Edward Leedskalnin's Coral Castle

After being jilted a day before his wedding and narrowly surviving tuberculosis, Latvian immigrant Edward Leedskalnin spent almost 30 years building Coral Castle out of huge blocks of stone. But how did he make it, and why wouldn't he allow anyone to watch him at work? Tune in to learn more.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
From UFOs two, ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, everyone,
welcome to the show. My name is Matt and I'm Ben,
and this is stuff they don't want you to know. Today,

(00:23):
we're gonna kind of recap look back at our episode
on Edward leads Skalman's coral castle. Yeah, interesting thing. First
question for most people would be what the heck is
a coral castle. It's a good question because this thing
is not actually a castle. No, no, not really. It's
kind of I don't know what I would call it
a It's kind of an art exhibit or a compound.

(00:45):
That's exactly what it is. It's an art exhibit. And
it's not coral, is it. No? No, it's made of
a kind of limestone called polytic limestone, which is actually
a sedimentary rock. Well. Well, first of all, where is
this thing? Oh right, yes, yes, this is, along with
so many other crazy things located in Florida, Florida. Yeah,

(01:06):
Florida also has an abnormally large population of cults. Really,
we need to look into this. We do we do? Now?
When when we first started our show on Coral Castle.
We did this as an audience request, right, yeah, that's correct.
We we there were several people on YouTube clamoring for it,

(01:27):
and most of our best episodes come from audience suggestions,
and we were excited to do this one because it's
both close to us in terms of space geographic space,
and in terms of time. You know. Oh yeah, well
it's fascinating there. There's there were so many questions and
there still are so many questions revolving around how the
heck this thing was made um and about the guy

(01:50):
that made it himself. Yeah yeah, and uh the Okay,
so Coral Castle itself, it's made of these huge rock sculptures.
When we say huge, we mean they wait tons, they're
nine ft tall, et cetera. But there's great skill in
precision in the in the crafting of these sculptures. For instance,

(02:10):
a door that wastes tons and tons that once upon
a time you could just turn with the slightest touch
because it was so well balanced. That's pretty incairible. They're
also all kinds of other, uh, just very cool shapes
that were made out of the stone. There's I know,
there's a sundial. There. There's also well they call it
a Pilaris telescope. Do you know much about this thing?

(02:31):
I know it looks like a tower and it's got
a hole in the center or not the center of
the top. Yeah, yeah, the um the hole in the
top actually is a Latvian star because the guy who
created the obelisk, our buddy, Edward lead Scaldan, was himself
from Latvia. There's there's other cool stuff too, like the

(02:52):
giant furniture, rocking chairs, um, a water well. An obelisk,
of course, because what would a strange numant b without
an obelisk. Always got to have one of those. Well again,
we'll talk about it later. But but he had some
Egyptian influence in his castle, right yes. And there was
no mortar in this, right man. It's just no, no, no.

(03:14):
They're all just fit together almost perfectly. And and I guess,
let's okay. There's a reason why they're fit together so well,
and that's because Edward had kind of a background. His
family had a background in masonry, right yes, yes, Although
his formal education was fairly limited. Edward lead Skalman born
in January twelfth, eighteen seven had an extensive homeschooling regimen,

(03:39):
likely by his grandfather, who was also a mason. So
he was trained in the ways of stonemasonry. Oh wow,
that's cool. So let's talk about what leads a person
to go to Florida and build castle of coral or
of of limestone. Well, it's a it's a good well

(03:59):
to say story, but you want to hear it anyway.
All right, So Ed is twenty eight years old, it's
nineteen nineteen. The love of his life. Lady's last name
was Scruff. I believe she um is sixteen eighteen, she's
in her teens. She's sixteen, and she doesn't want to

(04:20):
marry him, even though even though he asked her in everything,
so well, hold on, did she say yes initially? Was
there an engagement? There was kind of. Uh, that was
kind of an engagement. It was a spurning in the result,
a spurned lover spurned so bad that he went across
the Atlantic. Uh Landed, I believe in Canada and trapes

(04:42):
about the East coast. Um until uh tuberculosis concerns um
or should we say tubercular concerns. I like it. Yeah,
it sound a little dr sucy. Well, we'll keep it.
The tuberculosis drove him to Florida and hopes that the
warmer climate would help alleviate some of his pain. And
once he got in Florida, he did something very interesting.

(05:05):
He started kind of this monument to his um lost love.
So okay, so the coral castle is it was made
for her, it was made for his box love. That's interesting.
After after he's been spurned, he went ahead and decided,
I'm going to make this monument out of Do you
think he did it out of spite? Like, guess what,

(05:28):
guess what? I made this for you, but you know whatever,
I made this for you, but you know whatever. I
hope that's the in script show on the stones. Well,
it's it's strange because he spends the next like thirty
years or so building these structures and he dies in nine.
As far as we know, I'm kidding him. We were

(05:49):
pretty sure um but something interesting would happen. He would
charge people to check out the check out the structure,
pretty reasonable price, like a dime or something, and then
then when they asked him how I would build it,
he would say, I've learned the secrets of weight and leverage.
I've learned the secrets of the Pyramids, the builders of

(06:12):
the Pyramids. Yeah. Well okay, so in our in the
video we talked about this a little bit about what
those secrets could possibly be. There are some people who
think they're some maybe magical or hidden technologies that he found. Uh.
There are even other people that think there is some
kind of energy that he was able to harness, like

(06:33):
electromagnetism or just magnetism or even oh what weren't there harmonies?
Some people are saying to use some kind of specific
harmonies that allowed levitation to occur, right, Yeah, that, um,
a certain frequency would be able to negate in part
the effects of gravity, which is interesting, or the even

