of Latvia and sat back, Ed's older brother Otto chief among them, to watch their ranks swell with like minded, able bodied men ready to take back what was theirs. Ed, of course, was one among the mass of angry men. The first head this tension came to was in St. Petersburg on January 22, 1905. Led by the Russian Orthodox priest Father Gapan, socialist demonstrators stood proudly in the streets of St. Petersburg before beginning to march towards the entablature of the Tsar's Winter Palace. Father Gapon held in his hands a petition from the people of Russia to the Emperor that expressed the demands of the Socialist Party in no uncertain terms. He marched for all of Russia and all of Russia's subsidiaries, Latvia being one among them. But as the swelling mob of petitioners got closer to the Winter palace, ranks of Imperial guards started to form opposite them. Finally, shots rang out. Those same soldiers fired indiscriminately at the petitioners until piles of them lay dead. Father Gapon, among the stiff and cold slain, still clutched the appeal in his hand. Now stained with blood. And so Bloody Sunday was writ large in the history books as a spark igniting a fire of the socialist cause that is still alive today. Less than a week later, protesters gathered on the icy banks of the river Dauguba to express their judgment for what the imperial regime had done. Soldiers formed in ranks on the opposing bank of the river and began to fire. Many protesters, a group not limited to men, fled, confused, onto the ice covering the river. Eventually the ice broke and dozens of protesters fell into the cold waters, never to emerge. 73 people died between those shot and those drowned. Naturally, these events had a profound effect on Ed and his countrymen. An uprising began almost immediately and Ed's brother Otto found himself near the head of an unorganized mob. Thirsty for the blood of their overlords. Groups set fire to the mansions of the landowners they rented from wealthy families were murdered in cold blood and martial law was declared in the country. Ed's brother was shipped off to Russian prisons in Siberia and St. Petersburg with thousands other socialists. Even more rebels were killed by the soldiers charged with restoring order in the badlands of the empire. Little is known of Ed's direct involvement with this revolt, but some say he escaped the small country townships to live with rebel groups in the northern forests. What he or they did there, or whatever attacks they launched from there, is unknown to history. What is known is that the 18 year old carried these unfortunate years of waste and fear and loss with him for the rest of his life in a quiet demeanor and blanket distrust of authority. Eventually, seeing the rotten fruit all around them and not seeing any way of righting their socialist ship, masses began to immigrate to other countries, the primary landings being the UK or the United States. Ed was among the fleeing rebels trying to double the Latvian population in the U.S. he, like so many others, feared the problem he would face with the Russians should his deeds ever come to light, whatever those deeds actually were. He therefore trekked across the country toward the western port of Riga, Latvia's capital city, and smuggled his way onto a boat bound for Germany. From there he found money to cover a spot with two companions on the SS Pennsylvania bound for New York City. He never returned to his homeland. Getting off from the long voyage over the Atlantic and finally standing on the New World's soil, saw Ed beaming, perhaps for the first time, with real hope for what could be. He was short and not particularly handsome. He had no money nor reputation. And none of it mattered because he was in America. Here, so he figured what mattered was one's Merit and drive. Though coming in a landman day laborer with no resume to show for Ed was confident that his intensely motivated work ethic would win him glory and peace soon and enough for a few months, Ed was content to settle into life in New Jersey with the two companions, Ernst Warsall and Bertha Schmidt, he rode into Ellis island with. But after that time, Ed grew restless and thought the grass of opportunity might be greener in the further Hesperia, the places that even to the New World were newer and farther west. Thus he worked and paid his way across the country until he finally came to the Pacific Northwest, a place famed in those days for the ease with which newcomers could find a job and put roots down in a community. Hills blanketed with pine and fir forests were juxtaposed with the snowy and rocky reaches of the higher mountains above them. It was a landman's paradise indeed, with logging operations and sawyers finding more work than they could handle anywhere they set up shop. But Ed, going first through Eastport, Idaho on his way towards Spokane, found it a difficult place to adjust to. The east had been so loud and full of so many different groups of people, he assumed the west would be quiet and open and slower. But when he got to Spokane, he realized the fast paced world had already caught up to that region. And while he was less overwhelmed with different people speaking all sorts of different languages and doing all sorts of different things, he was still stuck not knowing anything English in a place where virtually no one spoke any lick of Latvian or even German. The greener grass he'd hoped to find was already a bygone era, or perhaps more accurately, grass that never existed in the first place. The next 10 years saw Ed floating around dozens of small logging and mountain towns in the Northwest. He paid his way by working for said logging operations or sawmills or railroads. He never considered himself too good for seasonal or otherwise temporary work. He was at least to history. Aimless, nowhere to go, and no one to be, Ed was just as lost in the New World as he had been in the ruin of the post revolution Latvia. Judging by his draft documentation, he eventually found steady work as a supplier of axe handles to the lumber industries in his region. At this point he had drifted down to Oregon and despite his listless attitude, had worked his way to some kind of stability and some form of independence. By the introduction of the 1920s, Ed Leed Skalnin had grown from an angsty and revolutionary teenager into a hardened man in his 30s. The vibrance of his youth had been eaten slightly away by the calloused career path he had been on. And it seemed to those who knew him there was some cloud of regret or other sadness that followed him around. He had spent over a decade working in some of the toughest conditions imaginable with men he had very little way of connecting with due to his persistent difficulty in picking up the English language. He was a Lithuanian in a sea of Anglos who knew he would likely have little in the way of friends for the rest of his life because of this ethnic boundary. He therefore picked back up a dream of his that had initially set him going as far west as he could. The dream of quiet social solitude somewhere that was his own. Charged by this, and taking his newly minted sickness into account, the cold and wet and long days of logging will make a man miserable for his whole life. After a decade of working in them, Ed decided to wave goodbye to the northwest and seek instead warmer climates to the south and east. He joined in with a rancher looking for hands to drive cattle from California to Texas. Ed was no cowboy, but he was a hard worker and a good learner. He proved to be competent with the remuda and won the favor of the top hands by the time they reached Texas. But at this point, rumor begins to fill in the gaps of Ed's life. Some say he invested what little he had in wages into a few utility companies that took off soon after, which provided his income for the remainder of his days and adventures. Others say that he made it big as a businessman of some kind and went into an early retirement of luxury. The truth is really unknowable and certainly unfalsifiable. What is known is that some years later, some years after his wandering into Texas, Ed similarly wandered into Florida City, Florida. There, the five foot nothing, 100 pound, fourth grade educated, former socialist, rebel, Latvian immigrant would blossom into a man of transcendent myth that still puzzles and interests people today. For there, in the quiet, sandy reed fields of Florida's deep south, Ed Leedscalnin would begin building his own home, which would soon thereafter come to be known as the enigmatic monument of Coral Castle. Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we explore the life and mystery of one of the modern world's strangest men and the even stranger monument of stone that he built.

[Brian]

Well, welcome back, haunted cosmonauts, to another episode of Haunted Cosmos. Let's go. I hope you guys had a great Christmas.

[Ben]

Oh, heck, yeah. Merry Christmas, guys. Merry Christmas.

[Brian]

And we're still in the 12 days.

[Ben]

And happy New Year.

[Brian]

Yeah. Happy New Year. And. And guess what? We're recording this before Christmas.

[Ben]

That's right.

[Brian]

So you know what we got or what you got? You know what I got for Christmas?

[Ben]

Probably. You don't know what I got unless I told you. And I love Christmas presents, so I probably did tell you.

[Brian]

Ben was threatening to open this episode with singing oh, something. And I was like, but wait, Ben.

[Ben]

Decks of halls with boughs of holly Tis the season to be jolly.

[Brian]

Lord, give me strength.

[Ben]

It matches up perfectly.

[Brian]

So he was threatening to open the episode with that. And I said, ben, this is going to release after Christmas.

[Ben]

But then I got to anyways.

[Brian]

But then he was like, yeah, but liturgically, it's actually still in the Christmas season.

[Ben]

Exactly. There's 12 days.

[Brian]

To be fair, you know, even one of the traditional dates for the birth of Christ is a very important date in human history. January 6th. Not for the reason that you think.

[Ben]

The day we won back our republic.

[Brian]

Not for the reason you think, but because January 6th is my birthday.

[Ben]

That's right. So happy birthday.

[Brian]

Close to this episode.

[Ben]

Happy early birthday. It's about a month away.

[Brian]

19. Two years closer to getting to drink that communion wine.

[Ben]

Yeah. So how old are you going to be for real? 34.

[Brian]

I'll be 34.

[Ben]

Wow.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

34.

[Brian]

Yep.

[Ben]

That is 34. Dust and ashes.

[Brian]

You know, year of our Lord 20. 25. 34. It's gonna be great. Hey, Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?

[Ben]

Maybe it's Grandma's Butter recipe. Or maybe it's Great Toad Tallow.

[Brian]

Their tallow products are 100% organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there.

[Ben]

So say sayonara, Sammy to kitchen experiments. And say hello to healthier skin. Gray Toad Tallow Trusted by skin Envied by Great Grandma's Butter Recipe.

[Brian]

For more information and to get a sample pack, check out gray toad tallow dot com. Don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps COSMOS15 for 15% off your order. Ben, do you know what's weird?

[Ben]

The fact that Gokli Tepe contains advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made.

[Brian]

Okay, nerd, I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold and flu season.

[Ben]

Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elderberries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave.

[Brian]

And that Trevor and Autumn at the King Kings Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind.

[Ben]

Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that, but did you also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted all caps haunted, you can get 10% off your first order@tkr farm.com dude, absolutely the best news I've heard.

[Brian]

Today.

[Ben]

We are living in the beginning of a new Reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art businesses, publications, ministries and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti Christian world. And all of these mediums are going to need marketing to help them get more eyes and ears on them.

[Brian]

New Dominion Design Company is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian New Dominion Design Company exists to labor alongside fellow members of the Body of Christ as we engage in this great work of reformation.

[Ben]

With over 15 years of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, new Dominion Design Company was launched in 2024 to help like minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture.

[Brian]

If you're ready to build new Dominion Design Co is ready to work with you. Visit newdominiondesignco.com that's newdominondesignco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be in the description. So we didn't open the episode with Ben singing that. Instead, we talked about it for two minutes, then he sang it anyway.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

And I just want to say, like, both of us have head colds and we're just going to go for it this episode. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm hopped up on NyQuil.

[Ben]

We're ready to. We're ready to rose and cruise right through this episode. It's a Rosicrucian joke.

[Brian]

That was. It was not funny.

[Ben]

It was a deep cut. It was hilarious.

[Brian]

You're laughing after our last episode.

[Ben]

Look at Martina. He's laughing after our last episode.

[Brian]

Because of the number of your mom jokes we made, I was forced to force the AI to generate an image of a giant woman in a matronly kitchen apron and dishwashing gloves building the Great Pyramid of Giza and. And make a T shirt on it that's currently on our website that said, your mom built the pyramids.

[Ben]

Here's What I'd like to say.

[Brian]

So you guys can check that. I mean, if you want that very specific niche item.

[Ben]

Here's what I. It actually is a really funny shirt, though, to be walking around.

[Brian]

I mean, I made it in, like, 14 minutes.

[Ben]

You could get it in Hot Topic. That'd be a Hot Topic.

[Brian]

That would be a Hot Topic shirt.

[Ben]

What I appreciated about the giant was that she wasn't obese.

[Brian]

No, she was very trim.

[Ben]

Giant. You know, she was just a giant. I wouldn't say trim.

[Brian]

Like, yeah, she was. She was burnt.

[Ben]

She was beefy. She was burning.

[Brian]

She had some guns.

[Ben]

Yeah, she was like an old pioneer woman.

[Brian]

Well, anyway, guys, we ended our last episode. We were talking a lot about the celestial imagery related to Gobeka Litepe and the pyramids and a lot of these ancient megaliths. And we tied in the very end. The hot outro opposite of the cold open TM trademark. I get a quarter anytime someone says that. Now, the hot outro ended with a nod to this mysterious story of a modern American megalith built in the 20th century.

[Ben]

Like the modern megalith that is full.

[Brian]

Of mystery with this guy named Ed Rumpelstiltskin.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

Or something.

[Ben]

Ed Belchnicker.

[Brian]

Leed Skelnim. And this is a story. It's often referred to as the Coral Castle story, even though it didn't bear the name Coral Castle till actually after Ed died. But you can go visit this. You can go to their website right now. You can book a wedding. You can do your wedding there, like, literally on their website.

[Ben]

And if you do, invite us and we will come.

[Brian]

Invite us. Pay for our plane tickets. Yes, we'll cover everything else.

[Ben]

No, you cover everything else. Everything's comped.

[Brian]

You go to the Coral Castle. Comped. You get a hotel.

[Ben]

A huge line item in your wedding budget is going to be there for no reason.

[Brian]

Okay, so this ancient megalith. It's not an ancient megalith, but this modern megalith story. And I just wanted to. We thought it was worthy of a deep dive because it's just so full of mystery. And it has the feature of some of these stories that is one of my favorite but also most frustrating feature of stories like this in that it is just totally unresolved.

[Ben]

It's unresolved. And this is what makes it so cool. I actually appreciated this more as I was writing the show. Yeah, it's unsettling because of that. It's unsettling because he died in, like, the 1940s or something. Like that. Like, he's a modern man. We should have the answers. And we still don't.

[Brian]

We don't know.

[Ben]

I don't know. There's something about that, if you really think about it, is actually kind of creepy.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And so I like it even more. Or don't like it even more.

[Brian]

When did you first hear about Coral Castle?

