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No Kitchen_ No Windows_ No Way Out · Phantom Navigator

0:33
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the Czech Republic, there is a castle with
0:37
Speaker 1: no kitchen, no mote, no water source, no arrow slits
0:43
Speaker 1: facing outward, no place to sleep that makes any logical
0:48
Speaker 1: sense whatsoever. The defensive walls face inward, the thickest stone,
0:55
Speaker 1: the most fortified windows, all of it aimed at the courtyard,
1:01
Speaker 1: not at an enemy approaching from the outside, at whatever
1:05
Speaker 1: was already inside. The chapel sits directly over a hole
1:13
Speaker 1: in the ground, a hole that no one has ever
1:16
Speaker 1: successfully measured, the bottom of a hole that in the
1:21
Speaker 1: thirteenth century the Bohemian crown decided the only rational solution
1:28
Speaker 1: was to build an entire medieval castle on top of
1:31
Speaker 1: it and hope that God and several tons of Gothic
1:35
Speaker 1: masonry were enough to keep whatever was down there from
1:43
Speaker 1: crawling out. And here is the part that should keep
1:46
Speaker 1: you up tonight. It is still there. The hole is
1:52
Speaker 1: still there, sealed under a chapel floor in an operational
1:57
Speaker 1: building in twenty twenty four. The reason no geologist has
2:02
Speaker 1: drilled through to measure it isn't because it isn't because
2:08
Speaker 1: of bureaucracy red tape. It's because of Nazi's mind. The
2:14
Speaker 1: foundation on their way out. I want you to sit
2:18
Speaker 1: with that for a second. Welcome back to the Phantom Navigator.
2:24
Speaker 1: I'm your host, and tonight we're going into the deep end.
2:28
Speaker 1: We're talking about buildings, bridges, staircases, fortresses, structures that humans built.
2:38
Speaker 1: We're supposedly built that the laws of physics, engineering, and
2:43
Speaker 1: basic common sense says should not exist. Tonight's episode is
2:50
Speaker 1: about one very specific Tonight's episode is about one very specific,
2:58
Speaker 1: very terrifying idea. What if some of the most famous
3:02
Speaker 1: structures in the human history were built by something that
3:06
Speaker 1: wasn't human. Adam, that is crazy. Welcome in, good to
3:12
Speaker 1: see you. That it is crazy. And more importantly, what
3:20
Speaker 1: if some of them were built to keep something in.
3:25
Speaker 1: I have been down a research rabbit hole for this one.
3:28
Speaker 1: That generally disturbed me, and I do not say that lightly.
3:34
Speaker 1: I have done episodes on serial killers, on mass disappearances,
3:39
Speaker 1: on a ritual sacrifice. But something about this topic, something
3:44
Speaker 1: about the idea that the walls around you might have,
3:50
Speaker 1: the walls around you might have I have a purpose
3:56
Speaker 1: that you never meant to know about. It's differently, they'll
4:01
Speaker 1: buckle in. We have a lot of ground to cover,
4:04
Speaker 1: and some of that goes very very deep underground. Let's
4:11
Speaker 1: start with the question nobody asked an architecture school. What
4:15
Speaker 1: does a building look like if its only job is
4:18
Speaker 1: to trap something, not to shelter humans, not to project power,
4:25
Speaker 1: not to honor a god, just to serve as a lid,
4:29
Speaker 1: a cork, a cage with a very elaborate ceiling. Because
4:36
Speaker 1: when you start looking at the historical record through that lens,
4:40
Speaker 1: a frightening number of structures starts to make a horrifying
4:46
Speaker 1: kind of sense. Postca Castle and Czech Republic. Postca Castle
4:52
Speaker 1: was built between twelve fifty three and twelve seventy eight
4:56
Speaker 1: by the order of the by order of the bohem
5:00
Speaker 1: King A Takar. Second, let's run through that standard checklist
5:05
Speaker 1: of medieval castle designs and see how it scores strategic
5:12
Speaker 1: strategic location. No, it's in a dense, swampy forest with
5:17
Speaker 1: no military value, no nearby roads, no trade routes, garrison capacity,
5:24
Speaker 1: no kitchen, no l trains, no wells, no food storage.
