It is nineteen seventy one and the August heat beats down on the Wiltshire countryside in southern England. Five free spirited teens who've spent their summer traveling the country in a campavan, hopping from one festival to another, or on their way to their final destination, an unofficial campsite on Salisbury Plain. As their van crests a hill, it comes into view Stonehenge. The behemoth stands tall and inscrutable against
the rolling green hills. The ancient ruins are comprised of a partial outer ring of vertical sarsen stones that stand about thirteen feet tall and seven feet wide, some still possess seeing their stone lintels, And in the center of it all stands what's left of a series of trilithons, huge stand alone n shaped structures which together once stood in the shape of a horseshoe. Three still stand complete, each around twenty feet high. They look like giant portals
to some other place. Another vast stone of the inner sanctum lies flat on the ground, leading some to believe it may have been some kind of altar. The five teenages are mesmerized as they draw ever closer even at a distance. The vastness of the stones and their weighty presence is palpable. Just beyond it lies what's known as a heel stone, a single outlying standing stone to the northeast.
The kids in the van think back to the summer solstice two months before, when they, along with many of their friends, gathered there to watch the sunrise it crested the horizon. Just to the left of the heelstone. Many years before, a second stone had stood there too, the
pair of them perfectly framing the rising solstice sun. As the five friends continue on their way, they talk about how it all might have once looked, the perfect completed circle of the outer ring, the giant trilithon stones inside, the tallest of which would have towered over the others
at twenty four feet high. Debate surrounding what's left of the stones that litter the inner circle continues to rage to this day, as archaeologists, historians, and geologists argue over which stone stood upright, which ones have broken into pieces, and what on earth it was all for, none of which is any concern to the teenagers. As they arrived finally at their destination after parking up, they grabbed their
camping gear and head straight for the mighty structure. The enigmatic stone circle looms high over the teenagers as they make their way inside, passing first through the outer ring before settling right in the center. Pleased to find the place is completely deserted, and there among the collapsed stones, they pitched their tents. Yuenesco has since prevented open access to Stonehenge, deeming it at World Heritage Site, but things
were different in the nineteen seventies. Long the group are opening beers and smoking weed, philosophizing on the meaning of life and soaking up the strange energy of the place. They note the muted sounds of the surrounding world and how oddly charged the air seems, the result of the storm, perhaps slowly moving toward them. It rolls closer as the evening wears on, the sky darkening ominously as heavy rain clouds slowly blot out the sun. Then the rain begins.
It pummels down onto the group as they huddle in their tents. Thunder booms above and lightning forks the sky nearby. A local police officer notices the strange frequency of lightning and the way it casts the stones into sharp relief against the sky as it lights up with a fierce, electric blue glow. Others step out of their homes, farmers and local residents, drawn by the blinding light and the sound of trees crashing to the ground as the storm
grows in intensity. Then another sound seems to carry over to them, just audible through the booms of thunder and the thrashing of branches, the sound of screaming coming from the direction of Stonehenge. The screams are faint and ghostly, at first, hurled toward them on the wind, before being ripped away again as the squawn rages on, but grow
steadily in volume. Drawn by the screams, the police officer sprints toward the henge, but is forced to stop, throwing his arms up to his face as a fresh bolt of lightning shoots down from the sky. Moments later, he can only watch in mesmerized horror as another bolt shoots down, hitting the center of the henge in a blast of white blue light. Then the screaming stops. The officer falls back,
too afraid to get any closer. When the storm finally passes, the officer rushes into the stone circle, racing himself what he might find there dead bodies, perhaps hideously burned and charred by the lightning, But what he sees is far more eerie. There are backpacks and the remnants of a small fire, but not a single person. The campers had completely disappeared. In some versions of this story, the teenagers have names Julia Ashton, Lucas Adams, Cherie E. Wilson Junior,
Daniel Wilson, and Wilma Rupert. Their details are said to have been found on missing persons reports. It is, of course, an urban myth created on Internet forums and message boards. Nonetheless, it serves as a perfect allegory for Stonehenge. Stories around it persist, a relic from a bygone era, with no written explanation for its existence, centuries of speculation spinning itself into a tangled web of myth and history, an alluring mixture of fact and fiction, all shadowed by an ever
present aura of death and pagan's spiritual energy. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLane. Smith. Stonehenge captivates us precisely because we don't have all the answers. Who built it, how did they build it, When did they build it? And most importantly, why did they build it? One of the earliest answers came from one of Britain's earliest historiographers.
