Season 09 Episode 04: To Each Man His Castle (Pt. 1)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
In the middle of Salisbury Plane in the southwest of England,
stands one of the most famous ancient sites in the world, Stonehenge.
For millennia, it has been a focal point of myth
and mystery. Whichever culture constructed it, they left no further
trace of themselves, no writings or firm indication as to

(00:31):
who they were or why they went to such great
effort to build their monument. Theories ranged from the practical
to the mystical. The Australian science writer Lynn Kelly posits
that Stonehenge served as anmonic resource for Neolithic Britons, that
the mathematics and information encoded in its construction could be

(00:53):
a way of passing down crucial knowledge in an era
before written language. Some people think it has things to
tell us about the stars. Modern archaeologists have pointed to
the site's astronomical alignments, perfectly framing the dawn rays of
the summer solstice and the setting sun on the winter solstice.

(01:15):
In nineteen sixty three, the British astronomer Gerald Hawkins published
a paper identifying dozens of lunar and solar correlations in
the ancient complex. Two years later, he co authored Stonehenge
Decoded with JB. White, in which they described the site
as a neolithic computer, able to not just map, but

(01:38):
to accurately predict astronomical events. Others suggest that Stonehenge lies
at an important junction of lay lines, the theoretical grid
network of energies said to connect prehistoric edifices and important
natural features across Britain and the world. Still more esoteric

(01:59):
theories about the megalith include its supposed healing abilities, unique
acoustic properties that allow it to be played as a
giant instrument, or the claim that the entire site is
laid out to represent the female sex organs in a
grand system of fertility worship. Yet, as with so many

(02:19):
ancient structures freckled across the face of the modern world,
the question of why is secondary to the more pressing
problem of how, because the sheer physical theft of Stonehenge
presents its own great mystery. The Stonehenge complex comprises two

(02:44):
concentric rings of standing stone, of which ninety three are
still standing, though estimates suggest the Henge once included almost
twice that number. The outer ring is constructed from sarsen,
a silic rite sandstone found in large quantities throughout the
surrounding area. Even with such an abundant source of building materials,

(03:08):
the carving, lifting and positioning of the Sarsen stones appears
an almost superhuman feet. Each weighs roughly twenty five tons
and are capped by similarly massive little stones that have
been lifted over thirteen feet to rest atop the vertical columns.
But that is nothing compared to the logistics of the

(03:30):
inner ring. The smaller bluestones that comprise it, each weighing
two to five tons, have been traced to the Priscilli
Hills of Western Wales, roughly one hundred and fifty miles away.
Even more staggering is the mystery behind the circle's centerpiece,
the Altar Stone, a six ton mass of solid rock

(03:52):
that only in twenty twenty four was discovered to have
likely been transported down from the north of Scotland four
hundred an thirty miles away. Exactly how and why these
stones were quarried and transported from such great distances is
perhaps the greatest question that haunts the Great Stone Circle

(04:14):
even today. So much of Stonehenge's mystery relies on the
long passage of time. Looking back from our technological vantage point,
we wonder at the achievements of those we consider more
primitive people. Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, Indonesia's Barda Valley Stones,

(04:37):
the Great Gate of the Sun at Bolivia's Tiwanaku. Each
of these baffles the modern mind because the scale and
finesse of the construction seems to so far exceed the
technology available at the time. It's why the hint of
the other worldly adheres so closely to these places, why

(04:59):
conspira theories take root about the helpful hands of giants
or ancient extraterrestrial visitors. But what have we discovered such
a feat of inexplicable engineering in the modern age? A
wonder of stone constructed little more than a century ago,
when all the rewards of modernity were readily available. Yet

(05:22):
still we cannot determine how it was accomplished, Because, unlike
the mass efforts of Neolithic tribes, enslaved people's, or cultish devotees,
there is a modern megalith, often called America's Stonehenge, that
appears to be the work of a single man. And
what marvels he built? This is unexplained. And I'm Richard

(05:48):
McLean Smith, which about Edward Leedskalnin's life remains unknown or
in doubt. The man himself is almost as much of
an enigma as the remarkable things he achieved. What we

(06:12):
do know is that he was born in eighteen eighty
seven in what was then a Baltic province of the
Russian Empire, in a region that corresponds to present day Latvia,
but the specifics of his birth, both the exact day
and the precise location, are clouded by conflicting documentation. This

(06:33):
early shadow of ambiguity would cloak him all his life,
a sense that Edward was a man out of time
and without a natural place in the world. The fifth
and youngest son of tenant farmers, Edward spent his youth
working the fields with his family. He attended school until