5:29
Speaker 1: You couldn't sustain a fighting force in this building for
5:33
Speaker 1: a week. Defensive capability. Here's where it gets interesting. A
5:41
Speaker 1: standard medieval castle is oriented outward. You build thick walls
5:46
Speaker 1: with battlements, aerow slits, and kill zones facing the approaching enemy.
5:54
Speaker 1: Every design decision is about repelling a threat from coming
6:01
Speaker 1: from repelling a threat coming from outside the perimeter. That
6:06
Speaker 1: is medieval military architecture. One oh one. Posca's exterior walls
6:12
Speaker 1: are flat, smooth, featureless, no battlements. The outer skin of
6:19
Speaker 1: this castle gives zero technical advantage to anyone trying to
6:24
Speaker 1: defend it from the external assault. But the interior. The
6:30
Speaker 1: interior is fortified like a maximum security prison, hav a
6:35
Speaker 1: defensive windows facing inward towards the courtyard, reinforced stone structures
6:42
Speaker 1: not pointed at the forest, pointed down towards the ground,
6:47
Speaker 1: towards what's below in the censure of that courtyard. Beneath
6:53
Speaker 1: the castle chapel is a limestone fissure, a crack in
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Speaker 1: the earth that descends into total the lightless darkness, a
7:04
Speaker 1: hole that pre Christian Bohemian locals described as so active,
7:11
Speaker 1: so loud, so terrible that half animals, half human entities
7:17
Speaker 1: allegedly crawled out of it at night. The chapel was
7:24
Speaker 1: built directly over it. The chapel floor is functionally a
7:28
Speaker 1: massive stone capstone, and the walls of that chapel are
7:33
Speaker 1: covered in thirteenth century freshcos that I need you to
7:38
Speaker 1: understand are completely unlike anything else in medieval European religious art.
7:46
Speaker 1: No triumph not, no triumphant Christ, no Serene Madonna, no
7:53
Speaker 1: angels with harps. What you get on those walls is
7:58
Speaker 1: a left handed centaur art. Sure, and if you know
8:01
Speaker 1: what medieval iconography, you know that left handed handedness in
8:09
Speaker 1: that era was explicitly the mark of a sinister, the infernal,
8:15
Speaker 1: the wrong side of the veil. The Latin word for
8:19
Speaker 1: left is sinistra. That is not a coincidence. You also
8:26
Speaker 1: get bound entities, creatures with animal heads pinned beneath the
8:33
Speaker 1: weights of geometric stone arches, crushed into submission by the
8:39
Speaker 1: architecture itself. Someone was very deliberately putting those images on
8:45
Speaker 1: those walls, someone who wanted whatever was below the floor
8:50
Speaker 1: to know exactly what was happening to it. Now here's
8:56
Speaker 1: where the story takes a sharp left turn into the
8:59
Speaker 1: twentieth century. World War Two. The Nazis the ss A
9:07
Speaker 1: near neary Rareb and nan Nerby, Okay and Enerby was
9:16
Speaker 1: Heinrich Kambler's personal occult research burrier. These were the guys
9:24
Speaker 1: who sent expeditions to Tibet looking over the origins of
9:30
Speaker 1: Aryan race, who excavated Arthurian sites in Germany, who believed
9:37
Speaker 1: with complete institutional sincerity that the physical world contained hidden
9:42
Speaker 1: supernatural infrastructure that could be weaponized. The Honor nearby took
9:53
Speaker 1: over the Uska Castle during the During the occupation, they
9:59
Speaker 1: didn't use it as a barracks, they didn't use it
10:02
Speaker 1: as a command post. They moved somewhere in the neighborhood
10:07
Speaker 1: of four one hundred and forty thousand stolen manuscripts, occult text,
10:14
Speaker 1: witchcraft trial records, alternative physics documents from across occupied Europe
10:23
Speaker 1: into the castle's subterranean rooms. And then they started digging. Specifically,
10:33
Speaker 1: they started excavating beneath the chapel floor, targeting the exact
10:38
Speaker 1: coordinates of the sealed pit. They were trying to measure it,
10:44
Speaker 1: maybe open it, maybe harness whatever they believed was leaking
10:49
Speaker 1: upward from it. For over seven hundred years, we don't
10:56
Speaker 1: know what they found because when Sylvia, when the Soviet
11:01
Speaker 1: Army advanced in nineteen forty five, the ss destroyed their
11:06
Speaker 1: research records, all of them, and then before they fled
11:12
Speaker 1: they heavily mined and booby trapped the foundation. The subterranean
11:18
Speaker 1: limestone fishers beneath the chapel they sealed their own research
11:24
Speaker 1: into in the one place they were most convinced contain
11:29
Speaker 1: something real. This is why there has been no modern
11:35
Speaker 1: geological survey of the Hostka pit. It's not forbidden by
11:39
Speaker 1: some ancient mystical edict. It's because the most fanatical occultives
11:46
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century took the secret to their graves
11:50
Speaker 1: and left the unstable eighty year old explosives. As the footnotes,
11:57
Speaker 1: the castle is still standing. It's private owned. You can visit.