[Ben]

Not until I listened to the Astonishing Legends episode. Okay. So Astonishing Legends did a great podcast on Coral Castle.

[Brian]

It's like episode 41, something like that.

[Ben]

It was in 2018. Yeah, it was a while ago. We actually listened to it to help us prep for this show. Great, great episode. And I remember starting it just like, meh, Whatever. I was born and raised in Georgia and I had never heard of it. And so I thought this is some super obscure small thing that probably doesn't really matter. Like the Georgia Guidestones. Everyone thought the Georgia Guidestones were this crazy thing. They're really not.

[Brian]

I didn't care about them at all.

[Ben]

Yeah. I mean, I thought they were going to have a huge bearing on my future when I was a kid.

[Brian]

They turned out. But they didn't two actually have a huge bearing. They actually were a prophecy of you.

[Ben]

That's true, actually. Little known fact.

[Brian]

Little known fact.

[Ben]

So I started listening to the episode and about halfway through, I was like, oh, wait, this is crazy. This is insane. Because it's not just sculptures. It's not just building a stone wall or something like that. It's massive stone sculptures that were made by one guy only, ever working at night over the course of, they say, 28 years, but actually it was more like 15 years when he really built it. Yeah. Because of the gaps in the timeline. And it's 1100 total tons of stone that he himself quarried all by himself at night, alone, using only rudimentary tools, and then sculpted into these crazy. I think what we established last episode, celestial figures, among other things, too. And it just blew me away. Fell in love with it. Wow.

[Brian]

So let me give just an overview here to orient you in the story. And then we're going to talk about different parts of it. Some of the mystery, some of the theories. What we've gone through so far in the story is we've brought Ed to Florida City, Florida, where he grew up in Latvia and was involved in literal socialist revolution.

[Ben]

Yeah. Depending on who you ask, he was very involved.

[Brian]

Some people claim that have read the. Is it Latvian that they speak or what is the language? I can't remember.

[Ben]

I think they speak Lithuanian.

[Brian]

Lithuanian.

[Ben]

But it's like a diet. It's like, it's a dialect thing.

[Brian]

There are people in Latvia who have claimed there are original sources in that haven't been translated. That it's well known in that area that like Ed actually killed people.

[Ben]

Like assassinated.

[Brian]

He literally assassinated key figures. And that he would just carry a gun around. This is the claim that he would carry around like a Lee Enfield rifle and just kill police officers.

[Ben]

Yeah. Now look, we don't recommend that behavior.

[Brian]

Don't do that.

[Ben]

Okay. But if you do end up doing it, know that you might end up building some modern megalithic structure in America a few days later. And you, and you'll wonder like what got you there.

[Brian]

If you'll do that, you'll be guilty of a capital crime and should be put to death. Let's just like, let's stop it 100% like all that.

[Ben]

But also if you're not put to death, you may find yourself building a modern megalithic marvel. And you'll have no idea how.

[Brian]

Yeah, so Ed grew up, he had this difficult, tragic upbringing. He's like literally 5ft tall, weighed 120 pounds, dude. So that stinks.

[Ben]

First of all, there's like a life size cutout of Ed at Coral Castle. It looks like a child, like a hobbit. I mean, there's a lot of jokes I can make about people that we know very well who are shorter than.

[Brian]

Me, who are shorter than you and therefore legally own them or you legally own.

[Ben]

But this guy, you almost feel bad for him.

[Brian]

Yeah, you do. He didn't feel bad for himself.

[Ben]

No, he sure didn't.

[Brian]

So he. Some of the aspects of his story that are important, at least to the theories. He grows up in this violent environment, very poor. Some of his brothers end up in prison. One of his brothers, his family were like builders, carpenters, involved in these trades. One of his brothers was, supposedly died building a church, which was a Mennonite church. And he like fell on the construction site and died. And allegedly Ed became an atheist at that point.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

And like denounced his belief in God. I don't know if it was because he was building a church or what. What about that particular thing? So he got caught up in this socialist revolution. He was atheist. But then in the course of all this, he also got caugh some neo pagan revival that was sweeping the nation at that time and became involved in like paganism.

[Ben]

Some of it kind of makes sense because we didn't mention this in the Cold open or last episode. But one of the things that's important About Ed is that before he fled Latvia as a trade, he was a stonemason. So he was into the Masonry game. And with the. There's already occultic stuff that happens in socialist revolutions almost ubiquitously. But one of the things that happened with them was this Masonic esoteric kind of revitalization. Neo paganism. And the Masons. It sounds so fake or kitschy, but the Masons were heavily involved in that.

[Brian]

The Freemasons.

[Ben]

The Freemasons, yeah.

[Brian]

Not like stonemasons.

[Ben]

Well, no, like, the Masons are also the stone masons.

[Brian]

The stonemason masons, yeah. But also we're Freemason stonemasons.

[Ben]

A lot of the Freemasons were stonemasons because they're actually Masons. And. And so Ed. That's kind of how Ed was introduced to all this.

[Brian]

So Ed's got some weird background.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

You know, a complicated past.

[Ben]

Look. Hey, what's that? What's that real. With that Italian guy. He's like, what murder?

[Brian]

I didn't see. I didn't see any murder. What murder?

[Ben]

But Ed actually did probably murder people, so he probably did actually legitimately kill. Not. Not a great guy now.

[Brian]

So he then leaves his country, as we told in the story. He ends up in New York. There's another anecdote and, like, a lot of things that happened in the pre. Everything's video and recorded, and he wasn't like, a notable figure. So some of this is just post facto anecdotes and alleged eyewitnesses and things that you can't always verify. But there are even reports that when he got to New York In, I think, 1912 or so, that he met Nikola Tesla.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

In New York.

[Ben]

Well, he was already really into magnetism at the time.

[Brian]

Very into magnetism, which, like, young boys grow up and they have to make their whole personality revolve around either dinosaurs, ancient Rome, cowboys, esoteric theories of physics, magnetism or electricity, or cowboys or astronauts.

[Ben]

But at that time, astronauts weren't a thing yet. So it was the electromagnetism stuff that was his. Yeah, yeah.

[Brian]

So he allegedly might have, you know, either met with or just like, run into Nikola Tesla. And Tesla was around that region at this time, but then he moves on to the Pacific northwest, spends, like, 10 years hard labor doing all this very. And some people then say, well, he learned a lot of this leveraging, moving large because timber cutting. And that involves moving huge, heavy objects, trees, like your mom.

[Ben]

Nice dude. No, I didn't see it coming. That was good.

[Brian]

No. But some people say he learned a Lot like how to do leverage and mechanical advantage, and it's sort of a normal explanation. Gets tuberculosis.

[Ben]

Yes. Wait, can I just say.

[Brian]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Ben]

First of all, back to the Tesla thing.

[Brian]

Was he Latvian?

[Ben]

Was Tesla Latvian?

[Brian]

Tesla. Oh, my word.

[Ben]

Doesn't that sound right? Like, maybe he was Romanian or something.

[Brian]

Nicola Tesla.

[Ben]

Nicola Tesla with the red sauce.

[Brian]

The thing is, if I can say a name with an Italian accent, they are Italian.

[Ben]

Martina McBride.

[Brian]

Are you saying the bolt?

[Ben]

It's a me.

[Brian]

Barack Obama.

[Ben]

It's a me.

[Brian]

All Italian.

[Ben]

So that's every single one of them without a hana. Cosmonauts let us know in the comments if Nikola Tesla was a Latvian.

[Brian]

Now, here's the thing. I want to point something out here.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

That nobody was probably just offended by our. By our bad Italian accents, but we got at least two to three emails about our Japanese accents. Oh, what the. What's up with that, guys? Like, why are you offended by a Japanese. A really good Japanese accent, by the way, and not by Italian accents.

[Ben]

No, dude, I was listening to this.

[Brian]

It's all in Jeremy Carl's book.

[Ben]

I heard the Unprotected. Unprotected class.

[Brian]

Wow.

[Ben]

Easy for me to say. I've had a lot of trouble reading this morning already. No, dude, dude, I saw this video. It was hilarious. It was this. It was this comedian, and he was talking about how he was. He had been catching flack at a show for doing a Chinese woman accent that was really over the top. Like, oh, do you guys want to. Yeah, you know, it was.

[Brian]

It was our Japanese.

[Ben]

Like, really? Yeah, exactly.

[Brian]

And.

[Ben]

And he was catching flack for it. And he was like, yeah, look, whatever. Like, I'm joking, so I don't mean it, you know? Well, then he went on. He said that he got on the plane and he was in first class, and the first stewardess that came up.

[Brian]

Oh, no.

[Ben]

Was a Chinese woman. And he was like, all right. She, like, didn't think anything of it. And then she leans over and goes, oh, do you all want a drink?

[Brian]

Literally.

[Ben]

No.

[Brian]

No. She didn't know who he was.

[Ben]

No, she was. That was how she talked. And anyway, he felt vindicated.

[Brian]

It is flattering to another culture for us to do an impersonation of them. It's an honor. It's an honor. Cause I only joke around with my bros. So, like, I don't call my random people. I don't be like, hey, King, you could lose a few. But I do call my friends short and fat as a joke. So if I parody your culture's accent, It's a sign of respect.

[Ben]

Huge respect. Yes, 100%.

[Brian]

So anyway, he gets tuberculosis.

[Ben]

Wait, the other thing I was gonna say, though, was. And we can talk about theories later. Right. But the whole he became a logger and so he knows how to do leverage thing. Here's my thing. Why don't all loggers then build megalithic structures?

[Brian]

That's a great question that you ask.

[Ben]

Okay, maybe they do.

[Brian]

Have you asked all loggers?

[Ben]

Maybe they do what their hobbies are. You're absolutely right, I admit. But I just want to, like, float that out there.

[Brian]

Yeah, go ahead. So he gets tuberculosis, which at the time, like, you can easily die of, and he's. He's getting run down, like maybe coughing up blood. You know the classic movie, the guy gets tb, he's coughing up blood.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

And you're going, poor, poor Ed. Right. Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's like comeuppance for murdering all those police officers.

[Ben]

Like, maybe not allegedly, you know, but.

[Brian]

So then he determines the weather's going to be better, the climate's going to be better if I relocate. And he ends up in. We don't know how really. He ends up eventually in Florida City. Florida.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

But the account that I heard at least was that he was literally found collapsed on the side of the road. Like he was wandering down the road on foot, collapsed. And a passerby stopped, picked him up, took him in, and actually like nursed him. And this guy's family nursed him back to health for months. And that. That guy was a land speculator in Florida. At the time, land speculation in Florida was very. It was a booming industry.

[Ben]

Yeah. Cause no one was there yet.

[Brian]

No, it was very undeveloped. So I think that Ed ended up buying this piece of land for $12.

[Ben]

It was a 2 acre.

[Brian]

2 acre plot.

[Ben]

Yep.

[Brian]

And the story is that this land speculator guy, who was a dealer, and he'd buy parcels and then sell them, he'd try to predict where development was going to be, just like a land speculator today. And he facilitated somehow this purchase, helped Ed get it. But the interesting thing was he took Ed all around these areas where there was land for sale. And Ed is like dowsing rods and using esoteric techniques to assess these land areas. And he literally, to the land guy apparently wants the worst possible land. Yeah, like land where you. There's. It's rocky, there's no soil, you can't farm on it. Ed was he like deliberately wanted what to this guy appeared to be very bad Land. But Ed had his strange reasons. He wouldn't communicate. Apparently there was something he was looking for in this land. And we now know this is where he begins his original construction of what comes to be known the Coral Castle. There's more to it as well. Moving and different things. But what's up with that?

[Ben]

I know. So there's a few things that we will get into even more later. But I'll plant the seed now. This idea of ley lines. Yeah, Ley lines and energy densities.

[Brian]

Ley lines. You've got me on my knees. Lay lines. Lines. I'm begging, darling, please. I'm assuming it's.

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah. Eric Clapton.

[Brian]

Like the Clapton song.

[Ben]

Hey, Eric Clapton. Video of him playing a guitar with a cigarette in the tuning. One of the coolest things, like if.

[Brian]

You in for 1 second of your life can be as cool as that image. Kids don't smoke. Smoking's bad. But if you can be as cool as that. Let's be honest though, it makes you look cooler. If you can be as cool as that one image, you can retire.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Legally.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Really. Anyway, shout out.

[Ben]

Hey, great connection.

[Brian]

Thank you. Yeah. So like, can you just briefly give us. Because it does. It seems that. Let's talk about dowsing, water witching, ley lines here for a second because this is vintage haunted cosmos stuff.

[Ben]

So here's the idea actually the water divining stuff with the witching rods that actually has its genesis in the idea of ley lines. And ley lines is this idea that Earth's magnetic field has created an energy density distribution such that like everything has a north and south pole. Like every object, every discrete object is magnetic and has a north and south.

[Brian]

Pole energy density distribution.

[Ben]

Yeah, dude, your mom. I'm sorry, you know what I mean?

[Brian]

So the sportiness.

[Ben]

Biggest energy density in the world. Your mom.

