Season 09 Episode 04: To Each Man His Castle (Pt. 2)

the ad promised, you will find Ed's place. The cost of entry was ten cents. Two photographs accompanied the advert. The first depicted a maze like arrangement of stones, though the coarse grain image made it hard to discern the exact layout. The second photo is clearer and shows a man in a shirt tie and dark formal trousers. His hair is crisply parted, and his posture is as tense

as his face is haggard. He is unrecognizable from the first photograph taken of him on American shores some twenty years previously, but the most noteworthy thing in the photo is not the man. It's the chair. He is sitting on a carved block of rough stone over two tons in weight. Next to it is a huge table top

sitting on rough hewn stone legs. In the photograph, the dimensions, shape and true size are hard to make out, but visitors to the strange exhibition were discovered that the table is carved into the sh of the state of Florida. This vast furniture as the sole work of the man sitting at them, rocking in his colossal armchair, trying and failing to convey a sense of ease and relaxation. His diminutive frame only serves to highlight the sheer scale of

the stone that surrounds him. It is Edward Leedscownin, of course, and all that stone is the first iteration of his life's work. It would have many names over the years. At the time the photo was taken, it was Ed's Place. Later it would be known as Rockgate Park, but in the enduring public imagination, it's best known as Coral Castle, America's Stonehenge, and just how it came to be remains

one of the abiding enigmas of modern Americana. No one really knows when Edward Leedskownen first began the project that would carve his name into the annals of the American Bazaar. The nineteen thirty two advertisement is the first known mention of it in print, but Ed had been living and presumably working on the site for almost ten years by that point, ever since he bought two acres of Florida City land from the Moser family after they'd saved his

life and helped him recuperate from near fatal tuberculosis. Ed had chosen the land because of the ready availability of oolite limestone, known in laypersons terms as coral. It was abundant in the area, and nowhere more so than on the extensive plot belonging to the Moses. During the decade that Ed spent on his two acres, he quarried the coral, heaved it from the ground, carved it into fantastic shapes,

and arranged it into startling configurations. Visitors to Ed's place could wander through his larger than life creation, taking in the exquisite craftsmanship and the inexplicable heft of what he'd made. All in all, Ed extracted more than eleven hundred tons of stone from the ground, and somehow he did it all single handedly a man in ill health, standing little more than five feet tall and weighing a mere one

hundred twenty pounds. It's a feat that has confounded visitors and commentators alike, and which comes with a fair share of local legend. In their two thousand and nine book Coral Castle, The Mystery of ed Leedscalnen and his American Stonehenge, authors Rusty mc cure and Jack Heffron have compiled the most comprehensive accounts from witnesses to ed Leedscownon's labors. They quote neighbors of its people who knew him well, but

who were none the less as founded by what he achieved. Accounts, details and theories vary, but all agree on a few common facts. Ed worked alone, without any help from man or any other animal. He worked only at night, illuminated by the moon or by a lantern, depending on the weather. And he was only ever seen using simple handheld quarrying tools that he himself had personally crafted from car parts

he scavenged from a nearby junk yard. The tools alone were a work of strange genius, let alone what he did with them. Earl s Lee was a boyhood neighbour of Ed's in nineteen twenty nine, when he was lucky enough to witness how the quarrying was done. According to Lee, he saw Ed cut and dig out the huge slab that would become the Florida shaped tabletop. Lee describes how Ed would mark out his desired shape and then dig

a narrow foot wide ditch around its edges. He would then drive metal wedges into the gap, breaking the stone loose in one single piece to prize the cut shape out of the hole. Lee claims that Ed used nothing more than a few simple poles with a heavy bucket attached to the end for leverage. Other photographs collected in mcure and Heffron's book show Ed using a large ten

foot tripod built from telephone poles. His block and tackle pulley system is attached to a large chain which Ed would slip beneath the cut stone once it was wedged up. In this way, it seems he was able to lift massive pieces of coral from the ground all on his own. But on top of the tripod is a strange black metal box. It seems to serve no obvious purpose, but over the years many have speculated the degenerated strange powers, powers that only Ed alone was privy to, and which

he put to use in his Titanic undertaking. More prosaically, Ed's skill and knowledge is often attributed to his early apprenticeship in stonemasonry back in the Baltics, where he learned from his father. He certainly had a better than average understanding of how to cut and maneuver stone. Yet working on gravestones, it's one thing at Ed's place. Some of the stones, such as the gigantic single piece known as the Obelisk, stood over forty feet in length and weighed

