Transcript
Ben (0:03)
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Brian (0:53)
It'S it's.
Ben (2:01)
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.