[Brian]

And there's allegedly even the. Like. It was also in the same way that in the 20th century. Or no, I'm sorry. In the 19th century, the 1800s, there was a lot of mythology and pseudoscience mixed with cultic paganism. Stuff mixed with pop Christianity and folk Christianity created a lot like think of Mormonism coming out of New York at this time. You have a lot of ideas about lost tribes coming to America and different. There was a lot of that in the water in the 19th century. Treasure hunting, water witching, dowsing. Those were very common. Now coming into the 20th century, we have developing scientific scientized or. Yeah, like people are then coming up with scientific theories that are counter to the mainstream theories of magnetism and Electricity. And this is where Tesla comes in, along with others who are. There are competing views.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

For how does the world work? How does electricity work? Magnets, how do they work? In the words of Insane Clown Posse, you know, like, what a. Which, by the way, don't ever. I only know that reference as a reference from others to clear my name. So this is all in the air. There are literally scientists who are popular at this time who are proposing concepts of magnetism that are attempting to actually integrate these more ancient ideas of ley lines magnetism. And some of these guys had postulated that there were these vortices of particular magnetic energy, one of which was not too far away from where Ed was in Florida, by the way. And the Bimini Islands.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

Which.

[Ben]

Dude, Bimini Road. Hello.

[Brian]

And we know what else happened in Bimini. In an earlier episode of Haunted Cosmos. Electronic fog, it's called.

[Ben]

We do a little Go into the Bermuda Triangle time vortex and come out inexplicably later.

[Brian]

Inexplicably faster or later. So there's a lot of wibbly, wobbly, swirly, whirly magnetic theories.

[Ben]

And the thing is, some of it makes sense because we've all seen pictures of magnets. Magnets. How do they work? Thing.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Genuinely good question.

[Brian]

It is.

[Ben]

Can anyone tell me. So there's, like, the magnet, and then they throw the iron dust in the picture, and you see kind of the ley lines of the magnet going vertically and then around the world to the north pole of that magnet. And then it gets to the point.

[Brian]

The magnetic vortex.

[Ben]

Yes. And so the idea is that the magnetic field of the Earth, if the Earth is magnetic, which. That's a big. A whole big thing, that the core of the Earth is actually a magnet.

[Brian]

Like moving iron solid because of the pressure layers that are moving in contraposition, creating magnetic fields.

[Ben]

They have a grid. You have a grid pattern of magnetic lines or energy lines or ley lines that even go up to the surface of the world. And where those things intersect especially, or where they're particularly dense, for whatever reason, is where you can build particularly impressive structures. Because if you can manipulate the inherent magnetism of each discrete object in that place, you can make it lighter. So the pyramids are built on these junctions according to these principles. Yeah. The Gobekli Tepe is supposed to have been built in this junction. Stonehenge as well. There's all these megalithic structures that apparently line up with this ley line idea. And one of them is now Coral Castle. It used to be Rock Gate when Ed was in Florida. City. And it was very close to one of the ley lines, but it wasn't right on it.

[Brian]

So he's looking in this time for this land. He's using these ancient techniques. Water witching, by the way. We still have a hard time finding water.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

So if you want to drill a well on your property, you basically have two options. And this is still true today. People still do this. You can get like a well drilling company that will come and they'll assess and they'll drill test wells and things. It's expensive because we literally, we don't have an easy, like, detector you can put over the ground and be like, oh, there's water here. If you could invent that, you'd be really rich if you could figure out how to do that.

[Ben]

So we're counting on you to invent it and then tell me. And I get all the. No, we get 99%, you get 1%, we get 1%.

[Brian]

Hantekosmos gets 1%. Since we came up with the idea, it's the first time anybody's thought of this well. So the other option you can do is that you can get a water witch or a dowser. And people, the explanations for why this works, or if it works at all, range from purely natural phenomena that are explicable by the laws of nature. Through these people are legitimately, in a problematic way, engaging in witchcraft or supernatural stuff. And they'll take these rods and they'll walk over the land. And when they cross, supposedly that's where to drill a well.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Now people do this still all the time. And we'll say they were right on. We drilled the well. It was a perfect spot for well.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

And who knows, if they had drilled the well 20ft of it in a different spot, if it would have been great there too.

[Ben]

But doesn't matter. They people still did. It worked.

[Brian]

So he's using these techniques at Rumpelstiltskin, and apparently that played into how he assessed, like, whether I'm going to buy this lot of land in Florida City.

[Ben]

Because the idea with the dousing rod is that if there's like an underground river or underground lake, it'll mess up the polarity or the ionization of the earth beneath you.

[Brian]

There you go.

[Ben]

And so it'll change the polarity of the dousing rods and cause them to be attracted to each other. And so they cross. And so that's how you can tell, like, there's some disturbance. And it would be water. Cause that would be the strongest disturbance. Yeah. Or if There's a high density of ley lines that are crossing. The same thing would happen.

[Brian]

And don't they say that along some of these theories that people naturally, historically have tended without knowing that they're doing this, have established roads and important boundary markers that tend to line up with alleged ley lines, where you'll go and you'll find that there's an ancient road that passes through a region and there's been version of a road there since Roman times. And then you go there today and lo and behold, it's a modern road, it's still there. And there's a crossroads. And people say that ley lines are detectable or they influence human behavior, these magnetic fields and where they want to build and be and establish civilization.

[Ben]

And it does play heavy. I'm just now making this connection. It plays heavily into esoteric witchcraft because most ancient pagan gods or goddesses of witchcraft, like Hecate was also the God or goddess of the crossroads. And so it's almost as if man has senses that might indicate to him where high energy areas would be. Yeah. Even if he's totally like not privy to what's going on. But yeah, that connection with witchcraft and crossroads is a very big one.

[Brian]

Totally. Like there, there are witch. Witchy and pagan and occultic practices that depend on people going to a crossroads.

[Ben]

She flies.

[Brian]

So they'll go.

[Ben]

She got the moon.

[Brian]

Okay, you're welcome. They'll. They'll go to these places even and perform like nighttime, which witchcraft. What's the word?

[Ben]

Stuff.

[Brian]

Witchy stuff. Spells and charms in junk, you know, rituals and all that rot.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

And they'll be, they'll be trying to do that and they'll, they're. They're trying to tap into the power of these, of these ley lines.

[Ben]

Bubble.

[Brian]

Bubble.

[Ben]

You know what I'm saying? Bubble.

[Brian]

Double, double boil, boiling bubble, Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

[Ben]

Yeah, indeed.

[Brian]

In the words of Shakespeare. In the words of the witch. It's like Michael Scott.

[Ben]

Something wicked this way comes.

[Brian]

There you go.

[Ben]

Ron Weasley. Me. Okay.

[Brian]

Wow. So leylines were apparently. Or some version of this idea was apparently powerful, at least in the mind of Ed when he was looking for this land. So he gets there and what does he build?

[Ben]

Yeah. So he fires off at Rock Gate Park. That's what Ed called this first location, Rock Gate Park. He builds a table in the shape of a heart. Okay.

[Brian]

Which is out of a large oolite stone.

[Ben]

Oolite. Limestone, Ooalite. Oolite.

[Brian]

Oo olite is how it's pronounced.

[Ben]

Oolite O. O.

[Brian]

But it's pronounced ooh. Light.

[Ben]

Oolite limestone.

[Brian]

So if Ben pronounced it oolite, Disregard him.

[Ben]

So oolite limestone. He makes a heart shaped table stuff.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Ooga puga. Yeah.

[Brian]

He makes this heart shaped table. That's sweet.

[Ben]

He makes a big throne.

[Brian]

Who? I mean, what guys?

[Ben]

First two things, you know what I mean?

[Brian]

You sit down on your land, you're like, what do I need? Heart shaped table for the girls. Throne.

[Ben]

Throne for the boys.

[Brian]

Well, big news, guys. After several weeks of delays in editing, a week of weather delays where our whole shipment spent. A week in Pocatello, Idaho. Haunted. Cosmos. Doing your duty in a world that's not just stuff is here. Luckily, we had many pallets to unload, but we also had an enormous army of child labor with St. Brendan's Classical Christian Academy to unload the books for us. So that's how we keep our prices competitive here at New Christendom Press. We hope that you go pick up the [e-mail] Cosmos and hey, Christmas shipping is going to be cut off. You got to order the book by December 11th. Ben, I'm trying to do an ad read. I carried a lot of them. Run the film. I carried a lot of them right. December 11th. Okay. You got to do December 11th. That's gonna be the cutoff to get this book in your hand by Christmas. Look at this. Gold foil stamp. Premium hardcover edition. Custom end sheets. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Get your copy today.

[Ben]

Bathtub.

[Brian]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Ben]

Bathtub. And side by side, rocking chairs. So which I couldn't figure out, and I couldn't even tell from the picture, really.

[Brian]

Were they really rocking chairs?

[Ben]

They were. They rocked.

[Brian]

They rock.

[Ben]

They rocked.

[Brian]

Were they made of oolite?

[Ben]

They were made of oolite limestone. Everything is made of oolite limestone. Ed was obsessed with oolite limestone because Florida is obsessed with.

[Brian]

Well, because of its toroidal characteristics.

[Ben]

No, it doesn't have any toroidal properties. Not that I know of.

[Brian]

There are people who. Who say that it has the.

[Ben]

Has toroidal plasmoid.

[Brian]

It has some affinities, dude.

[Ben]

Hey, people.

[Brian]

Basically, here's the thing about the Internet. People learn a word. Toroidal plasma, and they're like, obviously, this limestone, dude, it's had toroidal properties. Toroidal plasma.

[Ben]

I know that means.

[Brian]

But they call it coral castle later because this kind of oolite stone looks like coral.

[Ben]

Yeah, they call it coral rock.

[Brian]

Yeah, it looks like coral. So it has this rough kind of texture. Akin to like unto.

[Ben]

It's actually hard to get it smooth. There are some pieces where Ed does get it quite smooth. The bathtub is one of them. The bathtub is smooth on the inside, very rough on the outside. Everything else, though, is kind of just like. It looks like how oolite might look, but just in a particular shape. Now, what's interesting about the heart table, before we move on to why he moved locations.

[Brian]

Red crumb.

[Ben]

Yeah. Let's leave this other seed that I'm going to plant here. Ed had this myth that he told people about that was called the Sweet sixteen myth. And really it was like a cover story. When anyone would ask Ed why he moved from Latvia to America, he would generally say, yeah, it's because of my sweet 16. And he wouldn't really say much else, but people started to fill in the gaps for him. And so they would say like, oh, it was like a girl. Like, you left because of a girl. And he'd be like, classic. Yeah. And they'd say, oh, did she leave you? Or something. Is it jilted love? Yeah.

[Brian]

Who hasn't immigrated across the world because of a jilted love?

[Ben]

Dude. Guys will literally immigrate across the world because of a jilted love and build a modern megalithic structure instead of going to therapy. Instead of going to therapy when this.

[Brian]

Podcast not sponsored by BetterHelp, which is dumb and you shouldn't do it.

[Ben]

Yes. But it could be sponsored by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon.

[Brian]

Magic Spoon. Get in touch. Because we want to eat your cereal, but we currently, like, don't want to buy it ourselves.

[Ben]

And it could be sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends if they became more modest.

[Brian]

If they started using modest attire on their goblin people.

[Ben]

So this whole sweet 16 idea where people help Ed fill in this story that in Latvia, he was supposed to be married to this girl, this 16 year old named Agnes Scuffs.

[Brian]

Sounds fake.

[Ben]

Yeah, sounds fake is fake. And then the night before the wedding, she gets cold feet or she doesn't want to marry him or something.

[Brian]

And they were like 16, 15 at this time.

[Ben]

She was.

[Brian]

She was. Which was like, just younger than him. But that was normal at the time.

[Ben]

Yeah, he was like 20, 21 or something like that. But yeah, not too crazy. And then she, like, leaves him basically at the altar.

[Brian]

Someone's going to make like a meme and it's going to say, Ben marrying a 15 year old.

[Ben]

Totally normal, not crazy.

[Brian]

Moving on.

[Ben]

She was 16.

[Brian]

It was culturally normative at the time.

[Ben]

And it was consensual among Both parties and parents. Until, of course, she left Ed.

[Brian]

Scuff, man.

[Ben]

Yeah, dude. She scuffed.

[Brian]

She left him high and dry.

[Ben]

She scuffed him.

[Brian]

And then she found a guy who's five foot one.

[Ben]

He was very. Yes. Seriously, dude. She's scraping the bot. She's getting the dregs.

[Brian]

She found a guy who's five foot one, and she was like, he'll never be able to reach the shelves. I need.

[Ben]

She's 16. And he's the small spoon. He's the little spoon when they cuddle. Okay? So he gets embarrassed and also angry. And so he leaves Latvia, and there's this whole cover story. The thing is. That's not true.

[Brian]

That almost definitely didn't happen.

[Ben]

Like, any of that. No, it definitely did not happen. The one thing that may have happened, but it didn't cause him to leave Latvia, was he was supposedly engaged or wanted to be engaged to be married to this one girl. Her last name, it was.

[Brian]

Her name was like her. It was close to Hermione, but it wasn't Hermione. Yeah, it's like Hermine or something like that.

[Ben]

Imagine Hermione, but Lithuanian. So completely. Completely crazy. And he couldn't pay the. And he couldn't pay the dowry.

[Brian]

Lithuanians hardest hit.

[Ben]

Well, look at Ed.

[Brian]

That's the only Lithuanian I know of.

[Ben]

Exactly. And look at him.

[Brian]

Like, a sample size of one.

[Ben]

He's insane. Really weird. He's insane. He couldn't pay the dowry. And so there's the speculation that that was actually his sweet 16. She was actually much closer in age. And he couldn't pay the dowry, and he was embarrassed, and so he fled. But that just doesn't really hold up. The reason that he fled Latvia was because he was afraid of going to a Gulag.

[Brian]

Like, literally being shot for socialist revolutionizing.

[Ben]

Yes. So the reason this is important is because you might expect.

[Brian]

Oh, and by the way, this was all against Tsar Nicholas.

[Ben]

Yeah, exactly. So not actually gulag.