more than thirty tons. That's five times the weight of the average male African bush elephant. Could any level of expertise with handmade tools and a basic pulley system ex explain how Ed was able to so finely cut and position such monoliths. The engineering sophistication on display was often even more impressive and confounding than the scale of the end product. One of Ed's most famous sculptures, known as the Rock Gate, is constructed from a single nine ton

slab of coral. The size is daunting, but what's more amazing still is that the door does not simply stand there, inert and imposing no all of its vast weight is set to turn with the merest pressure. Somehow, Ed first managed to hang the door perfectly. Then, having identified the exact center of mass, he bored a hole through the

coral and inserted a metal rod into it. The rod is balanced so precisely on ball bearings scavenged from a model t Ford that, when pushed, the door smoothly swivels with less than a quarter inch clearance between it and the surrounding doorframe. Extracting the slab is one thing, Maneuvering it into place is yet another. But the accuracy required to sow perfectly suspend nine tons of stone that seems beyond the reach of even the most skilled stone masons.

As a paper in the Journal Civil Engineering would later point out, not one piece of stonework showed any sign of a crack or damage, suggesting that Ed had somehow managed to create this great work without any need for trial and error. In other words, it seems he got it all correct first time. By the late nineteen twenties, Ed was welcoming plenty of visitors to see his hand

carved wonders. The ad he placed in the Miami Daily News in nineteen thirty two claimed that over seventeen thousand people had walked his grounds, a figure that seems strikingly optimistic for such a rural stretch of the state. Florida City only had approximately one thousand inhabitants, so it's hard to believe that Ed's estimated footfall is anything more than crude boosterism. But Ed dismissed the notion that he was

interested in fame or profit. Instead, those who took his tour would be treated to a well honed speech that implied far more romantic motivations. Ed's place, he said, was dedicated to his great love, young Agnes Scuffs, the bride who jilted him at the Altar back in Europe, who he'd never forgotten. As Ed's story went, he'd undertaken his great task in her honor. It was intended as a castle fit for his queen. Some of the sculptures tied

firmly into his tail. One structure, which Ed called his Feast of Love Table, was a five thousand pound block of coral carved into the shape of a heart. In the center was a small hole into which Ed placed an Exora flower or West Indian jasmine. He would tell his tour groups that men too often neglected their wives, and he wanted his lost love to have flowers in her honor every day. Another part of the site, known as the Throne Room, contained several chairs. The largest, Ed's

throne sat atop a stone plinth. Next to that was a smaller version of the same design, just waiting for Agnes should she ever come back to him. A few feet away was a sinuous slab of stone that Ed called his love seat. This would allow two people to sit side by side yet faced to f and was intended, Ed explained, to help him and his fantasy princess to resolve their quarrels. Whether Ed really expected Agnes to join

him in America is doubtful. In all his papers and writings, there's no indication he ever once wrote to her, or indeed to any of his loved ones back home. In fact, there are those who think that Agnes Scuffs never truly existed. Some offer a more sinister interpretation that the true focus of Ed's desire was Lois Moser, the teenage daughter of

his neighbors, the family who had saved his life. There is no evidence of this However, beyond scurrulous local gossip, the truth of Ed's Agnes is just one more unresolved chapter in his story. Whether she was an authentic lost love, a mythicized piece of Ed's past, or just a cynical narrative construction, you shall likely never know. What is certain about Edward Leedskownen is that he was a well known

and generally well liked member of the local community. People would often go to his place to socialize, where he'd hold cookouts and would welcome them generously. After his itinerant start in America, it seemed as if ed had finally found a place to call home. But by nineteen thirty seven, Ed was once again looking to move, and just as he had built it all on his own, he would move it with the same mystifying independence. Ed paid just ten dollars for the ten acre plot that would become

known forevermore as Coral Castle. It wasn't far away, in the nearby town of Homestead. But when you're transporting over a thousand tons of stone any distance at all problem, and that problem is multiplied by magnitudes when said stones weigh enough to blow out the tires of most vehicles. Ed approached the issue with his trademark homespun innovation. First, he built a trailer from the chassis of a junked truck, over which he laid thick boards with the weight then spread.