Galfridus Alturas, also known as Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth century cleric from Wales, was a major figure in the development of written history, best known for popularizing tales of the fabled King Arthur, a mythical figure said to have defended ancient Britons against the invading Anglo Saxons in the fifth century CE. For his Stonehenge origin story, Galfridus Alturus
spun a tale of magic and wonder. According to him, back in the fifth century, two brothers named Hengist and Horser, members of the ancient tribe of people known as Dutes, arrived in Britain from what his present day Denmark. They came first to fight as mercenaries for the so called King Vortigern of the Britons, but would eventually turn on him. Hengust is said to have led a bloody uprising, murdering
four hundred or so of Vortigan's men. Vortigan's successor, King Aurelius Ambrosius, the supposed uncle of King Arthur, was devastated by the assault. Such was his grief that he declared no ordinary memorial for the nobles would do. He wanted something immortal, a tribute to their sacrifice that would last forever. His builders made suggestions, came to him with plans, but nothing seemed like it would truly last. After weeks of
pacing and fretting, he summoned for the wizard Merlin. Merlin did not disappoint Have you heard of the Giant's Dance, your majesty, he asked him. Ambrosius had not, and so Merlin explained all about the strange circle of stones that had been brought from Africa all the way to Ireland by a group of giants. The stones, known as the Giant's Dance, were said to be located at the top of a mysterious mountain called Mount Killerouse. Legend had it that the stones were used as a site for performing
strange magic rituals and had magical healing properties. It was Merlin's suggestion that they find the stones and bring them back for themselves to use for King Ambrosius's memorial. Ambrosius agreed, and within days he and his brother King Uther Pendragon, King Arthur's father gathered a small army and set off for Ireland. When the King's legions arrived in Ireland, they were met with fierce resistance. However, after much bloody fighting,
they eventually broke through and made their way to Mount Killerouse. There, at its summit they found the mighty stones of the Giant's Dance. Ambrosius and his men stared up in awe at the vast sarsen stones that seemed to vibrate with their own life force. Across the top of them were the huge lintels, creating endless thresholds into the preternatural space within. Hung in the air like dust. Then Merlin shook back
his sleeves and got to work. Peace by piece, he magically dismantled the structure, imbuing each stone with a magical mark so that he knew exactly how to put it back together. Then he used his sorcery to make each stone light enough to be carried by only a few men, and borne on their ships back to Britain. The stones were then carted back across the Irish Sea through the West Country of ancient Britain, all the way to Salisbury
Plain in what is present day England. Once there, Merlin reassembled the gigantic pieces into what we now know as Stonehenge. When the final piece was put back into place, the stones began to hum once more, just as they did on Mount Killerouse today. Much of what galfridas Salturus wrote about the history of Britain is thought to have been fabricated for centuries. However, give or take the use of Merlin's magic, what he wrote about the origins of Stonehenge
was widely believed. It was only around the seventeenth to eighteenth century, during the birth of the field of study we now know as archaeology, that other theories put forward began to dispel the Merlin myth. For John Aubrey, the famed seventeenth century antiquarian and pioneer of archaeological study, it was most likely the Druids who erected the stones. Celtic pagan priests of ancient Britain thought to have been most
prominent between four hundred BCE and two hundred CE. Druid communities, which have been traced to areas around Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, a thought to have placed special significance on the marking of the seasons and the veneration of the dead, two common interpretations of the purpose of the stone circle. It's also believed they used altar stones similar to the one found in Stonehenge, principally, as some have suggested,
for human sacrifice. However, since the Druids never kept written records, most of our knowledge about this mysterious elite holy order comes second hand from Greco Romans, including famously Julius Caesar, who declared the Celtic God's delight in the slaughter of prisoners and criminals, and when the supply of captives runs short,
they sacrifice even the innocent. Without any verifiable evidence, this interpretation of the Druids has frequently been dismissed as baganda aimed at dehumanizing what to Roman invaders was simply strange people from a strange, unknown world. Back in the nineteen twenties, archaeologist William Hawley was carrying out excavations at Stonehenge when his assistant Robert Newell, discovered a ring of forty six chalk pits surrounding the stone circle. Inside some of them
were cremated human remains. Suddenly, the prospect of Stonehenge being used for Druidic human sacrifice seemed a little more real. It isn't known exactly what the precise purpose of the holes were, aside from providing a final resting place for some ancient peoples. Known today as Aubrey Holes, named after antiquarian John Aubrey, some have speculated they may have had an astronomical significance and were possibly the markings left behind