[Brian]

The first unsuccessful revolt.

[Ben]

Right.

[Brian]

Against Tsar Nicholas. And then later, Tsar Nicholas is murdered leading into the World War I by the Bolsheviks. By the Bolsheviks.

[Ben]

And I think we can all agree Tsar Nicholas is one of the coolest.

[Brian]

Coolest guys Ben claims ever to look like. Sar Nicholas ii. Because lots of people have claimed.

[Ben]

One person has claimed that I look.

[Brian]

Like s. But then it really hurts his feelings because since then, without us saying anything, like, 10 people on Twitter have said, brian, you look like Star Nicholas ii. And every time Ben sees these tweets, he wants to become Ted Kaczynski.

[Ben]

I go outside and I pluck petals.

[Brian]

Off of a flower one by one. But let's. Guys, Ben looks way more like Sar Nicholas than I do.

[Ben]

I don't think. I actually don't think so. You got the beard.

[Brian]

Let's agree we equally look like Sar Nicholas.

[Ben]

No, I think that you were equally cool. I'm not gonna do that.

[Brian]

We're equally handsome.

[Ben]

No, because I know that this is charity, and I'm not gonna give in, so I don't need your charity. So the reason this is important is because Ed began to say, or he began to let other people also say, that the reason he was building any of this stuff at all Was because he wanted to win back his lost love so that he would have a house for her whenever she finally came crawling back to Florida City, Florida. To Florida City, Florida.

[Brian]

Where she didn't know that he lived.

[Ben]

Literally all and she didn't exist. Yeah.

[Brian]

And so it's like a fake girlfriend in Canada on steroids.

[Ben]

Yeah, exactly. It's like he's fishing for a ghost, you know?

[Brian]

Yeah. And it's also like he is allowing a narrative to take root that was more. And adds to the mystery of what he's really doing.

[Ben]

One of the things that backs up this idea, Apart from just the physical written evidence that he did not do this, is that the only monument directly explicitly dedicated to anything remotely including love, is this heart shaped table. Yeah. After this, you could say, like, he made a house with two beds and a bathtub. And. Sure. But this is the only thing that actually is like, oh, look, a Valentine's gift for some. After this, he does nothing.

[Brian]

Even the esoteric star stuff.

[Ben]

Yeah. He starts to get into celestial stuff. And some could argue that this is a celestial thing as well. Cupid. Anyone ever heard of Cupid?

[Brian]

Wow.

[Ben]

Venus's sun.

[Brian]

We are getting deep into the mythology right now.

[Ben]

So anyway, that is probably more than I wanted to share, but now I think it's worth talking about why Ed moved.

[Brian]

So think just to set this up. And we're gonna go into our next story. You go to Florida City, Florida. You spend your $12 on two acres of land. You go to enormous effort to try and find the perfect land with your dowsing rods and your whatnot. You quarry.

[Ben]

Ooh.

[Brian]

Light stone yourself in the dead of night when nobody can see you. And mysteriously somehow start building this enormously heavy stone structure. This is not like setting up a Kelty backpacking tent or like parking your double wide on a piece of land.

[Ben]

Like, every single thing is at least one ton large.

[Brian]

Like massively heavy. Huge. Enormous.

[Ben]

Like your mom. You set me up for that one.

[Brian]

Like, I was like, right over the plate. Ben just cracked out of the park. Oh, dude. So why on earth would you do what Ed proceeds to do?

[Ben]

It's a very good question. I think now Brian is going to tell us a little bit about why Ed moved.

[Brian]

Ed Leedskalnin was not a particularly charismatic man. He seemed aloof to most, though not unlikable. And while he was generally friendly, he was not of a mind to accept help or aid of any kind from anyone. This sometimes got him into awkward encounters when neighbors offered him rides home in their cars after finding him on his rickety bike downtown. Each time it happened, Ed gave his stuttering denial with the qualification that it wasn't anything against the offeror. He just preferred to do things alone. And that was the truth. Ed really did do everything alone. With the almost negligible exceptions of taking neighbors around his stone monuments at Rock Gate Park, Ed kept completely to himself. He worked in solitude and only at night to avoid the curious eyes of watchers wondering how he was capable of doing his craft. This proclivity to solitude reached its first public head in 1937, though, when Ed decided that it was time to pick up the work he had done so far and move it. Apparently, though a man who preferred his own uninterrupted company, he was not uninterested in having more eyes see his wonderful creations. He therefore decided to move what he had done 10 miles or so north onto a 10 acre property just off of Highway 1, the road traveled by tourists headed for the Everglades and the Florida Keys. He was jobless and needed the income of onlookers paying to explore the grounds of his limestone edifice. Or at least this is the common, commonly accepted reason for his moving. But before diving into the questions of why Ed might move, the details surrounding how he actually accomplished it are well worth our attention. It began simply enough with Ed, perhaps for the first time since moving to Florida, enlisting the help of a neighbor named Orville Irwin for the transportation of his mining and sculpting tools. Just moving these took two trips with Irwin's flatbed truck because of the size of the handful of pulleys and tripods Ed claimed to use in his art. When the pair arrived at the new property, Irwin was surprised to see a trench already present in the bedrock of limestone that Ed had at some point dug out. Irwin recalled the smoothness of the walls of the trench, remarking In a memoir he wrote in the years after Ed's eventual death that it appeared finished, at the very least, by some kind of machine. At any rate, after dumping the tools off at the new ground, Irwin was ready to face Ed with the very awkward question of how his little flatbed would be expected to transport the multi ton limestone blocks that made up his already built miniature park of rock gate. To this, the surreptitious man replied that he would be enlisting the help of yet another Ned neighbor, a farmer named Bob Biggers, who, with the help of a homemade trailer Ed built from scraps he found in the dump, had a tractor with a big enough engine and sturdy enough tires to carry the stones. Of course, nobody saw how Ed actually loaded and unloaded the stones to their proper places at the new home. Bigger would leave the trailer at Ed's. Ed would tell him exactly when he would be ready to haul the next load. Biggers would come back at that time and see the next load of stones precisely stacked on the trailer. And then he would drive them the 10 miles to Homestead, Florida. Once there, of course, Biggers would be told to leave so that Ed could unload under the COVID of night and in utter silence. Affidavits from the time period, including statements from Irwin and Biggers and their local families, are not in agreement on how long it took Ed to accomplish this. Some say it took him a matter of a couple nights, while others claim it was weeks. It's difficult to say one way or the other. What is known is that the move ended up having a profound impact on Ed's ongoing work. To many, the monuments he made at his first place in Florida City, though impressive for a man working alone, seemed nonetheless a bit sloppy or awkward in their shape. The rocking chairs rocked, but they were fat and seemed elementary. The sun couch was, well, just a circle, and even then it had some irregular nodules on it. The obelisk was oblong and seemed unbalanced or otherwise not quite right to the view. But the things Ed began churning out in his new homestead were not like this. Sleek designs with increased intricacy and symmetry came to be the new norm. Precarious pieces, massive and expertly balanced on one another. It was in these days that Ed made the Polaris telescope and the northern gateway. He made the sundial one of the most impressive pieces of stonework in human history, and the cubic or tessaractean well piece. These things and many others alongside them came into the world only after Ed's move to Homestead. And all of them marked a dramatic increase in skill for the Latvian man. Many have wondered whether the new location might have helped Ed display his greater skill. Not for any reason, in the rock itself. It was still the same old oolite limestone, though perhaps a bit darker than the previous quarry, but for some reason, more esoteric. In the year of Ed's first arrival to Florida, a man from Jacksonville was driving through town when he saw a small man walking methodically through a field off the road. He was driving home from the Everglades and wasn't in a particular hurry. He had never seen a man with such a combination of small stature and serious expression. It was difficult for the onlooker to describe. He just felt compelled to stop and watch the man, who was, of course, Ed, do whatever he was doing. The field had been cultivated recently, and its soft topsoil fell in ridges for its entire length, which made Ed stumble every now and again over one of the intermittent hard spots. He walked the full length down on one edge before turning around and moving inside of the field. A few feet from there, he slowly walked its length again. He did this over and over until he walked the entire field in just such a grid pattern. It was a hot day, of course, and the man in the car marveled at the patience on display. Ed wore dark clothes, and the sun's reflection off of his shimmering face would have been blinding had it caught at just the right angle. But Ed did not seem bothered. He just kept on walking as carefully as his body would let him. Finally, near the end of his survey, Ed had gotten close enough to the driver for him to discern more details. What he saw made him feel an uncanny sense of unease. There in Ed's outstretched forearms, he held two rods that one might use in divining water, Witching rods that promised to turn under some unseen power at the presence of water under the earth. Later, though, Ed clarified that it wasn't water he was looking for. He told the man that the witching rods could also be used to detect anomalies in the world's electromagnetic field. Ed was looking, so it seemed to them then and to us now, for a place where energy might flow more freely, a place where things might somehow be lighter than they really are.

[Ben]

Wow, Brian, I think that was really, really.

[Brian]

Cymatics.

[Ben]

Okay, okay.

[Brian]

Cymatics.

[Ben]

Care to elaborate?

[Brian]

Cymatics. I have three words. Cymatics. One word.

[Ben]

That one word. You ever seen NBA on tnt? I got two words for you. Jets or Sons and Pistons in Houston? Brian, I got bad news the other day I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself, and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in, like, a heavy wool blanket. And then also I started googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts.

[Brian]

Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl.

[Ben]

Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it?

[Brian]

Ben, you ignorant Normie. All you've needed to do is go to Indigo sundries so soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties.

[Ben]

Okay, I am literally going to indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy, Ben.

[Brian]

What I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle.

[Ben]

Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men's six pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't.

[Brian]

So true King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps. Discount code Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.

[Ben]

Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?

[Brian]

Ben, you ignorant Normie. It's always in the show description.

[Ben]

Okay, so I'm going to go to indigosundrysoap.com I'm gonna pick the men's six pack bundle, and I'm gonna use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. All caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.

[Brian]

Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things. And maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified.

[Ben]

Don't let unwanted fairies bearing quote unquote gifts from faraway countries come down your chimney this Christmas. Rest assured, with no monsters under your bed, that when you buy toys from Rooted Pines Homestead, they'll be made on the motherland with American hands from the Jarrett family, coated with delicious coconut oil and beeswax. This Christian family economy makes toys safe enough for the mouth of babes to last a thousand generations. Help further Christendom and get 10% off your next order when you use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. That's all caps, one word. Haunted Cosmos for 10% off at checkout or check the link in the description below. How many demons, ghosts or vampires do you have in your investment portfolio? Well, if you've invested in the s and P500, it's probably more than you think. Since it's full of companies who actively support causes that go against your faith.

[Brian]

Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help. Stonecrop offers faith based portfolios to help you direct your hard earned investment dollars away from those kinds of companies and towards companies that are having a positive impact on society. They also offer comprehensive financial planning to help give you peace of mind about your future that these investment dollars support.

[Ben]

Get the demons out of your portfolio and instead invest in God's kingdom while you're grow your wealth. Contact Stonecrop Wealth Advisors today by visiting StoneCropAdvisors.com Haunted Cosmos that's StoneCropAdvisors.com haunted cosmos or just click the link in the description below.

[Brian]

Investment advisory services offered through Stonecrop Wealth Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission. Okay, so let's talk about all the. There's so much here. And I do want to talk about Cymatics because we teased it in the cold open.

[Ben]

Okay. But Broseph Joseph iii, here's what I propose. I propose that maybe we talk about some of the elements of the park and then we get into the Cymatic stuff.

[Brian]

Yeah. We got to talk about the nine ton. Gabriel, what was the biggest piece of stone? Do you remember?

[Ben]

The biggest piece of stone was the obelisk for the telescope. Okay. And it alone was 10 tons. On its own. It was 10 tons.

[Brian]

Dang. Was it? I thought it was even bigger.

[Ben]

Maybe it was 30. Maybe.

[Brian]

I'm gonna look it up while you.

[Ben]

Yeah, look it up.

[Brian]

I'm gonna look it up.

[Ben]

So. But the. That telescope is really fascinating. We've talked about a lot of this in the last episode. Make sure you listen to the closer of that last episode if you haven't already. But the, the North Star Polaris telescope that Ed made, it was the biggest thing. I think it was 10 tons. Maybe it was like 30. But it was. I think it was 25ft tall, but 5ft of it was buried in the ground.

[Brian]

It was 30. Okay. It was short tons or 27 metric.

[Ben]

Okay, so 20. All right, so hey.

[Brian]

Unbelievable.

[Ben]

27 tons.

[Brian]

It also had two monoliths that were 25ft tall. It had multiple that were this 30 ton weight.

[Ben]

I mean, there was the first obelisk that he made.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

That was around that same weight. 25ft tall, but it looked kind of funny. People thought it was like a screw up. Turns out it just looks like a constellation. And then the Polaris telescope is the other obelisk. That's the 27 ton.

[Brian]

25 foot, 30 tons is 60,000 pounds, roughly.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

That's amazing.

[Ben]

Yes. 60,000 pounds.

[Brian]

Like the 12 passenger van that I transport my large family in is like £7,000. Yeah, it'd be like nine of those.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

That's crazy. That's so heavy.

[Ben]

And he not only did he Cory it himself, he carved it himself. He moved it into place. He buried a five foot hole that it could sit in, by the way, positioned it perfectly so that the North Star shows up in the quadrant corresponding to the season that's in the telescope. And he lifted it up all by himself. And using a tripod that was shorter than 25ft tall.