The trailer could support even the heaviest of his stones. With that in place, he sought the only help he ever solicited from a local farmer named Bob Biggers. It was Biggers who owned the solid tied tractor capable of pulling the burdened trailer up the highway to the new site, which he did repeatedly until every single stone was relocated from Florida City to Homestead. But Bob never saw how

the stones were loaded and unloaded. All he knew was that Ed would call and Bob would then arrive to find the trailer already laid with huge blocks at the other end. Ed would thank him and ask him to come back in two or three days, by which time the trailer would be empty and the stones would be in their new and final position. How Ed managed this

with no help or industrial equipment, Bob couldn't say. Ed's later biographer Rville Irwin was just fourteen at the time and remembers asking Ed how long it would take him to move his entire castle. According to Orville, Ed smiled a peculiar smile and simply replied, it'll take a long time, but I'll do it. By mid nineteen thirty nine, Ed's entire complex sat in its new grounds. The relocation is

commonly attributed to his need for privacy. Supposedly, word had gotten around about plans for a new housing development, and Ed wanted to escape the prying eyes of all those new neighbors. In truth, Ed lived in a relatively isolated stretch on the edge of town, and even now, nearly a century later, it remains largely undeveloped. Would he really have gone to the colossal task of moving over a thousand tons of stone just on the basis of a rumor.

In his nineteen ninety six biography of Ed, mister cant is Dead, Awvial Irwin opines that his move was motivated by far more business minded interests, and that he had drained his pool of visitors, and the mere two acres of his previous home were inconveniently placed to attract more. The new site certainly solved that problem. Located in the

town of Homestead, just off Highway One. It was in a prime position to grab the attention of travelers eager for a quick distraction on their way to the Everglades or the Florida Keys. It was also five times the size of his original site, which allowed Ed to keep expanding his megalithic work. Indeed, another theory for the move is that Ed had exhausted the available oo light in Florida City, Whether catalyzed by a fresh location or a

fresh reserve of stone, He set to work with renewed vigor. First, he constructed a set of walls to curtain his new site. Each of the three foot thick slabs weighed over six tons apiece, and they were assembled with such precision that no beam of light shone through them. The new additions to the castle were easy to distinguish, as the stone quarried at the new site at a darker, grainier tint than the near white coral he'd been working with previously.

They are also even more sophisticated than his earlier pieces. The telescope, for instance, is a twenty five foot twenty ton column sitting just outside the main wall. It has no lenses, mirrors, or magnification of any kind, merely a large hole cut near the top with two wires overlapping

like a gunsight. If a viewer were to look through the small holes carved in the curtain wall and line up their perspective with the corresponding hole in the telescope, they will find the location of the North Star on any given night of the year. It's a feat of astronomical mapping, not dissimilar from that encoded in Stonehenge or

other megalithic structures. Another nod to the stars is glimpsed in the most photographed of all ed sculptures, the Crescent of the East, a moon shaped slab of coral jutting up from a low wall. Around it sat similarly massive representations of Mars and Saturn. The castle also features a large Sunday, carved from a single piece of stone and accurate enough to keep time within a few minutes throughout

the year. And there was the sun Couch, a huge circular stone bed that could swivel at a touch to face the sun throughout the day. It's this bet that the writer Joe Bullet had suggested ed used to aid his recovery from TB through self administered sun therapy. But the greatest mysteries both of the man and his work were found in the structure known as the Tower. The tower is where Ed lived, worked and pursued his strange scientific theories, and it's where the story of Ed slides

into the truly unfathomable. The tower itself is just one more confidence with the seemingly superhuman. It is built from blocks weighing five to ten tons and roofed with thirty one ton blocks. Inside a staircase winds up to Ed's living quarters, where his bed hung suspended from the ceiling on chains allowing him to adjust the angle and height to his whim. Designed to mitigate Ed's ongoing struggles with tuberculosis,

as elevated sleeping upright can help reduce breathing difficulties. Ed liked to claim that he was entirely cured of the disease, but both the nature of his sleeping arrangements and his steadily declining health suggest otherwise. It's mystery enough that he lasted as long as he did. It's the ground floor workshop, however, that contains the apparatus most central to the legends circling Ed leeds gownen there Ed stored his radio and its generation, both of which play a part in the more esoteric

theories about Coral Castle. Some have proposed that Ed's homemade radio was used to contact extraterrestrial support. They point to the surprising strength of his simple arrangement made from copper wire and a mason jar, and when people queried how he'd accomplish so much, with an enigmatic smile, Ed would

simply reply, I know the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. Certainly, for conspiracy theorists comparing Coral Castle to the Pyramids of Gezer or other mysterious ancient sites, extraterrestrial help is a tantalizing prospect. Some even suggest that Ed himself was an alien who'd come to Earth with all the knowledge of the heavens, though why he would use such universal wisdom to build a coral castle in Florida remains to be answered.