(06:55):
at Edward lid Scaldin himself had psychic powers. Because the
reason that we hear a lot of this stuff come
out is first it's really cool, it's you know, it's
sci fi and it's interesting. But second, he was fairly
secretive about his process working with this stuff. Um. And third,
people who own Coral Castle and we'll get to the

(07:17):
cool part where you can visit Coral Castle to day,
I have a definite financial interest in sort of spicing
up the story. So the more mystery they can purport
to have well, and if he was selling tickets to
it or you know, his charging small amounts, he also
had probably a high stake and making it mysterious and mystical.
Oh and he was weird too. Did you ever read

(07:38):
those pamphlets that he wrote. You can find some of
them online. I read some about morality and how to
court uh a woman? Well, yeah, I think that's a
book in every home. Is the name of that one?
I'm I don't know. It takes all kinds, Ben, and
I was. I was interested. At least he wrote something down.
It's better than I've done. Well. He is also, um,

(08:02):
just cartoonishly politically incorrect in this day and age. Um,
he would say this. He would say stuff, for instance, like, uh, well,
we shouldn't let people who are poor or don't have
jobs vote if you let the weak vote, and that's
what's wrong with the country, which I don't think would
fly in most debates today. However, Um, you know, there
might be some people who privately believe that. But he

(08:24):
also wrote some strange theories about magnetism, and this is
one of the reasons why people thought that he had
uh some other unknown power or technology. However, it's more
probable that he he learned how to use kind of
the basic mechanisms of physics. Some of the basic tools
have like pulleys, levers, oh, simple machines, simple machines exactly. Yeah,

(08:48):
that's a point. And you know that's kind of the best,
the best theory that we have for how the Egyptians
did it. Just manpower and simple machines. Yeah, and ingenuity.
I think in our episode we talk about some um
modern hobbyists who have figured out ways to move gigantic

(09:09):
blocks all by themselves, like the guy building the replica
of Stonehenge right, and you can see Edward lead Skalman's
tools on display, I believe at Coral Castle today, there's
also an interesting guy named Orville Irwin, a friend of
Lead Scaldan, and he wrote a book with a just

(09:29):
terrible title. I'm gonna lay that on you guys right now.
I think the title is terrible. Uh are you ready?
Mr Kant is Dead the Story of the Coral Castle,
Mr Kent. I assume that that refers to something in
the book. Maybe I'll like the title more after I
read the book, which I will read. But um Orville

(09:52):
Orville claims uh that lead Scalton's methods are not as
mysterious as some would have us believe. Right Like he uh,
he points out that exactly what you said, these principles,
weight and leverage, that Edward leed Skaldan did do the
work on his own, which is amazing already, but that
he did it through um ingenuity, through knowing how to

(10:18):
um arrange these stones. If anything, one of his most
extraordinary powers would have been. Uh. That he was very
very good at figuring out the center of gravity of
his gigantic structures and at keeping a secret. And it
keeping a secret, that's a very good, good superpower. Um.
But we we so we hate to bust the bubble

(10:39):
for some people. But everything that that we found about
Edward Leeds Skaldan does show us he's an eccentric individual.
It does show us that he really did build Coral Castle. Oh.
One of the things we I don't think we covered
in the video, sorry, that was that he bought a
single acre of land for some ridiculously low price in

(11:02):
Florida originally and he started to build his coral castle.
Then for some reason he had to move it. I
think there was coming in. Yeah, and he decided to
move it, and he got a friend to help him
move all of these giant blocks, just the truck and
the driver. Yeah. Well, and and he didn't even have
a truck at the time. I don't think. I think
he had a chassis of a truck or at least

(11:24):
a small He had parts of a truck that could move,
but it couldn't function. So we had to get another
friend too, I guess attached to his truck and then move. Okay,
that way, but he moved the entire thing and he
got I think it's ten acres of land and it
only takes up about three acres on the ten acre plot,
but right, and he sold some of that land and

(11:45):
that's where he got a lot of the money, they
say to live for a while there by selling some land.
And as far as we know, he was never reunited
with his lost Latvian love. I doubt she's ever even
seen it. You know, it's weird since she is ten
years was ten years younger than him. It would be

(12:06):
cool if she if she did see it. You know,
I'd like to hear that story. If anybody, if if
you know of this occurring, please let us know. Send
us an email or something. Yes, we are Conspiracy Discovery
dot com. We'll go ahead and drop that in because
sometimes people might miss it if we say it at
the end, but we'll say it again if you're just
like hearing it. Um, let's end on this note, Matt.

(12:28):
People can visit Coral Castle. Yes, it's still there. It's
still there, you guys, And most of the stuff still works.
There was one one gate doesn't work as well as
it did because they had to fix it. Um. But
here's how you get there. You uh go toward Homestead,
Florida in Miami Dade County. Um. It's at the intersection

(12:50):
of South Dixie Highway and Southwest one seventh Avenue. There
it is, And you can even type it into Google
Maps now and find Coral Castle, which is kind of cool.
Oh yeah, I wonder if you can just go to
a street view. I haven't checked that. Wouldn't that be cool?
I haven't done that either. Look around in the castle
Coral Castle. Oh no, man, they probably have blurted out

(13:12):
in some way to you know, make sure people will
still pay money to get in and look at everything. Yeah,
that might still be something they don't want you to know.
Oh well, every time. UM, all right, so we're gonna
head out. We hope that you enjoyed our episode on
Coral Castle. You can find us on Facebook, We're all
over Twitter. Were conspiracy Stuff on both of those avenues. Uh.

(13:34):
You can also send us an email directly, right, Yeah,
that's right. You can always find us at conspiracy at
Discovery dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon,
visit test tube dot com slash conspiracy Stuff. You can
also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at

(13:56):
conspiracy Stuff