[Brian]

Literally, he couldn't have used that tripod. Like he has these tools that are almost like red herrings.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Like this is how I do it.

[Ben]

But then he has that black box, dude, that black box up there. The black box.

[Brian]

So what was the Leonard Nimoy show In Search Of?

[Ben]

In Search of did an episode on.

[Brian]

This with some of the worst acting known to man. The reenactments.

[Ben]

But also because of that, some of the best.

[Brian]

But they did like reenactments of this move where the guy with the truck who moved all the tools and stuff would be. Or really they were kind of combining things in the show because they made it look like he did the stones when he really did the tools and other stuff. But. But anyway, Ed is like, you know, he gets there with the truck, he's like, I'm ready. I'm ready to load up. Now.

[Ben]

Ed is played by an eight year old boy.

[Brian]

And Ed is like awkwardly like, can you go over there?

[Ben]

Can you go around that little.

[Brian]

And then. And then they make some cheesy sound effects. Unlike our sound effects, which are awesome. He's like. And then he walks around the corner and there's just like all the stones are on the truck.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

So it wasn't really like that.

[Ben]

But one of the, one of the things that that show did do to show just how difficult this is, is they got a state of The Art diamond tipped excavation drill. And they kind of carved out of the bedrock this fairly large few multi ton slab. And then they got a big crane truck to come in to lift it out. They could barely do it.

[Brian]

And it was not even close to the size of the biggest ones.

[Ben]

No, not even close to the toy.

[Brian]

It was tipping a little bit in the back. The wheels were coming up. And then. Maybe they're playing it up for tv, but. But it would. They were really showing you. You could watch it happening.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

You know, it was like unbelievable. And you're telling me that, like people just say, oh, yeah, he learned how to leverage stuff when he was logging.

[Ben]

He used some pine logs.

[Brian]

What? So think about quarrying just for a second. You're quarrying these big stones. Even if it's just a big cubicle kind of stone, you have to cut down and then you have to cut under.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

And what they typically do is there's like a. Like a triangle shaped cut they make down. And then later they'll quarry it flat.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

To get. Cause think of how hard it would be to like actually go under the stone and do a flat edge. And then they have various techniques to lift stones out without breaking them. But to do this with no heavy machinery. Apparent as a 120 pound five foot tall man. And not only that. Ooh, a light is not particularly hard, which might. Ooh, a light. Ooh, a light. Anyway.

[Ben]

Nice.

[Brian]

Ooh, give me a light. So think about this, though. People have replicated some of this. They'll wrap chains around the stones and things like that to lift them up and cranes. And the chains leave gouges and marks on this stone that are very evident. Not apparent on Ed's stones. No, there's just. People have claimed that he had electric motors and things that did the heavy cutting. Even if he had stuff to cut them, how did he lift them out.

[Ben]

Of the ground like he has? And this gets a little bit into the technology. I know that we just said we're gonna name some of the things and then we didn't. But bear with me. Oh, yeah.

[Brian]

So I got distracted.

[Ben]

And he had two pieces of machinery that no one to this day understands. One of them was a generator that he made out of like free spinning gears that he called a perpetual motion holder.

[Brian]

His perpetual motion holder?

[Ben]

Yes. Not even a machine holder. I don't even know what that means. And it's still there. Like it's still in coral Castle. It's no longer functioning, but you can see how it kind of worked. And it's just this wheel that spins like it's no longer a perpetual motion machine. If it ever was.

[Brian]

It wasn't.

[Ben]

Granted.

[Brian]

I mean, probably.

[Ben]

It definitely was.

[Brian]

According to our current understanding of physics, it couldn't have been.

[Ben]

It definitely was, though.

[Brian]

But it definitely was.

[Ben]

Look, who cares about the second law of thermodynamics?

[Brian]

Not Ed Rumpelstiltskin.

[Ben]

Yeah. And then the other thing that only.

[Brian]

Applies over 5'three oh, by the way.

[Ben]

He said that his perpetual motion holder. That's hard for me to say today.

[Brian]

Perpetual.

[Ben]

Perpetual motion holder was something that generated all sorts of light. Okay. Weird.

[Brian]

That we know of.

[Ben]

No, it definitely did. It definitely did.

[Brian]

People would come and try to watch him work because this thing got popular.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

So people would try to sneak up because they figured out, okay, he only works at night, and we don't know how he does it. So they'd sneak up. And people said he had almost a preternatural ability to tell what he was being observed.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

But he wouldn't be rude about it.

[Ben]

No.

[Brian]

He would just sort of imagine this. Like, you're the kid, you're the kids in the movie scene. At the beginning, you sneak up, you're like, shh, be quiet, Billy. We gotta go get. I don't know why they're British, but whatever. They creep up over the hill and they see, like, edge in silhouette, and he's kind of, like, doing something mysterious. And then all of a sudden, he, like, stands up and he turns around.

[Ben]

It'd be horrifying.

[Brian]

And he looks and he would just, like, kind of wave at them and then, like, smile. And then he would just wait. He would literally wait, even for hours.

[Ben]

He's like a little, like, gremlin, you know?

[Brian]

And this was before, like, hidden cameras were a thing. Really?

[Ben]

Yeah. So is he a fairy?

[Brian]

Imagine now. I mean, what if Ed Rumpelstiltskin is actually a fairy?

[Ben]

So then the other piece of machinery that he had.

[Brian]

Probably mystery solved.

[Ben]

Yeah, indeed. It was really funky. Was this black box at the top of his tripod.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And the black box was really weird. It had no tools in it. It didn't have any, like, racks or pinions or gears or anything in it. No chains coming in or out. And no one knew what it was. And Ed actually didn't even give any clues. At least. He called the other thing a perpetual motion machine. But this, he didn't give any clues to it?

[Brian]

Nope.

[Ben]

So some people think.

[Brian]

Some say.

[Ben]

And by some people, I mean, literally me, I don't know if I think this. But it's interesting nonetheless. There was some kind of communication going on between the black box and the perpetual motion machine, where he talks about how it generated all sorts of light. And one of the things that maybe we'll get into more, maybe not. Maybe it's just for your own personal study, is a thing called a toroidal plasmoid.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

Which is. Do you know, like, zero point energy stuff?

[Brian]

I mean, I'm vaguely familiar from haunted cosmos related stuff.

[Ben]

Okay. So there's this idea that you have various zero point energy systems that are stable because it's zero point energy. So they're not violent or anything, but they can contain and release like pure energy. So there's no lack of efficiency. They're 100% efficient engines or batteries, which would allow for perpetual motion. Now, what we found is that the only plasmoid structures that occur in nature are unstable, like lightning, and they can't really be relied on for anything repeatable except for one naturally occurring toroidal plasmoid.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

A torus is just a donut. It's a very stable structure, and it occurs when different types of fluid, whether it's gas or liquid or both, are rubbing against each other and it creates a sheer. Dude, you can't do that. You can't do that. You can't do that.

[Brian]

I can't say anything.

[Ben]

You can't do that.

[Brian]

No, go on.

[Ben]

No, we're cutting that out. Okay. I'm not gonna look at you. I'm gonna just look at the camera. I knew it, dude. I was trying to come up with some other word other than rub. So much friction.

[Brian]

Let's just say, like listeners.

[Ben]

I'm gonna say rub.

[Brian]

You're cutting from Ben's sentence to this scene. There was like, three minutes of laughter. We're back now. Okay, keep going.

[Ben]

So this toroidal plasmoid happens when two fluids of different types, you know, gas or gas and gas liquid. Liquid or gas and liquid, are rubbing against each other at high rates of speed. It creates a lot of friction or shear stress. And when that shear stress happens, atoms start to be shared between the two mediums, and it ionizes both of them and creates this plasma structure that occurs very quickly. It goes away, but it occurs nonetheless. And it is the only naturally occurring toroidal plasmoid. So it could act as a naturally occurring battery with perfect efficiency or near perfect efficiency. The idea is that somehow the perpetual motion holder created these toroidal plasmoids. And then. And here we go.

[Brian]

Okay, Here we Go.

[Ben]

And then the black box used different sound frequencies, harness them.

[Brian]

Cymatics.

[Ben]

Yes. To get into the cymatic question and somehow like draw power using sound. Because that's electromagnetism still in some way from the plasmoid to help him lift these stones.

[Brian]

And so the idea is that we've touched on this before our cold. Our hot outro today is going to relate to this outside of the Coral Castle story with some other cymatic y sound related stuff.

[Ben]

Okay.

[Brian]

The idea, and this is a very common idea that people have postulated.

[Ben]

It's.

[Brian]

It's totally undemonstrated. And it is basically right now, mythology, pseudoscience.

[Ben]

It's called we do a little pseudoscience.

[Brian]

It's called we do a little pseudoscience. But the idea is that using sound, you can manipulate physical objects in ways that enable you to make them lighter, lift or move or even fly or levitate objects. Now we can use extremely like high frequency, high amplitude sound to levitate small objects. This is demonstrated phenomenon that is replicable.

[Ben]

Right now, especially in conjunction with magnetism.

[Brian]

We talked about cymatics. In cymatics specifically being like the study of. It's the effect of certain sounds and frequencies when they go across a plate to rearrange and have visible effect on some medium. So often like sand type particles on a plate or salt. And you put a frequency and it's amazing. I mean it'll instantly change to the shape of like the rosettes on a cathedral window or.

[Ben]

Yeah. Or like mandalas and Eastern mysticism.

[Brian]

It's like boom. Different shapes and very creepy. If you haven't ever watched just a Cymatics demonstration. Because again, this is experimental. You can actually see this. It's genuinely amazing. Yeah, it's one of those things that makes you go, the Lord is wise beyond us.

[Ben]

Right. It. It gives you a whole new perspective on sound and what sound actually is and what it could do. It's shocking.

[Brian]

In our book that is actually now shipping. I know it's past Christmas, like the book shipping. You order it, it'll get to you. It'll leave our warehouse within a day or two. At this point, I talk in one of the chapters about sound and just how interesting it is that God put little a stereo drum system in our head that you like certain air wiggles like you like certain frequencies of sound. They can make you feel sad, happy, ecst, angry, inspired, focused.

[Ben]

If you go into the. If Christians would finally retake the Hagia Sophia and you sing a hymn in the Hagia Sophia, you will feel better. You will feel almost euphoric. You'll feel a sense of peace because of the sound frequencies interacting with you. If you go into a horror movie and the director plays infrasound, you will feel more unsuited.

[Brian]

At least 20% of people will feel. If you go into an anechoic chamber that is perfect or near perfect, which is just a chamber that absorbs all sound, they have these big sound traps, baffles on the wall. It makes most people feel very uncomfortable and physically uncomfortable to have all of the sound robbed from them right as it leaves their mouth and just be. It feels suffocating, like you have heaviness on you. You. So sound is powerful. You think about what is sound. It's just energy. It's traveling in waves in the same way that light and the electromagnetic spectrum works. So there's this whole interchange of energy through vibration and sound waves that we know affects the world in many demonstrable ways. And what we're. This is where it actually is less crazy than it sounds. Than it sounds. Pun not intended. It's not as crazy as it initially appears to say, what if certain frequencies of energy transmitted through sound could do things that we don't yet know about? That's not crazy at all.

[Ben]

If it can affect your mood, why can it not also lift a rock?

[Brian]

So the idea is that there were ancient peoples that had certain cymatic or sound related technologies that they had mastered and that this was in the same way that they didn't have like internal combustion engines. To our knowledge. This is Hana cosmos. So I have to say to our knowledge, to build big earth moving equipment, they had different, maybe they had different ways of doing that that were via lost technologies that we no longer have access to.

[Ben]

Even one biblical example, potential biblical example, I'll say, is the walls of Jericho crumbling from the shouting and the trumpets of the Israelites. Clearly that's God doing something sovereignly. It's God performing some amazing miraculous work for his people. But he did use the means of shouting and trumpet blasts. And those means mean something. And so even that is like you read that story and you're like, what is happening? Why is this going on? Why did God. Because this will is not arbitrary. Why did God command the Israelites to walk that many times, to shout like that, to blow trumpets like that? And you can start to see the interconnectedness of God's incredible power, sovereign power on display, and also the means that he's using to institute that power. And you can wonder if there's Something more there than just. Well, he wanted them to shout, so they shouted.

[Brian]

They recently recovered the song they were singing.

[Ben]

Is it your mom?

[Brian]

So tumbling down the city that we lost.

[Ben]

What?

[Brian]

That was a joke.

[Ben]

Nice. I thought it was in your mom joke. I totally.

[Brian]

No, it wasn't. You totally.

[Ben]

Hey, that's my fault.

[Brian]

Immature.

[Ben]

I know. Shame.

[Brian]

Immature.

[Ben]

Frivolity.

[Brian]

Shame. I'm a lot of frivolity.

[Ben]

So anyway, what are some other fascinating pieces?

[Brian]

Yeah. So let's talk about the pieces. There was a nine ton gate on the north side of the structure. It's called the nine ton gate.

[Ben]

I'm pretty sure he's a creative man.

[Brian]

Right. And this gate was again a nine ton piece of stone that was a door. And it would move. Now when I say move in nine ton rock, you might be thinking, wow, that must have had like a pretty big obvious chain link pulley system or like a big moat gate that would open it. And he was like, no, no, no, no. The wind could open this gate.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

A child could go up and push on it with their fingers and this gate would silently and perfectly swing open.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

And it was sat on this like pie shaped piece of rock that was. This is also a weird thing that's hard to confirm.

[Ben]

I was gonna say. No one knows where the piece of rock came from.

[Brian]

Allegedly one of the local universities did a test. Did a test and said. Unknown origin.