12:02
Speaker 1: The hole in the ground is still there. And if
12:05
Speaker 1: you lay your ear flat against the chapel's stone floor
12:09
Speaker 1: on a still night, and I'm pulling this directly from
12:14
Speaker 1: the staff at the Hoska who refused to be in
12:16
Speaker 1: that room alone after dark, you don't hear the shifting
12:20
Speaker 1: rock or groundwater or the wind. You hear scratching, rhythmic
12:28
Speaker 1: wet like something with very large claws is slowly patiently
12:34
Speaker 1: testing every scene in that stone, looking for the one
12:39
Speaker 1: weak point the medieval masons might have missed. They've been
12:47
Speaker 1: at it for seven hundred and fifty years. They are
12:51
Speaker 1: not in a hurry. And from what I know with limestone,
12:57
Speaker 1: people used to use limestone own to keep energy in.
13:04
Speaker 1: So is it also believe that limestone can keep energy in?
13:07
Speaker 1: So that might be that's one of the reasons it
13:10
Speaker 1: being built with limestone also fascinates me. Let's go above
13:17
Speaker 1: ground for a minute. In twelve sixty seven to East Lothian,
13:24
Speaker 1: Scotland and Man history called Sir Hugo d Giffard, though
13:30
Speaker 1: his neighbors had another name for him, the Wizard of Yester.
13:38
Speaker 1: Hugo was a brilliant man, an advisor to King Alexander
13:42
Speaker 1: the Third, educated, wealthy, powerful, and deeply pathologically frustrated with
13:51
Speaker 1: human workers. Human builders were slow, their geometry was imprecise.
14:00
Speaker 1: They went on striking winter. They asked to be paid,
14:05
Speaker 1: so Hugo, according to records, that the Church found troubling
14:09
Speaker 1: enough to preserve, secured a different kind of contractor. For
14:16
Speaker 1: three consecutive nights, a dense, sulfurous fog rolled in from
14:22
Speaker 1: the Scottish moors and engulfed the Yester estate. Locals described
14:28
Speaker 1: hearing sound not like construction, but like thousands of tiny
14:33
Speaker 1: metal hammers hitting stone at an inhuman speed, and underneath
14:40
Speaker 1: that sound a low rhythmic chanting that reportedly caused cattle
14:46
Speaker 1: in the surrounding fields to simply fall over dead. On
14:52
Speaker 1: the fourth morning, the fog cleared, Hugo unveiled his masterpiece.
14:59
Speaker 1: He had built a a massive subterranean Gothic vaulted hall
15:05
Speaker 1: carved directly into the bedrock of the Scottish earth. It's
15:09
Speaker 1: still there. It's called the Goblin ha the Goblin Hall.