The generator, however, is implicated in the most obscure theory about Coral Castle, one based on Ed's own scientific reasoning, as we briefly covered in Part one. In nineteen thirty six, Ed published a pamphlet concerning electromagnetism and the True nature of matter, In Ed's hypothesis, it is magnets, not atoms, that are the fundamental building blocks of the universe, that everything that is made up of subatomic magnets, each with

their own north and south pole. Gravity, to Ed's mind, was simply the pull of the Earth's vast magnetic core on this magnetic fabric of the world. And if we follow Ed's logic far enough by reversing the polarity of matter, he would then be able to counteract the gravitational pull of the Earth. But to do so, as Ed pointed out, would require a great deal of consistent power. Could the answer be found in that strange black box spotted on

top of its tripod? Edward Leedscowdin's writings are so convoluted and compromised by his middling grasp of English that it's

difficult for the lay person to follow. Some of those who claim to understand it believe that not only did Edward manufacture a way to make his coral monoliths levitate, he had also invented a perpetual motion machine, a device that, once set in motion, would spin, whir or tick forever, drawing no fuel, losing no energy, and producing endless work, as if it had stolen a secret from the universe itself.

Inventors have been chasing this impossible dream for centuries. Ancient sketches, mysterious devices, whispers in dusty manuscripts all hint at humanity's obsession with creating a machine that could self run forever. If Ed had indeed made one, it would have required breaking not only the first but also the second law of thermodynamics, and bending the very fabric of reality as we know it. Some have suggested this is exactly what he was hiding in his black box. Others have suggested

it was in fact his generator. Though it's a humble looking combination of flywheel and handle. The theory suggests that Ed could have attached strong magnets to the wheel, then when it was turned, electromagnetic forces would ricochet between these magnets, creating perpetual motion and a limitless energy source. All of this speculation was put to work in the claim that

Ed had somehow managed to overcome gravity. It sounds dubious at best, but one local legend commonly retold in the years before Ed published his magnetic hypothesis, offers a possible glimpse into the truth. One night under the silvery glow of the moon. As the story goes, a group of teenagers spotted Ed walking across its land, singing to himself, while a huge stone appeared to be levitating right in

front of him. Without the mirror's touch, the teen said he was able to move it along and simply float it into place. There is one stone at Coral Castle that tour guides use even today to prompt questions about Ed's secret understanding of strange forces. At the very start of a modern tour, visitors will encounter the three ton gait. This is a thick, triangular slab that, despite its weight and bulk, is balanced gently on a car axle. Tour guides will ask for a volunteer to step forward and

raise their arm above the stone. When they do, the guide will try and fail to push the guests armed down. The guide will then tilt the angle of the three ton git on its axle and try again. Supposedly, this time the visitor's arm will drop without resistance. This experiment is offered as proof that the stones at Coral Castle have a strange effect on the energy fields around them. By the end of the nineteen forties, Ed was in his early sixties and his health was in steady decline.

He was gaunt and half starved on a self administered diet of crackers and sardines, and loneliness had taken its own toll. The end was imminent. For a man who lived a life cloaked in mystery and law, why would death be any different. The oft told tale of Ed's final days is that he simply hung a sign on the doorway of Coral Castle that read going to the hospital, where he died three days later. The truth is a little less laconic. Ed checked himself into Miami's Jackson Hospital,

where he deteriorated over a span of four weeks. When he finally slipped away, the cause of death was registered as an acute kidney infection which had turned to sepsis. It was a fittingly lonely end, perhaps for a man whose life was always governed by a degree of solitary sadness. But it was also a life that lasted far longer than medical experts had ever thought possible, which included achievements that no one has ever been able to sufficiently explain.

Some say that the mysteries of the man and his Castle are entwined that Edward Leads Gownman emerged from the anonymity of America in search of natural powers that allowed him to live longer and do more than anyone could have believed. Such a theory takes us full circle back to where we began in episode one, A green corner

of Southwest England and the Puzzle of Stonehenge. It's long been argued that Stonehenge sits on an important junction of lay lines, and that that undeciphered power source holds an answer to both the purpose and construction of the monument, that it was built there to honor the power, and because the power allowed it to be built. Lay Lines

are a global concept. If they do indeed exist, then they gird the entire earth, and in a quiet corner of southern Florida, some believe there is another vergence of the lines right in the town of Homestead, home to

Edward Leeds Scownden's Coral Castle. For what it's worth, Homestead just so happens to more or less mark the edge of one particular region famous for its association with unseen forces and inexplicable phenomena, a place where the rules of reality are routinely said to bend Falter and break the Bermuda triangle. This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained as an Avy Club production 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. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or

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