[Ben]

Yeah, unknown origin.

[Brian]

Space rock.

[Ben]

There was another one of those too.

[Brian]

Space rock.

[Ben]

On the sun disc lounge thing. It used to spin. It doesn't spin anymore because they.

[Brian]

It's Florida.

[Ben]

Yeah, it's Florida. But it used to spin. And it would be on this, like the center of. Was perfectly situated on this one piece of disc. And it was also supposed to be unknown origin.

[Brian]

So this gate, in the 80s, Ed dies. And then years later, this gate had worked for like 40 years. Like 1986, it stopped working. And so it was inoperable for a while. Finally they called in a team and it was like eight men, heavy machinery and equipment. And they disassembled it. And they found that what Ed had done is he had taken the ball bearing from a Ford truck, which Ed used Ford motor vehicle pieces a lot. He would kludge together stuff from Built Ford tough. Built Ford tough. And he had perfectly balanced. He had drilled a borehole through this rock and then perfectly situated the rock with a rod on this bearing. And so it stopped working because it's Florida, it's humid, and it eventually rusted out. It stopped working. But the precision to Balance this rock to work that perfectly with no maintenance. There was literally no maintenance for decades. And they ended up fixing it. They somehow fixed. Took heavy machinery, eight men and engineers to fix this thing that the five foot tall guy did by himself, silently, at night. Ben, I wanted to talk to you about something. I'm concerned about you.

[Ben]

What are you concerned about?

[Brian]

Every time I see you, you have more and more Indigo Sundries products. I feel like you're overdoing it, dude.

[Ben]

Give me one example.

[Brian]

Dude, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Do you see? Like, where did you even get this from?

[Ben]

What's the problem with having some soap on hand?

[Brian]

Ben, we at work right now. There's. There's.

[Ben]

You don't want to smell good at work.

[Brian]

There's gonna be no situation where you need Indigo Sundry soap at work.

[Ben]

Uh, have you ever gotten sweaty in this basement, dude? Yes.

[Brian]

Every time we're filming, I look at you and I go, he's so handsome. Well then. Well then you're gonna need some soap so that you don't smell as bad. Do you see what's happening to you? Like, how are you even. I. Are there fair. Do you. Do you have fairies that give you this?

[Ben]

Dude, what are you talking about?

[Brian]

Have you partnered with the fae?

[Ben]

No, I'm a stone cold Christian who likes soap.

[Brian]

Dude, I feel. Wait, is that Calendul?

[Ben]

Oh, not so mad about it now, are you?

[Brian]

They make liquid soap.

[Ben]

You didn't know that?

[Brian]

Dude, I didn't know that. Well, they're obviously.

[Ben]

They're a sponsor of the show.

[Brian]

You should know that I have duties and responsibilities. Not all of us can just be Indigo Sundry Max all the time.

[Ben]

Okay, well, since you didn't know that, I'm assuming you also didn't know that if you use their subscription plan, you'll get 10% off of your order.

[Brian]

10% off? 10% off of their already great prices.

[Ben]

I'm telling you.

[Brian]

Are you kidding me?

[Ben]

With no headlamp?

[Brian]

He just did this.

[Ben]

You gotta think about, like, all of the things that he's missing at that. Not only by doing it by himself at night with no power tools, but also at that time of history. Like, he didn't have a headlamp. He didn't have a dehumidifier.

[Brian]

He didn't have YouTube.

[Ben]

He didn't have any of these things.

[Brian]

He didn't have a vast library of information accessible to him about how to do this.

[Ben]

He didn't have a TI84 calculator. He had his Pencil and he had paper and he had whatever it was he was using to do these magnificent things. It's crazy.

[Brian]

So he makes a nine ton gate and then the other side of South Gate, I think it was a three ton gate. It was the same kind of thing, but three tons instead of nine. You can actually go to the Coral Castle website and they have a schematic of the whole complex that will name everything. Repentance Corner.

[Ben]

Repentance Corner is really funky. It was, you know, because of some of the mythology with the sweet 16 and what Ed was saying, which we'll.

[Brian]

Get into in a minute.

[Ben]

It was this place where his wife and children could go to repent of whatever wrongs they did. Kind of weird. But it also has negative space carved out of it that we said last episode looks exactly like the Gemini twin constellations, exactly like the Gemini twins. And it's also sort of a resonant echo chamber where people think that Ed may have used it to help tune some of the cymatic power that he was using so that it would come out at a certain frequency and help him lift stones. Like very very.

[Brian]

What about telescope?

[Ben]

Okay, well, we already talked about the telescope.

[Brian]

Explain it. We kind of did it in passing.

[Ben]

Okay. So the telescope is really interesting. It's that 25 foot obelisk. It's 27 tons of stone and it's sunk 5ft in the ground. So 20ft above ground there's a hole, a perfectly straight hole, of course, bored out of the top with four quadrants of like just metal wiring that Ed put in there. And if you stand 30ft back, you'll find another triangle shape with another hole bored out of it. And if you get behind that triangle with the hole and you line up the two holes between that and then this obelisk and it's a clear night. You will see, depending on what season it is, the North Star in one of the quadrants. Really fascinating stuff. The level of precision that that requires. Again, especially for a man at that time, one guy, I think that people vastly underappreciate because there's all sorts of people who will.

[Brian]

They'll pull up this guy or that guy on YouTube who made some mechanisms that you can move large objects more easily and things like that. But it's not just moving them from one place to the other. It's also then lifting and situating and having the knowledge and carving them and quarrying them.

[Ben]

If you have heavy machinery in laser levels, sure. He didn't have any of that. Like he's Relying on his ability to see the North Star in the sky, stand some distance back and base and, you know, more or less eyeball it.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

But he only has one, like one shot.

[Brian]

And also, Ed Rumpelstiltskin, he was blind.

[Ben]

Sees everything he ever wanted.

[Brian]

The whole time, the whole movie, he was blind.

[Ben]

It's like Book of Eli.

[Brian]

I'm just kidding.

[Ben]

You find out at the end that he was blind.

[Brian]

I made that up.

[Ben]

One of the other.

[Brian]

But for that second that you believed it, you were like, but I lied.

[Ben]

One of the other things that is also underappreciated. There's the moon fountain, which there's so much going on there. It shows all the phases of the moon and it's. I'm not gonna get into it. It predicted that there was water on the moon, which there is. Which is really weird.

[Brian]

What?

[Ben]

Yeah, we found water.

[Brian]

I didn't know that we found water.

[Ben]

On the moon some years ago. And Ed was like, yeah, I'm gonna make this moon fountain. And people are surmising that somehow he knew. I guess I shouldn't say. He.

[Brian]

Oh. I was like, I thought it was gonna be way cooler.

[Ben]

He implicitly predicted water on the moon by making the moon into the mountain.

[Brian]

It was a fountain.

[Ben]

Yes.

[Brian]

Ergo.

[Ben]

But that's a really impressive piece. I think the thing that is, that's one of the most brain twisting things is the sundial that he made.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

It's a certain type of sundial that only one exists and it's the one at Coral Castle. No megalithic sundials exist that are as good as this. And in fact, it's the only remaining megalithic sundial that still functions. But it has these curved lines on it so that it traces all the different phases of the moon and the sun, such that it will tell you the time of day within 30 minutes or like 15 minutes or something like that. It will also tell you what month you're in and the day of the month in the year that you're in.

[Brian]

Wow, that's wild.

[Ben]

And it does with a sundial. And it's because of this hyperbolic geometry that Ed knew about. And he traced these lines and did it and he carved the lines. Didn't screw up, did it perfectly. And it is like the prototypical sundial in the world. Not just the angel.

[Brian]

If you could give me like a Methuselah amount of time and all the materials required. I could not.

[Ben]

I'm not doing it.

[Brian]

And there's no way I could make that.

[Ben]

I'm not an attention to detail guy.

[Brian]

Nor am I.

[Ben]

And then there's another thing. Do you remember what it's called at Stonehenge? The two vertical legs, and then the one at the top looks like a pie.

[Brian]

I can't remember.

[Ben]

Now, there's a name for it. I can't remember. There's one of those. And it's interesting that that general shape matches up not only with Stonehenge, but even in some way Gobekli Tepe, that kind of T shape.

[Brian]

It's also worth noting that all of these structures are gravity wall structures. They're not put together with mortar or that kind of thing. They just sit on one another. And the tolerances are so tight in the joinery that you can't fit a knife blade between them. So the same sort of thing that you find at Gobekli Tepe, the pyramids.

[Ben]

You can't even put a credit card between.

[Brian]

Very, very tight tolerances. And what's even more impressive to me in some ways with Ed is that in these ancient megalithic structures, we assume, at least, I mean, that there were large numbers of people working on them, but Ed was just. Ed?

[Ben]

Yeah. This is one guy working for 15 years, and he made 1100 tons worth of stone monument.

[Brian]

Before we move into the sweet 16 and get into some of his writings and the esoteric numerology type of stuff, because there's some of that, too. I think it'd be interesting just to briefly talk about the moving thing, because we mentioned it. But there was the one theory that he moved it because it was gonna be a better tourist attraction. He would give tours for 10 cents or, like 25 cents if you wanted him to accompany you. And it was a guided tour, and he would do that. That was the only way we really know that he basically made money other than trading some vegetables he grew. But he would do that if people were broke. He would just give them a tour for free. He was a pretty nice guy. Other than the policeman he shot.

[Ben]

Other than all the murders.

[Brian]

Other than all the murders. He was apparently, like, a pretty nice guy. They, you know, can you imagine? They just had all these. Moms and dads are like, yeah, kids, go visit the Coral Castle with Mr. Ed had no idea he was, like, a serial murderer. Serial murderer. Allegedly. Okay. Anyway, but just to circle back, many say the reason he moved it was because the magnetic virtues of the area shifted. And this is a feature of magnetism, it moves around is that it does move. We have theories and evidence that the polarity of the Earth has shifted in the past. And that can have violent effects on things when it's that drastic. But also magnetism, it's produced by real moving things and moving parts. And so it tends to wibble, wobble and move. And some people say Ed, it wasn't a tourism thing, they said.

[Ben]

Or some people also say that it's not that the ley line intersection point moved, but that he had actually miscalculated.

[Brian]

At first he was like, oh, it'd be better here.

[Ben]

And then he realized that he got it wrong and so he upsized more land and moved.

[Brian]

And then it got more impressive, which.

[Ben]

Is why it also got more impressive when he did that. So all very fascinating, I think. Now let's talk about Sweet sixteen and some of the more esoteric stuff that Ed got into. Much has been made of Ed Leed Scalin's storied history of romance. One story propagated or allowed to propagate by Ed himself, was that his motivations for leaving Latvia so many years prior were not so much the failed revolution he took part in, but rather the shame of being jilted by his lover. According to that story, her name was Agnes Scuffs and she was a 16 year old maiden from his district who he had already been engaged to for months. However, when the time came for the wedding wedding on the night before, in fact, young Agnes rejected the much older Ed and refused to follow through on her vows. Saddened and a little embarrassed, Ed left Latvia for a long sojourn from which he never returned. Unfortunately, as we've said, this story simply isn't true. Family and other contemporaries of Ed make very clear that he was not engaged to be married to an Agnes scuffs who was 16. He was, however however engaged or almost engaged to another woman, a woman much closer to him in age. And when he couldn't afford the dowry to win her hand, his embarrassment certainly motivated him to go through with his plan to flee the martial law of Russia over his country. But while the true story has little bearing on his work at Coral Castle and its predecessor, Rotgate, the false narrative does seem to be a focus of Ed's in his early years, particularly after Rot Gate. As time has passed since Ed's death and the theories behind his abilities become better acquainted with strangeness, researchers believe they might have discovered why Ed put so much stock in the lie. Many don't know that Ed Leedscalnin was the author of a number of books and pamphlets. Some of them were on magnetism, which is interesting enough in itself. But his magnum Opus is worked of moral education. Called A Book in Every home. Published in 1936, it at first glance is a sort of manifesto laying out Ed's particular views of morality and life's purpose. It contains political ramblings about who must vote and who must not, along with advice to parents on how to best raise their children, something of course Ed had no experience with. It speaks in great detail about the precious nature of a quote, Sweet 16 girl, a maiden untarnished by the world, who must be protected from the corrupting influence of boys. Perhaps most striking, the text only fills up half the pages of the book. With every turn, the right hand page is left completely blank. And Ed explains why in his short preface by saying he left the pages blank so that readers could argue with him more easily and present their own views over against his. Some, though think that while this is odd, it is also not the true intention behind Ed's choice of layout. Some believe this book to contain a code which, when deciphered in the free pages, will tell readers how he did what he did. They think this because of the numerological significance of the number 16, a number commonly meant to signify profound wisdom or analytical biblical insights with hermeticists and the construction of the New Judaic temple in Freemasonry. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the title A Book in every home has 16 letters. And while none have even claimed to crack a code from this book, some have nonetheless put compelling work into discovering any mysteries that may be hidden within. Images that Ed included in the work have been overlaid on different axes within itself to reveal what may be a coincidence, but what is still unsettling. Dark humanoid faces in the negative space of these overlaid images. Alien like and either apathetic or even malicious, cloaked figures presiding over Ed's book that give it a hostile feel. And the overlaid pictures that don't reveal faces, well, they instead reveal patterns that are strikingly similar to the cymatic patterns corresponding to different noise frequencies. If it was all an accident, it is one genuinely insane accident. Of course, none of this proves that Ed did anything other than use some kind of precise leverage and old techniques to build his castle. But all of it should leave us wondering why people think he used some unknown or higher power in its construction. Well, apart from his association with witching rods and water energy divining, Ed had one piece of so called machinery that has consistently puzzled people. A black box fitted to the top of his tripod. It is the element of the machine that nobody ever knew the inner workings of it didn't spool a chain, it didn't contain hand tools, it didn't have gears or racks or pinions within. It's just there, this mass of black metal, I guess, that apparently served no purpose of all, but was somehow too important a thing for Ed to ever remove. Some speculate that it was somehow connected to the so called generator that Ed kept in his living quarters or his perpetual motion holder that made all kinds of light. Others think that the black box is its own kind of energy machine, supposedly soundless to humans and without any moving parts. That turned the gravity off for Ed, allowing him to move 10 ton or 27 ton stones around as if they were pieces of paper. In one of his other books called Magnetic Current, Ed himself gives quarter to this idea when he says that he had found gravity to be a magnet which can be turned on and off. He says that if you reverse the magnetic forces present in the world with opposing frequencies of sound or electromagnetism, rocks will no longer be as heavy as they seem. Remember, Ed was only educated to the fourth grade, and yet his works on electromagnetism are surprisingly lucid and coherent, causing one to wonder if the less intelligible parts might hold water as well. There's only one recorded time that Ed gave an answer to the question of how he did what he did with the stones. The question, asked in all earnest, received what was claimed to be an earnest. I have discovered how they built the pyramids. He said. Wow.