(06:53):
he was nine years old, but that was about as
far as his formal education went. However, Edward had remained
a keen reader, and despite his many barriers to learning,
he would grow into a literate man, fluent in at
least three languages. It said he also learned the craft
of stonemasonry from his father, a skill that he would

(07:15):
put to use as a young man, carving local gravestones
and working on the homes of landowners, and one that
would ultimately come to dominate his lasting legacy. Like many
people in the Baltic regions at the time, the leed
scown In family lived a life of grinding rural poverty
with little chance of change. Imperial Russia was a society

(07:39):
where power and wealth were concentrated in the hands of
a few aristocrats and industrialists, while millions of small, old
farmers and factory workers remained trapped in hardship. The Czar
ruled as an absolute monarch who'd supposedly been chosen by
Gaunt to lead the empire. There were no elections or

(08:01):
any other democratic processes. His vast empire was policed by fear,
censorship of the press, surveillance by secret police, and the
threat of exile or execution for anyone who dared to
imagine a different world. For those who self identified as

(08:22):
something other than Russian, the sense of being held down
was even sharper. Russification policies smothered their language and culture,
and doors to education or professional life were kept firmly shut.
To be born financially impoverished usually meant you stayed that way.

(08:42):
There was no middle class to escape into no ladders
to climb, just a lifetime of labor, paying taxes to
a distant empire that seemed to exist simply to keep
you in your place. But then, in a bitterly cold
January in nine nineteen o five, something broke. In Saint Petersburg, Russia.

(09:06):
A crowd of workers marched peacefully through the snow toward
the Tsar's winter palace, demanding fair wages and political reform.
They carried icons and sang hymns, believing the Czar, who
despite everything many regarded as a caring, paternal figure, would
listen to them. But the Tzar wasn't there. Fearing the protest,

(09:31):
he'd already cowardly fled the city and authorized his Imperial
guard to take care of the matter. When the crowds
refused to disperse, the imperial guard opened fire on them.
Hundreds were slaughtered in the snow, with the massacre becoming
known as Bloody Sunday. The news spread across the empire

(09:52):
like a shockwave. In Riga, the future capital of Latvia,
ten thousand protesters gathered on the banks of the Dowgava River,
demanding change. Soldiers fired on them too. Some were killed,
where they stood. Others were forced to flee over the
river's frozen water, only for the ice to crack beneath them,

(10:14):
plunging them to their deaths. The unrest of nineteen oh
five was a moment that revealed the truth of the
Russian Empire that it would rather kill than reform. But
this only strengthened the resolve of those who wanted change

(10:36):
and the possibility of self determination. In response, many future
Latvian families, like the leed Scownins, were drawn into a
fervor of revolution that quickly engulfed the region. Edward's older
brother was arrested and imprisoned, and there is some suggestion
that Edward himself joined a local militia waging guerrilla rebellion

(10:58):
from the forest near his home Roome. Whether or not
this is true, it's certain that the climate of violence
had an impact on the eighteen year old Edward. Having
watched loved ones die, suffer imprisonment, or face exile in
their pursuit of what ultimately seemed like an impossible freedom,
he began to dream of a better future for himself.

(11:22):
For Edward, as for so many individuals toiling in the
remnants of oppressive old empires. There was one place above
all that offered the chance to break free and maybe
one day lived the life he aspired to, a shining
beacon of hope and freedom against the insufferable darkness of

(11:42):
authoritarianism America. Edward kept his dream alive, but then in
nineteen eleven, when he was twenty four, he became besotted
with a sixteen year old girl named Agnes Scuffs. He
proposed to her later that year. The couple set a

(12:03):
date to be married in a small Lutheran church in
the nearby town of vetual Bene on the day, with
friends and family in attendance, including Agnes's disapproving mother. When
asked by the reverend if he took his fiancee to
be his lawfully wedded wife, Edward proudly answered I do.

(12:24):
But when Agnes's turn came, she paused for a moment before,
as the story goes, promptly turning around and striding out
the church without a word. Maybe she bought at marrying
a much older man, or maybe her mother's warnings about
his lowly prospects had finally cut through. Either way, left

(12:45):
alone at the altar, Edward burned with embarrassment, Edward too,
ran out of the church. Whether the couple reconvened outside
for a brief moment or not, we will never know.
What is known is that from that day on, Edward
turned his back on his home. With the danger of

(13:07):
Czarist retribution, for the numerous protests still lingering, and the
shame of a broken engagement, it was time for Edward
to leave. On March twenty third, nineteen twelve, at the
Hamburg Docks, Edward leed Scownan bordered the SS Pennsylvania, bound
for New York in search of a new life. After

(13:37):
a fortnight at sea, the Pennsylvania docked at New York's
Ellis Island on April seventh, ed disembarked with two friends,
Ernst Warsaw and Bertha Schmidt. A photograph captures him at
the border desk, clean cut and well dressed, with a
thick mustache and tidy dark hair under a bowler hat.