by another stone circle. A further two circles of holes surrounding the site, known more prosaically as the Y and Z holes, were also discovered during Hawley's dig, though these are thought to being created some time after Stonehenge was built, with Hawley pursuing a theory that the Henge was simply a fortified settlement. The cremated remains he found there were gathered together and placed in Aubrey Hole number seven, where they were reburied and forgotten about. Then, in nineteen fifty
four came a further extraordinary discovery. Though it can't be known for sure if the Druids did utilize Stonehenge for terrifying human sacrificial rituals, what was proved beyond any doubt was that they didn't build the thing. Back in the nineteen forties, physical chemist William Libbey was a key player in the Manhattan Project, helping to develop a more productive
way to enrich the uranium used in the first atomic bombs. Later, as a professor of chemistry at Chicago University, he returned to the area of study that had interested him prior to the war, the study of radioactivity. At the time, it was known that carbon fourteen could be found in the Earth's atmosphere, and the extent of it calculated to a fairly accurate degree. It was also known that this global concentration of carbon forty is evident in the tissue
of all living things. What Libby realized was that because plants and animals cease ingesting carbon fourteen when they die, all he had to do to work out how long ago something died was measure the state of the carbon fourteen in its remains. By then, applying the half life principle the rate at which atoms decay, you could calculate how old it was. William Libby's discovery, known of course as carbon dating, would win him the Nobel Prize in
nineteen sixty. Before then, however, one of the first things he tested his theory on was Stonehenge. Using the charcoal remains of a campfire found at the site, Libby calculated that they dated to as far back as eighteen forty eight BCE. A further carbon dating analysis in two thousand and eight Nate pushed the first known use of the site even further back to twenty three hundred BCE, but
there was even more yet to come. Professor Mike Parker Pearson, world renowned archeologist at University College London, and his team had been working at Stonehenge for years when they began looking closer at the Aubrey Holes. It was they who finally took the remains from a whole number seven, estimated to contain more than fifty thousand cremated bone fragments of
roughly sixty individuals, and had them dated. The remains were found to be around five thousand years old, suggesting the area where Stonehenge was built was in use, perhaps as
a sacred burial site, since three thousand BCE. Professor park Arker Pearson has been a leading archaeological figure of the Stonehenge site for a number of years and has carried out work on other nearby and similar sites such as Durrington Walls, the remains of a Neolithic settlement located about two miles northeast of Stonehenge, near the village of Durrington.
Archaeologists believe that at one time thousands of people would have lived there, and have speculated that they were, in fact the builders of Stonehenge, though perhaps not in the sinister way of ritual and blood sacrifice. It seems increasingly certain that the true purpose of Stonehenge was inextricably linked to death and burial. Like in Galfridis Arturis's Merlin story, those buried at Stonehenge are thought to be nobles or royals.
Professor Parker Pearson's team have estimated that the cremated romins of as many as one hundred and fifty to two hundred and forty people were buried within Stonehenge over a period of five hundred years. As time went on, remains were buried more and more frequently descendants of those elites, perhaps being laid to rest with their forebears. There's even a so called avenue, made up of parallel banks and ditches, which curves in an arc from Stonehenge eastwards all the
way to the banks of the nearby River Avon. This avenue forms an axis between midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. Perhaps it was built to aid the veneration of the ancient gods, or rather as a funereal procession path along which solemn mourners would march as they brought the dead from the River Avon and laid them to rest at
the stones. As the sun cast its beams along it on the longest day of the year, it is hard not to feel what its ancient builders must have felt all those thousands of years ago, that this is a strange and powerful place, just like on Ya McGuinness felt
when she visited there in November twenty twenty. Back in November of twenty twenty, after a series of lockdowns were introduced to stave off the spread of COVID nineteen, England was beginning to open up again, with the threat of another surge of the infectious disease likely to take hold again soon. The threat of another lockdown was also imminent, and so while she could, on Ya McGuinness and her boyfriend decided to get out of Oxford for the day
and take a drive to Stonehenge. The day was crisp and clear and unusually warm for November, and as Anya road shotgun, she couldn't escape the overarching sensation that was building. She felt strange. She'd never been to Stonehenge before, had never even driven past it. As a native of Belfast, she spent most of her time in England, in Oxford or on trains to London, and yet she could sense
it lurking in the corner of her eye. The drive was about ninety minutes, and with each passing mile she became more and more aware of it, a dark, pulsing pull, an absence of light that sharply contrasted the golden autumnal day. It has been said that Stonehenge is different to other Neolithic monuments. So iconic is it in the national psyche.