15:20
Speaker 1: When you go into the Goblin Hall today and you can,
15:26
Speaker 1: and it's been surveyed, it's been photographed. The first thing
15:30
Speaker 1: architects notice is its stonework. It is flawless in a
15:35
Speaker 1: way that defies the timeline. The rib's Gothic vault is
15:41
Speaker 1: perfectly proportioned. The acoustic environment inside the hall is described
15:46
Speaker 1: as pressurized, dead, silent in a way that isn't natural,
15:54
Speaker 1: sound pulling in the center of the room rather than
15:57
Speaker 1: traveling outward. The second thing you notice is that the
16:03
Speaker 1: floor leads to a staircase at the far end. It
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Speaker 1: goes down, not toward an exit, not toward a cellar,
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Speaker 1: straight down into the bedrock, narrowing as it goes, not
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Speaker 1: a technical escape route. It has no ground level exit,
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Speaker 1: no practical purpose. It was built to go down into
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Speaker 1: the earth and nothing else. Hugo warned his servants that
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Speaker 1: the iron reinforced door at the back of the vault
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Speaker 1: did not lead to a wine cellar. It was, he said,
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Speaker 1: the threshold, the exact point where his workforce had entered
16:48
Speaker 1: from wherever they came from. When Hugo died, under what
16:56
Speaker 1: the court records call mysterious circumstances, the village elders went
17:02
Speaker 1: down into the hall with sledgehammers. They didn't just lock
17:07
Speaker 1: the door. They spent weeks hauling raw un quarried stone
17:12
Speaker 1: down those stairs, breaking up the gateway until it was
17:16
Speaker 1: completely flushed, with the wall completely invisible. The wall is
17:23
Speaker 1: still there. Whatever Hugo built the door for, whatever came
17:29
Speaker 1: through it is either still sealed inside or found another
17:33
Speaker 1: way home. I'd like to believe the second option, I
17:39
Speaker 1: just can't prove it. Tosca isn't It is a lid.
17:46
Speaker 1: The gabble hall is a threshold. Let's talk about the
17:50
Speaker 1: third type of supernatural structure, the ones built to do
17:54
Speaker 1: a job. Across France, Italy, Germany and Wales, there are
18:00
Speaker 1: dozens of medieval stone bridges explicitly named the ponds do
18:07
Speaker 1: Diablo the Devil's bridges, and they share a blueprint so consistent,
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Speaker 1: so structurally specific, that it stops being folklore pretty quickly.
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Speaker 1: Here's a template. A human builder has an impossible problem,
18:31
Speaker 1: a gorge too wide, a river too violin, a canyon
18:35
Speaker 1: that no amount of scaffolding and human labor can span.
18:40
Speaker 1: Multiple attempts have failed. Then builder is ruined and desperation
18:48
Speaker 1: or very specific moment of suicidal clarity at the edge
18:53
Speaker 1: of an abyss, the builder invokes the devil. The terms
19:00
Speaker 1: are simple. You build a bridge, I give you the
19:04
Speaker 1: soul of the first living being to cross it. At dawn,
19:10
Speaker 1: the contract is signed. The bridge appears overnight, always overnight.
19:18
Speaker 1: Now here's what is fascinating about these structures. From a
19:22
Speaker 1: purely engineering standpoint. Medieval humans bridges use semi circular arches,
19:31
Speaker 1: required extensive central scaffolding and multiple support pillars driven into
19:37
Speaker 1: their riverbed. These bridges almost universally feature something different a
19:46
Speaker 1: single sweeping parabolic arch, one span, no central pillars, no
19:53
Speaker 1: scaffolding marks. The low distribution requires calculus that wasn't formally
20:00
Speaker 1: available to rule European builders if they don't fail. Many
20:07
Speaker 1: of these bridges have survived catastrophic floods that wiped out
20:12
Speaker 1: modern concrete infrastructure. The Point d Diavlo Diavolo at Lonzo
20:20
Speaker 1: at Lozzo Rnnez in Italy, Belgium, thirteen seventy eight, never cracked,
20:28
Speaker 1: never settled. The standard exit clause, of course, is the
20:35
Speaker 1: animal trick. The builder sends a dog or cat across
20:39
Speaker 1: at dawn instead of a person. The devil gets the
20:43
Speaker 1: animal's soul, screams into fury at the loophole, and vanishes.