(13:59):
Already for a fresh start, the trio gave their forward
destination as the New Jersey city of New Brunswick. Though
no one thought anything of it at the time, Ed's
immigration papers hint at something slippery about the man under occupation.
He listed himself as a day laborer, which was true.

(14:21):
More surprising, however, he gave his nationality as Russian and
his ethnicity as Lithuanian. Oddly, Ed also gave his height
as five foot six, when in fact it was much
closer to a flat five feet. Having spent a few
weeks with Bertha and Ernest in New Brunswick, Ed decided

(14:43):
to move on. For four months, he traveled through the
Midwest on a rough northwest trajectory towards the Pacific coast.
In August of nineteen twelve, he crossed into Canada and
took up work at a logging camp in Cranbrooughritagtish, Columbia.
On the paperwork he filed for both the border crossing

(15:05):
and the job, Ed this time listed his height as
five foot nine. It must have been palpably untrue, but
labour was needed, and Ed, however, small, was nothing if
not a hard worker. But again, after just a few months,
a restlessness overtook him and Ed crossed back into the

(15:26):
United States. This time he told immigration officials that he
was bound for Spokane, Washington, but from there he vanished
from documentation for three years, reappearing in Elkhorn, Oregon. In
June nineteen seventeen to dispute his draft registration for the
First World War. Though Ed had been in North America

(15:49):
for five years, he had yet to seek citizenship. Some
suggest that he was merely biding his time, waiting for
the Czarist regime to fall before returning home. Others theorized
that Ed had been following the unfolding of the First
World War in Europe from Afar with understandable horror, safe

(16:09):
in the knowledge that as a foreign citizen in America,
he would remain free from the US draft. In the
latter case, at least he was right. Ed avoided the war,
and once again dropped out of view. Seven years later,

(16:33):
in the early winter of nineteen twenty three, a real
estate agent named Reubin Mosa was driving on a country
road thirty miles north of Miami in Florida when he
suddenly slammed on his brakes. In a ditch at the
side of the road was the heaped body of a
man lying face down in the dirt. He looked like

(16:54):
a stringless puppet. Mosa rushed from the car, relieved to
find the man was alive, but only just His breathing
was thick and labored, and he couldn't stand without assistance.
The man was Edward Leeds, Scowning. The real estate agent
helped him up and got him into the car. Then

(17:17):
together they drove on to moses home in nearby Florida City.
Once there, Moses's wife, Francis, immediately called for a doctor.
Doctor Ekman arrived to attend to the stricken Ed. It
didn't take long for Eckman to realize that Ed, who
was desperately pale and skinny, was suffering from tuberculosis. As

(17:42):
Beckmann explained to the Moses and the semi sensible Ed,
the prognosis wasn't good. Even if Ed were to recover
from the immediate crisis, he said sombly, he would likely
only have six months at most before he succumbed to it.
Feeling suddenly responsible for this stranger who had so unexpectedly

(18:05):
come into their lives, the Moses offered to let him
stay with them for the foreseeable future. With great charity,
they moved him into their tool shed slowly, along with
their daughter Lois. Against all odds, they succeeded in nursing
him back from the press abyss, and over time he

(18:26):
told them all about who he was and where he'd
been in the last few years, As he explained, having
been seduced by an advert seeking migrant workers to fill
jobs in the Pacific Northwest logging industry under the promise
of bright, sunny climes just like California, he'd arrived to

(18:47):
find it anything but it rained endlessly, and at times
it seemed the sun barely shined at all. But having
no money left, he had little choice but to stay
and find a jomp. The work was brutally hard and
not well paid. Meanwhile, the mills were damp and filthy

(19:08):
places festooned with mold, the sort of conditions that clung
to you wherever you went. When ed started coming down
with something, he made the decision to leave the state
and headed south in search of warmer weather. Though he

(19:35):
never explained exactly how, Ed claimed to have come into
money at some point after leaving his logging job, and
eventually made it all the way down to Florida. Joe
Bullard Junior, whose two thousand novel Waiting for Agnes fictionalized
the life of Edward Leedscowning, relates a story told to

(19:57):
him by a man who claims his father won met
ed on a street in Jacksonville. According to this story,
the man's father was working as a bank clerk when
he saw a short man pass by the window holding
a witching stick, also known as a dowsing rot. Some
believe with the use of such a stick, holding it

(20:19):
out in front of you until it moves, it's possible
to find water or sources of energy under the earth.
When the man asked ed what he was searching for,
he replied, when I find it, I'll know, and with
that he promptly carried on his way. Florida City is
four hundred miles from Jacksonville. Did Ed walk the entire