[Brian]

The biggest takeaway I have from this is that if you actually take the 16th syllable of every word that we've said on this show, it will reveal a hidden message. And I have actually revealed that hidden message. I'm going to think the word revealed by that secret code and the effect that it's going to have is to partially disrobe Ben. Okay, here we go.

[Ben]

Wow, it was getting hot in here.

[Brian]

Okay, that was just a setup to say Ben took his vest off.

[Ben]

I did take my vest off. Sorry to all you people. Shout out to Cinch vests. Hey, Cinch. If you're looking for a podcast to run ads for you, we run the best ads in the business.

[Brian]

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[Ben]

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[Brian]

I didn't think you needed a website.

[Ben]

Anymore Ben, what with all the marketing.

[Brian]

You can do on social media these days. What does a website even do for you?

[Ben]

Well, it provides a single place for all of the information about your business so that people can find you easier without scrolling through social media. Doom scrolling endlessly. You can also use it for an online portfolio, an online store and much more.

[Brian]

But where would I even start?

[Ben]

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[Brian]

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[Ben]

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[Brian]

What?

[Ben]

All you have to do is cover shipping. Are you kidding?

[Brian]

What?

[Ben]

So head over to squirrelyjoes.com hauntedcosmos that's squirrelyjoes.com Haunted Cosmos to claim your free bag of coffee. Let's flip and go link in the description below. I'm a poet. Didn't even know it.

[Brian]

Okay, dude, we're locked in.

[Ben]

So.

[Brian]

We're locked in. We're locked in. Okay, let's talk about. Ed's writings are genuinely weird. People have described them as one step above word salad.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Which has led some to say that there's no way he could have meant what he actually wrote. Therefore it must have secret codes hidden in it.

[Ben]

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't put it past him. He's a weird guy. Let's be honest. He did this weird thing. Why not leave a secret code?

[Brian]

If you sell your soul to the Fae in Latvia to try and win a socialist war, get backstabbed by the local Fae, move to North America, make another deal with the Pacific Northwestern Fae who then give you tuberculosis instead of fame, riches and glory, and then you move to Florida and you make a deal with the Florida Fae to write a secret, hidden, esoteric code knowledge book. And then you finally succeed in that.

[Ben]

I mean, here's the thing then.

[Brian]

Look out.

[Ben]

He literally left half the book blank so that people could take notes, like decipher it.

[Brian]

Okay, but some people say he did it because it's basically a pamphlet and he wanted it to be big enough to sell.

[Ben]

Some people say that. Those people are wrong, though. Man, trust him.

[Brian]

Have you broken the code?

[Ben]

No. Although I did find a. What. What do you call, like, when you can rearrange letters and they spell something else? Is that an.

[Brian]

An A shift cipher as well?

[Ben]

Is that an anagram?

[Brian]

Oh, an anagram. Yeah.

[Ben]

Okay, so I did find an anagram generator online. And I typed in it, like, had the text already loaded on it. So I typed in the title of the book and it was. Oh, no, no, no, I didn't. I typed in. Yeah, just the title.

[Brian]

Yeah, the 16 character title.

[Ben]

Okay.

[Brian]

It came up with like a book in every home.

[Ben]

A book in every home. It came up with literally like over a million different anagrams. Most of them were nonsense.

[Brian]

Was any of them, wow, Harry Potter?

[Ben]

One of them was Floop is a madman. Help us. Save us.

[Brian]

Oh, wow.

[Ben]

Deep cut, dude.

[Brian]

That was a deep cut.

[Ben]

That was it, though. Like, there was really. I. First of all, I dedicated all of 30 seconds to looking through them.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And it was me going like this. And then I backspaced because I was overlooked.

[Brian]

So he wrote these weird, esoteric things on magnetism. That were. Word salad. He wrote. His book, honestly. Contained some fairly creepy things about women.

[Ben]

Yeah, it did.

[Brian]

Are you familiar with that part?

[Ben]

Yeah. Things about how, like, sweet sixteens must be untarnished.

[Brian]

A young. He uses the word new. He says that young girls, when they're 16. Should be totally new.

[Ben]

They should be new.

[Brian]

And he means what you think by that.

[Ben]

Virgin.

[Brian]

Which I don't disagree with the concept that people shouldn't be promiscuous. And fornicating. That's a sin. But then he goes on to say some problematic things. You know what, kids? Listen, I'm not gonna get into it. But about, like, what people should do instead. In order to say it's bad.

[Ben]

He puts a lot of stock in.

[Brian]

Really creepy.

[Ben]

He puts a lot of stock in teeth. He says, like, teeth. If a new girl is smiling.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

And she should show her teeth. Martina McBride.

[Brian]

He's losing.

[Ben]

He's dying. Laughing.

[Brian]

He's losing.

[Ben]

I don't totally know why. Okay. So he says that if a new girl. A sweet 16. Is smiling. She should only show her teeth if she shows her gums. You know, like a gummy smile. Like Julia Roberts. Yeah.

[Brian]

Okay, then.

[Ben]

Or maybe she's more toothy than gummy. She's toothy for sure. But whatever. Then that gummy smile girl should be, like, basically shunned from society. And she's good.

[Brian]

Are you serious?

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

No one likes a gummy smile. But, I mean, that's kind of. That's taking it pretty far.

[Ben]

It's a little extreme. It's like.

[Brian]

So he would just do to them what he would do to the policemen.

[Ben]

Like, excommunicado, full on.

[Brian]

Okay. All right. So let's just now move on conveniently from the esoteric. Strange. And frankly uncomfortable writings of Ed Belsnickel. And let's talk about some of the theories about how he built the coral castle. We've hinted at some of these things. And then we can bring the plane to a landing. With another look at one of the theories in another place.

[Ben]

Clearly. Which is clearly our favorite theory.

[Brian]

It's cymatics.

[Ben]

Which is cymatics.

[Brian]

He whistled.

[Ben]

I'd like to start with the two. I'll say Naturalistic.

[Brian]

Yeah, let's do that.

[Ben]

Okay. The first is the.

[Brian]

Your mom did it.

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brian]

The first is that your mom built.

[Ben]

Your mom listener did it.

[Brian]

Yeah, that's the first. Well, that's. That's 1A.

[Ben]

Yeah. 1B. Is that Ed Leed Skownin actually did do it. Okay.

[Brian]

Yeah. Ed Leed Skownin. I remember his name, but he.

[Ben]

He was just a master of leverage and mechanical advantage.

[Brian]

Pulleys, levers.

[Ben]

Yeah. Kinematics.

[Brian]

Read a lot of Archimedes.

[Ben]

Statics clearly was well read in Archimedes and also David. And that's that he used a hammer and chisel as the efficient cause and. Right. No, as the instrumental cause.

[Brian]

That'd be instrumental cause.

[Ben]

That'd be the instrumental cause.

[Brian]

Then they got the formal cause, the.

[Ben]

Efficient cause, the material cause, which would be the oolite limestone itself. Oolite, yeah. And then the final cause, which is, I guess, a shrine to the celestial gods.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

So anyway, that's the first one. The second, I guess it's natural. I mean, but it's like a lost knowledge kind of thing, which is that there's this idea that everything from Gobekli Tepe to the pyramids to Stonehenge to this, and like, all of these temples everywhere else were actually made using wet concrete that was formed into all of these different megalithic structures. And so that's what Ed Leedskalnin did as well. It's this, like. I can't remember. I think it's called ancient cement is the name of the thing.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And so he rediscovered this method of taking existing minerals and easily turning them into a cement version of that mineral that you can then form into whatever you want.

[Brian]

So he was casting these blocks?

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah, more or less.

[Brian]

But they looked like oolite.

[Ben]

Oolite, yeah, they looked like oolite.

[Brian]

Ooh, light my way.

[Ben]

They looked like Ooh, light my fire.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

Come on, baby, light my fire. You know that song?

[Brian]

Oh, yeah, I do.

[Ben]

Isn't that the police?

[Brian]

I actually. Look out. Speaking of the police coming, at least.

[Ben]

Calum's gonna kill all the police.

[Brian]

All right. Yes. That's interesting. I didn't understand that theory until you just described it that way. I hadn't understood that. They were talking about, like, reconstituting materials that look like they were naturally formed.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Turning them, like, making a concrete version of any rock.

[Ben]

It's. Cause I'm such a good describer.

[Brian]

That's really good. Thank you.

[Ben]

So those are the two more natural. Okay. The ancient cement one's Kind of cool, but it's also like. I mean, does anyone really think, who's.

[Brian]

The guy that built all the machines that, like, move rocks and. Sorry, there's like, a famous guy. He does this on YouTube. Oh, he's like a debunker.

[Ben]

I don't know. You would know that guy better than me. Because you're more of a debunker than I am.

[Brian]

I do occasionally say, ben, where did you get this fact?

[Ben]

Dude, I'm a boonker and I'm a debunker.

[Brian]

Yeah, exactly, people.

[Ben]

I.

[Brian]

Of the two of us. Yes.

[Ben]

No. Brian is always like, ben, what's the source for this? And I'm like, okay, Fed, why are you so into sources?

[Brian]

That's like. The source is that it would be cool if it happened.

[Ben]

The source is that somebody once said it.

[Brian]

I heard it on an Instagram reel.

[Ben]

And there you go.

[Brian]

I can't remember where the reel is.

[Ben]

And there you go.

[Brian]

You're like Joseph Smith. It was on the golden tablet. Where are the golden tablets? I don't know.

[Ben]

I'm not saving every Instagram reel.

[Brian]

The Golden Table tablets are lost.

[Ben]

They're gone. Is my word not good enough for you? I guess not. Anyway.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

I don't remember that guy.

[Brian]

Yeah, but there's a guy, he shows all these machines and, like, moving things around, maybe. Here's what I'll do. I'll find it, and then I will have Martina McBride.

[Ben]

My guy's his middle name.

[Brian]

But you're selling his middle name.

[Ben]

I know. Okay. It just came out.

[Brian]

I will have.

[Ben]

You can edit it out.

[Brian]

Put like a. A thumbnail of a YouTube video where he does this right. Right here?

[Ben]

Yeah. And.

[Brian]

And it's gone.

[Ben]

Good. I think it's gone.

[Brian]

So it'll be there and you'll see it. If I can't find it, what he's going to do is he's going to put just a pane here that said Brian lied.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Brian is a liar.

[Ben]

It does. It does not exist.

[Brian]

If. If I am telling the truth, there's going to be a pain here right now says that Brian is not a liar. Okay, now it's gone.

[Ben]

What's your source?

[Brian]

Martin loves it when I do this. I make like 30 minutes of editing work in 10 seconds.

[Ben]

When we could just put a link in the description.

[Brian]

When I could just say link in the description. But let's be honest. Do we remember to put a link in the description?

[Ben]

And who actually looks at links and descriptions? Our people do, because they love Indigo Sundry. Soap link in the description.

[Brian]

That's true. If a link is in the description but no one is there to click it. Is it really there?

[Ben]

Exactly.

[Brian]

It's like Schrodinger's link or tree. So what are some other theories about the. Those are the natural theories. Basically he knew a lot about mechanical advantage levers, these ancient simple non powered devices, and that he did leverage some electric and motors as well to sort of enable these and make them effective. Okay, fine. Now what are some supernatural ones?

[Ben]

There's three remaining theories that are commonly called the supernatural theories or the esoteric theories. One of them is that he was a Mason or Rosicrucian or something like that, and he got into this mysticism and essentially used witchcraft to build these stones. Now when we get into the nitty gritty about how the witchcraft did it, I don't know, it doesn't even pretend.

[Brian]

To say, let's get down to the nitty gritty.

[Ben]

Let's get down to the real nitty gritty. Who is this incarnacion? But when we do that anyway, it doesn't really say. So there's no secret donmos or anything like that. Maybe there is actually.

[Brian]

Maybe there is.

[Ben]

And so time will tell. The reason that people, that some people think he may have been overtly practicing like witchcraft, like satanic witchcraft, is the presence of six pointed stars all over the.

[Brian]

Yeah, not all over, like covering every square.

[Ben]

Look, it's not really all over.

[Brian]

Tattooed all over his body.

[Ben]

There are like two or three.