20:50
Speaker 1: In most of the legends, he leaves a mark, a
20:53
Speaker 1: fracture on the keystone, a permanent dent on the spine
20:57
Speaker 1: of the bridge. This bite the structural damage. Despite the
21:02
Speaker 1: missing stone, despite the infernal tantrum, the bridges remained standing.
21:11
Speaker 1: But I want to tell you about the darkest version
21:14
Speaker 1: of this story, the one that doesn't end with the
21:18
Speaker 1: animal trick. The Rocotts Brooch, Germany, built in eighteen sixty
21:28
Speaker 1: the Crumlaw Park by a knight name frederick's Hermann wrote rotesque.
21:38
Speaker 1: The bridge wasn't built to connect two banks. There was
21:44
Speaker 1: no road on either side. There was no for traffic.
21:49
Speaker 1: It needed to accommodate. It was built to create a
21:54
Speaker 1: perfect circle. The arch of the bridge is built from
21:59
Speaker 1: a jagged imported volcanic basalt columns when the water, when
22:06
Speaker 1: the water of the lake below is still, the bridge
22:10
Speaker 1: and its reflection in the water form a geometric circle
22:14
Speaker 1: so perfect that it doesn't distort from any angle. An
22:19
Speaker 1: esoteric architecture, a perfect circle with no beginning and no
22:25
Speaker 1: end is a portal, a mirror to another realm, specifically
22:31
Speaker 1: in the European tradition, a crossing point for infernal entities.
22:40
Speaker 1: Ross also erected what he called the Devil's organ alongside
22:47
Speaker 1: the bridge, volcanic volcanic basalt columns arranged like the pipes
22:54
Speaker 1: of a church organ, designed to play the sounds of
23:00
Speaker 1: the wind for the entity ranking over the lake. The
23:06
Speaker 1: bridge has no safety rails. The path over it made
23:10
Speaker 1: of deliberately jagged, uneven stone. It was not designed for humans.
23:17
Speaker 1: The German government had banned anyone from walking on it.
23:21
Speaker 1: It sounds it stands permanently empty, waiting. I find that
23:27
Speaker 1: detail of the empty bridge the architectural invitation. The fact
23:32
Speaker 1: that most precisely engineered structure in the park is one
23:37
Speaker 1: explicitly built for something other than human feet. I find
23:42
Speaker 1: that generally one of the most unsettling things I've encountered
23:46
Speaker 1: in all the research I've done for this show. We
23:51
Speaker 1: built a lot of things for ourselves. We assumed everything
23:55
Speaker 1: we built is for ourselves. The risk is a form
24:02
Speaker 1: is a fomal reminder that we have not always been
24:05
Speaker 1: the intended audience. Here's where we pivot, because so far
24:14
Speaker 1: we've been talking about structures to purposes, demonic containment, bressholes, gateways,
24:22
Speaker 1: architecture as spiritual infrastructure. But there's a second category that
24:28
Speaker 1: might actually be weirder, and that is this what happens
24:35
Speaker 1: when the human being receies the blueprint from something external,
24:40
Speaker 1: When the math that produces a structure is simply beyond
24:45
Speaker 1: what the person building it could have known. What do
24:50
Speaker 1: you do with a staircase that shouldn't work? What do
24:56
Speaker 1: you do with a castle wall that was built by one,
25:00
Speaker 1: one sick man working alone in the dark. The Loretto Staircase,
25:07
Speaker 1: New Mexico, eighteen seventy eight, Santa Fe, New Mexico. A
25:12
Speaker 1: group of nuns, the Sisters of Loretto, have just finished
25:17
Speaker 1: building a beautiful Gothic revival chapel, and there's a problem.