It is even different to the others in Wiltshire nges that it is thought to be connected to in a vast Neolithic network, the meaning of which remains unknown, like the stone circles in the village of Avebury, twenty miles north of Stonehenge, one of which is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. Perhaps it's Stonehenge's looming presence
that begets its reputation. Perhaps it's the strange mixture of stones, or perhaps it's the way that it exerts a powerful force, a force that calls to people worldwide, from those with an interest in geology to those with an interest in paganism and the occult, the same force that Honya felt as they approached Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located. Onya, like those apocryphal hippies of the seventies, like anyone who
visits the ancient site, thought about the solstice. She knew that marking the passage of time was important to many ancient cultures. For the people of Stonehenge, most likely farmers growing crops and tending herds of animals, knowing when the seasons were changing was important. She also read about the Coney Barrier Nomally, another strange Stonehenge mystery. The Coney Barrier Nomally is a pit with animal remains and other refuse
found close to the Henge site. Excavations discovered a large amount of Neolithic pottery, together with a large quantity of animal bone and strangely, flint tools from both the Neolithic as and earlier Mesolithic era. These two distinct types of tools, the technology of which spanned entirely different epochs, were placed in the pit at the same time, suggesting two very different groups of people at once enjoyed an intimate social
gathering at the site. The material in the pit was dated to somewhere in the region of thirty nine hundred BCE. The more Oyna read, the more she realized that the whole layout of Stonehenge is designed in relation to the solstices marking the death of one year and the birth of another, and all the hope and fear that is extant between the two. Suddenly, Stonehenge looms before her. Onya could feel it in her throat as they drove up.
It reminded her not of darknesses exactly, but like a photo in negative, some kind of unnatural inversion of light and matter. When they finally parked and walked up to it, Onnya saw that the monument was covered with crows that hadn't seemed to settle anywhere else nearby. As they cowed loudly, she felt as though she were being sucked towards the center, towards the jumble of fallen and collapsed stones, towards the altar stone. The place felt as though it hummed with energy,
with something raw and compelling and inevitable. It made her think of death. Honya and her boyfriend entered the visitors center and carried out the obligatory reading. The nearest place from which the large sarsen stone could have been brought from was said to be the Marlborough Downs, eighteen miles to the northeast. The heavier stone weighs upwards of thirty tons. The bluestones thought to come from the Prosselli Mountains in
Wales were from even further afield. Suddenly, Merlin's help didn't seem so unlikely. It was said to have been constructed in three stages. The first was the building of a circular bank and ditch that contains the Aubrey Holes. Sometime around twenty five hundred BCE, the first standing sarsen stone
was erected outside the single entrance to this circle. Two hundred years later, the bluestones and trilithons appeared carefully crafted by hand into a slightly convex shape and then slotted into place, with lintels covering each of the two vertical stones hinged artfully into place with tongue and groove joints. Some fifteen hundred years later, the bluestones were dismantled and re erected inside the circle, where they can be found
to day. The so called alter Stone, which is said to have somehow traveled over one hundred and eighty miles from Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire to the north, was then set up inside the circle. It would have taken a thousands and thousands of collective hours over thousands of years, employing huge amounts of strength, machinery and highly detailed planning.
And despite all of the archaeological conjecture, no one can really say by who or why Onnya felt its strange pull once more, we have to get a picture, suggested her boyfriend. On your side, but eventually agreed and posed a short distance away from the Henge itself. Her boyfriend took the picture on her iPhone. Oh hold on, he said, as she walked back towards him. It's come out really weird, he said. She paused beside him to look where all
the other pictures from the day. Photos in the car as they left Oxford snapped at their lunch at a nearby cafe, even pictures of the signs at the car park were completely normal, but this one was not. It had somehow zoomed in and distorted. Even though her boyfriend swore he didn't do anything unusual, Anya looked closer and felt a shiver run down her spine. Her face was marred and hazy. She had two sets of eyes, and her nose and mouth were distorted. It was as though
something other worldly had interfered with the pixels. It had never happened before, and it never happened again. This episode was written by Ella mcleoud and Richard McLain Smith Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith Unexplained. The book and audiobook with stories never before featured on the show,
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