(20:44):
way there dowsing for whatever unspecified prize seem to be
eluding him? And such a question is quickly followed by
a more intriguing one. How far had Ed walked already
by the time he reached Jacksonville, all the way from
the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps it is one of the many

(21:06):
mysteries that surround the eccentric man. Either way, it appears
he never filled in this blank to the Moses, nor
did he reveal how exactly he ended up in that
ditch and where he'd been living in the weeks prior
to that. As the weeks passed, convalescing in the Moses shed,

(21:28):
day by day, Ed got better. Knowing that sunlight was
said to be beneficial to tuberculosis patients, they set up
a chair for him in the garden. Once he was
well enough to leave his bed, Ed would sit for hours,
basking in the sunshine that never really vacates the sky

(21:48):
in southern Florida. There are those who think that sunlight
was the answer to Ed's recovery, though medical studies have
found a correlation between UV light, or rather the victim
and d that the body converts it to, and the
suppression of tuberculosis. Sunshine alone could never have cured someone

(22:10):
as far gone as Edward, but there are other theories.
A neighbour of the Moses apparently described author Joe Bullet
that they had seen it lying out in the sun
with wires and cables wrapped around his torso, coiling away
to a generator near his lodgings. Bullet, who he must remember,

(22:33):
fictionalized Ed's life, draws the startling conclusion Ed was treating
himself with electromagnetic current, possibly to somehow augment and intensify
the benefits of the Sun's UV light, whatever he was doing.
As early as February of nineteen twenty three, just weeks

(22:56):
after the Moses had taken him in, the man who'd
otherwise it's been at death's door was now miraculously well
enough to begin looking for a place of his own.
Ed's seeming return to sudden health so soon after doctor

(23:17):
Beckman's ominous prognosis is certainly unusual, and in the weeks
and months that followed, his health only got better. Some
years later, Ed would publish a scientific pamphlet titled Magnetic Current.
It posits a mystifying reorganization of electromagnetic and atomic theory,

(23:40):
arguing that it is magnets, not atoms, that formed the
building blocks of the universe. It was Ed's belief that
all matter is made up of a swirl of north
and south poles magnets, each smaller than the atom, smaller
even than particles that will eventually be identified in emerging

(24:02):
subatomic science. The pamphlet is incomprehensible to the lay person,
but it was the output of years of private research
and amateur experimentation. Edward Leed Skalman was contemptuous of mainstream
professional science, According to him, scientists were looking in the

(24:23):
wrong place for their understanding of electricity and were cognizant
of only one half of the whole concept, as he
put it. There are some who believe that Ed had
used his unique understanding of magnetism to somehow recalibrate and
expunge the tuberculosis riddling his body. There are some, too,

(24:46):
who believe he might have used it for a very different,
but equally startling feat. When Ed was well enough to
start looking for somewhere else to live, he wasn't interested
in buying a han else or an apartment. Instead, he
was looking for land to build upon. There would have

(25:07):
been plenty of plots to choose from. At that point
in time, Florida City was ill deserving of its name.
It was much more a loose collage of farms, scrubland,
and swamp, with a total population still under one thousand people.
With the money Ed had mysteriously come into, he could

(25:27):
have purchased any patch he wanted, but he wanted something specific.
He was looking for a certain kind of rock to
build on. Technically it was classified as oolite limestone, but
more commonly known as coral. It's found all over the world,
but in very high quantities in southern Florida. Was coral

(25:58):
what Ed had been so woching for on his possible
long travels across the country. Did his witch stick lead
him to Florida in pursuit of the perfect materials for
the strange project that had been fermenting in his mind.
If so, he was a doubly lucky man, because it
just so happened that the greatest quantity of coral in

(26:21):
Florida City lay directly under the land of the family
who'd saved his life. On February twenty seventh, nineteen twenty three,
a small notice ran in the local newspaper, The Homestead Enterprise.
It said, simply, E leedscownin, a Californian, has purchased one

(26:43):
acre of the R. L. Mosa Homestead and was planning
to erect a home soon. For such a short report,
it got a lot wrong. Ed was no Californian, and
he actually bought two acres of Reuben Moses land. The
reporter did get one thing right, though. Ed was planning

(27:05):
to make a home, but what he eventually built would
be so much more than that you've been listening to
unexplained season nine, Episode four, To Each Man His Castle,
Part one, the second and final episode, will be released
next Friday, November twenty eighth. This episode was written by

(27:29):
Neil McRobert and Richard mclin Smith. Thank you as ever
for listening. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created
by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained.
The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide.

(27:51):
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heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or
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(28:14):
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(29:00):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Season 09 Episode 04: To Each Man His Castle (Pt. 1)