25:24
Speaker 1: The architect died before he could finish the job, specifically
25:30
Speaker 1: before he solved the problem of how to get up
25:33
Speaker 1: to the choir loft twenty two feet above the main floor,
25:39
Speaker 1: no staircase, no ladder installed, and a space so small
25:44
Speaker 1: that every carpenter and engineer they brought in that the
25:48
Speaker 1: same thing. It is mathematically and especially impossible to build
25:56
Speaker 1: aasteercase here without altering them building's footprints. So the nuns
26:05
Speaker 1: did what nuns do. They prayed a nine day novenna
26:10
Speaker 1: to Saint Joseph, the patron saints of carpenters. On the
26:17
Speaker 1: ninth day, a man arrived, bearded on a donkey. He
26:23
Speaker 1: had a hammer, a saw, and a t square. He
26:26
Speaker 1: offered to build the staircase on one condition he must
26:31
Speaker 1: be left completely alone, doors locks, no assistance, or months.
26:39
Speaker 1: The nuns agreed. Months later, they unlocked the doors. The
26:43
Speaker 1: man was gone, no payment collected, no forwarding address, no
26:49
Speaker 1: record of his name in any account book, and in
26:52
Speaker 1: the center of the chapel a staircase. Now I need
26:57
Speaker 1: you to understand what the staircase is, basically, because the
27:04
Speaker 1: description alone should make your skin crawl. A standard spiral
27:09
Speaker 1: staircase has a central support pillar, a newle post, a
27:14
Speaker 1: whole thing wrapped around this vertical spine the way a
27:20
Speaker 1: vine wraps around a fence post. Without that spine, the
27:25
Speaker 1: structure collapses. Basic engineering. The Loretto staircase has no sentinel
27:33
Speaker 1: support pillar. It is a perfect helix, making two complete
27:41
Speaker 1: three sixty degree rotations seven hundred and twenty degree is total,
27:47
Speaker 1: rising twenty two feet in the air. It is touching
27:51
Speaker 1: the wall at exactly one point at the bottom and
27:54
Speaker 1: one point at the top. That is it. That is
27:59
Speaker 1: the entire structure connection to the building. What it is
28:05
Speaker 1: a Functionally, it is a compressed wooden spring, a slinky,
28:13
Speaker 1: and like a slinky when people walk on it, the
28:16
Speaker 1: entire structure doesn't bend under the weight. It flexes and
28:21
Speaker 1: recompresses vertically. The nuns who first use it described it
28:26
Speaker 1: as bouncing, slightly swaying, alive in a way that wood
28:30
Speaker 1: is not supposed to be alive. And yet no splinters,
28:35
Speaker 1: no warping, no structural failures, no nails, no screws, no
28:41
Speaker 1: metal brackets of any kind, no glue. The entire structure
28:46
Speaker 1: is held together exclusively by hand carved wooden pegs and
28:51
Speaker 1: interlocking joinery so precise that engineers have spent over a
28:57
Speaker 1: century stunning it. Thirty three steps to the top exactly
29:05
Speaker 1: thirty three the age of Christ at the Crucifixion also
29:11
Speaker 1: the highest degree attainable in Scottish rote freemasonry. Whether you
29:18
Speaker 1: find that meaningful or coincidental, I will leave that to you.
29:24
Speaker 1: But it does suggest who ever built this staircase was counting.
29:30
Speaker 1: Here is a detail that ends arguments. When the timber
29:34
Speaker 1: experts later analyze the wood decades after is built, they
29:38
Speaker 1: found Sulfnian possible. The species of spruce used in the
29:45
Speaker 1: construction doesn't exist in New Mexico, doesn't exist the American Southwest.
29:53
Speaker 1: The closest botanical match to the cellular density and grain
29:59
Speaker 1: profile that the is a rare subspecies found in northern
30:03
Speaker 1: Europe in the subalpine forests of Israel. A lone man
30:10
Speaker 1: on a donkey rode into Santa Fe in eighteen seventy
30:14
Speaker 1: eight with a hammer and a saw. He left behind
30:18
Speaker 1: tons of ancient European lumber, with no transport record, no
30:23
Speaker 1: purchase order, no supply chain, and the staircase that structural
30:30
Speaker 1: engineers still can't fully figure out the Heuter investigators eventually
30:38
Speaker 1: pointed to a French woodworker named Francook Fracas Jene Roccas Frenchie,
30:47
Speaker 1: who lived in New Mexico at the time and was
30:52
Speaker 1: mentioned in an obituary as the builder. He was unalived
30:58
Speaker 1: in his cabin in an a eighteen ninety five. His toolsmatched,
31:04
Speaker 1: but even a Rocus built it. Rocus was a standard carpenter.