[Brian]

He was like the guy in Prison Break with these. I'm just kidding. There's like a couple, right?

[Ben]

There's a couple. Yeah. But it is a weird thing to put in like the Jew, the Jew.

[Brian]

Star, like the six, the two triangles.

[Ben]

Yeah, well there's, there's. Believe it or not, that's not the only six pointed star. That is one of them. That's a Masonic symbol because, you know, Solomon was a Jew and so he was the ma. He was the first Mason. Right.

[Brian]

So allegedly.

[Ben]

I don't think that's one of them. I think it's more of like the sort of neopagan six pointed star, if I'm remembering right.

[Brian]

And that would fit with his lot via neopaganism.

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah. And the six pointed star, some of the symbolism is like a five pointed star is supposed to be a symbol of man because it's got the head, the two arms and then the little legs. And the six pointed star is like man plus some other presence or entity.

[Brian]

Okay.

[Ben]

And so it's Sort of this familiar spirit type possession.

[Brian]

It's witchy.

[Ben]

Yeah, it's a witchy woman, you might say. And so that's one of them. That's really the only thing that gives credence to that theory. But I really like it because I think that he was a neo pagan.

[Brian]

Who was into witchy. So maybe he got into spiritualism and ended up communing with some. What we're saying is, in classic haunted cosmos fashion, who built Coral Castle? The fae, the demons.

[Ben]

Now what do you think would be a common familiar spirit in Florida? To me it would be like a coconut that's somehow alive.

[Brian]

It'd be an alligator. Ow.

[Ben]

That's a good one.

[Brian]

Be an alligator. It's like a dinosaur dragon that eats people.

[Ben]

That's a really good one.

[Brian]

All right. And eats puppies sometimes.

[Ben]

Alligator. There you go. Yeah, that's a good one. Another theory is that aliens did it.

[Brian]

You know, I feel like the History Channel once actually covered history and now all it does is say aliens did various things.

[Ben]

The History Channel was. Was World War II in color.

[Brian]

Oh, and it was so cool.

[Ben]

And then it was like Third Reich in color.

[Brian]

Yep.

[Ben]

It like forgot about everything else in World War II except the Third Reich.

[Brian]

Just the Third Reich.

[Ben]

And then it was ancient aliens.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And I think the bridge between those two things is the Nazi bell. So it's actually a very, very natural blind.

[Brian]

Spoiler alert. We might do an episode on the Nazi bell.

[Ben]

Spoiler alert. Maybe.

[Brian]

Or other.

[Ben]

Other Nazi occultists.

[Brian]

Anti gravity occultic space Shippy, Antarctica, MH370 stuff.

[Ben]

So anyway, that's another one. Like, I mean, everyone could have seen that coming from a mile away. Of course, one of the big ideas is, oh, aliens.

[Brian]

I'm not persuaded of aliens just because there's frankly no evidence.

[Ben]

Yeah. And don't you think people would have seen weird lights in the sky around.

[Brian]

There's none of the other classic UAP alien phenomena accompanying it.

[Ben]

Yeah. So. But that is one of them. I just don't think it's a very compelling one.

[Brian]

The last one.

[Ben]

The last one though is that he used the secret technology of cymatics handed down to him from celestial demon gods, which I guess is sort of aliens.

[Brian]

It's a natural.

[Ben]

It's sort of aliens repackage because we.

[Brian]

Both just said it fit under a different category. It's also a natural explanation because this is actually not necessarily an idea that cymatics is like, overtly requires spiritual power in the way that a. The familiar spirit or something. It's Actually, a lost technology theory, but. But that the lost technology came from.

[Ben]

From fallen angels.

[Brian]

Yeah.

[Ben]

So there is demons involved. Don't worry. Don't turn off now, okay? We are gonna blame it on the demons.

[Brian]

Yeah, guys, come on.

[Ben]

But that's it. And really with that, I think that we're safe to go into the hot outro here.

[Brian]

Thanks for listening, guys. Enjoy this Hot outro. We're gonna talk a little bit more about cymatics, but if you haven't already, pick up the book. Haunted Cosmos. Doing your duty in a world that's not just stuff. Maybe you didn't get it for Christmas. Maybe you were disappointed. Look, go ahead and enhance, okay? Maybe you were disappointed in that you dropped hints left and right that the only thing you wanted for Christmas was the haunted cosmos.

[Ben]

Many such cases, they didn't give it to you.

[Brian]

They didn't get it. Listen, I understand. We've all been there. You can order it today with your Christmas money.

[Ben]

That's right.

[Brian]

All right. Take that Christmas money you got in the card. Your Aunt Josephine sent you. A20. Look, chip in. Go ahead. Newchristenimpress.com cosmos. There's a link in the description. Pick up the book. We hope you enjoy it. In all seriousness, a lot of you have asked, what is the book about? It's not episodes of Haunted Cosmos. It's more of foundational work establishing a look at the nature of the world that God made.

[Ben]

Yeah.

[Brian]

The seen and the unseen.

[Ben]

And there may or may not be a secret message hidden in the book that neither Brian nor I meant to do, but is somehow still there nonetheless.

[Brian]

That may or may not.

[Ben]

I said may or may not be. True.

[Brian]

To be fair, he did say or may not be.

[Ben]

Emphasis on the or may not be.

[Brian]

So go check it out, guys. With that said said, we'll take you into this hot outro. We'll see you next time on Hana Cosmos.

[Ben]

Bingo.

[Brian]

Was the bingo really necessary?

[Ben]

No. I. Should I say Yahtzee instead? Yahtzee, I have to say something.

[Brian]

Okay, now I'll take. Yeah, Yahtzee.

[Ben]

All right, Here we go.

[Brian]

In 19. In 1939, a Swedish doctor and teacher named Jarl boarded a bus in a small Tibetan town of Lhasa. It was bound for the Himalayan foothills at the southern border of the country, a remote wilderness. Dr. Jarl marveled at the geography around him. The countries bordering the south side of the mountain chain, like Nepal and Bhutan, were carpeted lands of green forests. He had always assumed the northern countries would be much the same, but he was wrong. Rolling mountains capped with snow sat atop the barren brown of Tibet's high desert. Outside of the villages and few larger cities, there was nothing. Indeed, many of the roads his own bus ran on were just dirt paths covered in washboard gravel that had hardened time and time again each fall after the brief runoff of the summer. It was another world, an eastern one that that was virtually unacquainted with all the things Jarl knew from his upbringing in the West. He had come at the behest of one of his students to help a team of doctors treat one of the high lamas at a monastery. But he could not help regretting this charity as he rode with the other travelers further and further into the abyss of sand and snow. He reached his stop and disembarked to a more ancient city scene. What met him was a translator standing next to two Yaks, the remote Tibetan version of a caravan. He exchanged pleasantries with this new stranger he was meant to trust with his life before awkwardly following his awkward English directions on how to mount the yak. As the day concluded, he watched the blood red and shimmering gold temple crowns of the monastery come into view behind a final ridge that were to cross. His back ached, and he had hardly spoken for a full 24 hours. He was hungry and thirsty and wondered about all the things that he would need to exist normally in that place, but he settled into the monastic life without complaint. He followed their rules of protocols for outsiders without any questions, and over the course of some weeks successfully nursed the lama back to his full strength. What remained after after that was a mixture of study and his own personal and surprising desire to stay for as long as he could. Charles found himself enchanted with the older and slower and more focused life these monks lived. The air was always clean and clear, clear enough for him to think he was looking at the edge of the world when he espied the horizon each morning. Most of all, the monks were kind and warm to him. Of course, he knew he had earned this gratitude by healing their leader, but he also sensed that, for whatever reason, they simply liked him and wanted him to stay around. And so he did for many months. One day during his sojourn, the friend that had originally convinced him to come visit took Dr. Jarl down a winding path into a hidden mountain valley away from the monastery. After hours of hiking through through the dense forest of the foothills, he hardly remembered the wasteland he drove across to get there anymore. They came to a clearing in the trees that faced a sheer cliff of rock on its opposite side. Jarl could see a hole in this cliff with a cantilever stone platform in front of it. He wondered if it was some hyper secluded area of meditation for the Higher Order monks. In the center of the clearing, there stood a large solid stone slab with a bowl notched out of it. Jarl and his friends shared no words at all, and the doctor watched other monks lead one of the yaks to place a stone inside of this notch on the slab such that it would not roll away. Once the stone was in place, other monks emerged from the forest carrying various instruments. Drums, trumpets, and rudimentary harps. Jarl was silently struck by the silence around him, and it gave him the impression that some sacerdotal thing was about to happen. At the sign of a hand from one of the monks, the rest began playing their instruments in a set fashion, all working together to create a rumbling but very powerful sound. Over time, the tempo began to increase and the force of the music began to build. Concomitant with this, the monks began to sing. They chanted a prayer with the smoothest voices they could muster, and to just to Jarl's shock, the stone set in the notch by the yak started to wobble slightly from side to side. All at once, with Jarl's mouth open and his eyes as wide as they had ever been, the massive stone of solid granite rocketed into the air as if it was a small ball. Hit suddenly with a rod, it flew almost 1,000ft up the cliff before gently landing on the stone stone platform in front of the cave opening. Once it landed, yaks inside the cave that Jarl had not seen lumbered out and pulled it inside for whatever the monks were doing for the rest of the day. Dr. Jarl watched as a massive stone after massive stone was shot up into the sky by the music and chanting of the monks. He was the first outsider to ever see the long rumored and secretive practice of hurling stones that Eastern mystics were said to be able to do. Sharon Bullard exited the car and stared with wonder at the massive gate entrance to the famed Coral Castle. She had lived in southern Florida for the entirety of her nine years, but it was the first time she'd actually been to the mysterious place. Immediately, she was enamored. She ran here and there in the courtyard of Ed's place and marveled at the size and immovably solid nature of the stones. She peered through the Polaris telescope and sat in the repentance corner and climbed into the massive rocking chair and all the while questioned just how Ed Leedskalnin could have done such wonderful things. She turned to her parents and noticed her father, a man named Fred, appearing slightly unsettled by it all. Later that night she asked him why didn't he like Coral Castle? Castle, he replied, and said that it was not the case, that he didn't like it, but he just did not know what to make of it. Sharon asked what he meant, and he began telling her a story. In his youth, Fred Bullard lived in Homestead, Florida, and was best friends with a neighbor of his. They would ride their bikes around the town and even into the countryside at the edge of town all day in the summer. Sometimes, when the weather was right and the parents agreed, they would even ride around under the veil of night to excitedly explore their home in darkness. By the time they were teenagers, rumor had done her work in spreading word of the strange Latvians project, how Ed never worked during the day, only ever worked alone, and claimed to use the methods of quarrying and building enlisted by the ancient Egyptians when they built the pyramids so long ago. Fred and his friend knew that that nobody had ever seen how Ed actually moved his multi ton stones around. Everybody just knew that he somehow did it. This was, of course, not enough for the intrepid and curious pair of boys. And so one night in the summer, when the sky was clear but very dark from a waning moon, they rode out of Homestead before parking their bikes a long way off from Ed's property and stalking up to it quietly. I know it seems a scene straight out of a Stephen King novel. As they approached and through the gaps in the breeze that rustled the palm branches everywhere around them, they started to hear the sound of one singing. They crept as silently as they could, carefully choosing each step so as to avoid stepping on stones or dried grass and leaves. Finally they had arrived on the outside of Coral Castle's massive wall. Still, the singing endured, and it sounded to them monotone but nonetheless lovely in its own way. Clambering quietly up a branchy tree that grew next to the wall, the boys finally looked with an odd mixture of amazement and horror at the image before them. The small frame of a man in Ed Leedskalman walked gingerly in his courtyard, his hands in his pockets, while he sang his tune almost breathlessly. All the while there moved about him a block of limestone coral big enough to flatten a van. It floated and sifted in the sky as if shaken by the same breeze that rattled the palm trees, but it did not deviate from following where Ed led such power and so unknown. The boy slipped off their tree and ran softly back the way they had come until finding their bikes and pedaling quickly home. They spoke of it very little, if ever after that, didn't not enjoy the memory. So how did Ed Leed Skalnin build his coral castle? And why did he do it? Was it for a lost love? Was it just because he knew he could? But if so, how did he know he could? Did he have access to some secret knowledge shared by the ancients but lost to modern minds? Did he consort with demons and their Eastern mystic prophets to bend nature to his will? Did he befriend the devil and gain a familiar spirit spirit to construct a tourist trap for Floridians? Did he just work painstakingly each night at chiseling away the stone and then moving them with clever tools of leverage and balance? Did he do it by the aid of some power beyond thought and speculation? Of course, we may never know the answer to any of these questions. Certainly nobody today knows how he made his masterpiece. But perhaps there are clues. For those willing to look and not sure shrink back from uncomfortable thoughts. We will leave you with a lasting word from our previous episode and its close, which was also in regards to Coral Castle. There is one likeness of a face carved into the rock of Coral Castle. It is not a woman's face, as some may expect, given Ed's cover story. In fact, one can question whether or not it is a human face at all. It appears rather to be a humanoid face, one with exaggerated eyes glowing yellow or gold, one with little in the way of a nose but somehow perfect holes drilled for nostrils, one with a thin slit of a mouth. If the face resembles anything, it resembles that of a monster, some forgotten thing from the history man had. Before man began thinking of history, people have wondered whether or not it was this face commemorated forever in stone, which belonged to the thing teaching Ed had all of the skills he would need to build this place. For of course they were skills unique apparently to him and very few select others outside of the pagan ancient world. And maybe that's not a coincidence.