31:10
Speaker 1: Nobody had ever explained how a rogue craftsman, alone with
31:16
Speaker 1: hand tools in a larfed room, calculated the low bearing
31:21
Speaker 1: physics of a double helix spring staircase, a design of
31:27
Speaker 1: modern engineering firms still study with fascination. The math requires
31:35
Speaker 1: to do the math required to do what was done
31:39
Speaker 1: in that chapel exists, but didn't exist in eighteen seventy eight,
31:44
Speaker 1: and it certainly didn't exist in the hands of one
31:47
Speaker 1: man on a donkey. If the Loretto staircase is the
31:54
Speaker 1: pinnacle of mystery, individual Edward Lee Edward lead Skynen is
32:03
Speaker 1: its patron. Saint ed was a lot Vian immigrant. He
32:09
Speaker 1: stood five feet tall and weighed just over one hundred pounds.
32:14
Speaker 1: He was a frail He was a quiet and in
32:19
Speaker 1: between nineteen twenty three and nineteen fifty one. Working entirely alone,
32:25
Speaker 1: mostly at night, without electricity or heavy machinery, he quarried, carved,
32:33
Speaker 1: and constructed over eleven hundred tons of oo light limestone
32:40
Speaker 1: coral into a fortress. His name for it was Coral Castle.
32:47
Speaker 1: The stone ranges, the stones ranged up to thirty tons
32:52
Speaker 1: a peace, the center of gravity. Calculations required to move them,
32:58
Speaker 1: to swing them, to stack them, to rotate them are
33:04
Speaker 1: not trivial. They are not something you figure out in
33:09
Speaker 1: your garage. And yet Ed's visitors, who attempted to watch
33:15
Speaker 1: him work through fence gaps at night, reported something that
33:21
Speaker 1: every serious research researcher into this site eventually comes back to.
33:29
Speaker 1: They didn't see Ed straining. They didn't see him with
33:33
Speaker 1: levers and pulleys and primitive scranes. They saw him seeing
33:41
Speaker 1: a low sustained rhythmic note, his hands flat against the stone,
33:46
Speaker 1: and then the stone rising, not dragged, not levered, rising,
33:53
Speaker 1: they said, like a helium balloon, allowing Ed to steer
33:57
Speaker 1: it gently into position with his finger tips. Ed left
34:03
Speaker 1: behind a handwritten booklet called Magnetic Current. In it, he
34:08
Speaker 1: claimed that modern science was fundamentally wrong about electricity, that
34:14
Speaker 1: magnetism was physical fluid substance flowing through the earth, and
34:20
Speaker 1: that by harnessing this specific interaction between north and south
34:25
Speaker 1: pole magnet currents in the bedrock, he could temporarily sever
34:32
Speaker 1: a stone's gravitational bond with the earth. He never gave
34:38
Speaker 1: a clearer explanation than that. When people asked him how
34:42
Speaker 1: he moved the stones, he said, I have discovered the
34:45
Speaker 1: secrets of the Pyramids. Here's a piece of evidence that
34:50
Speaker 1: I find most striking. Ed built a nine ton revolving gait,
34:55
Speaker 1: a single monolithic block eight feet tall, set as the
35:01
Speaker 1: entrance to the castle. It was balanced so precisely that
35:07
Speaker 1: a child could push it open with one finger when
35:15
Speaker 1: the gate stops working. In the nineteen eighties, decades after
35:20
Speaker 1: Ed's death, engineers brought in a crane to inspect it.
35:26
Speaker 1: They removed the stone and found that Ed had drilled
35:30
Speaker 1: a longitudinal hole through the exact center of the nine
35:35
Speaker 1: ton block. Through the center, he had inserted a metal
35:41
Speaker 1: shaft resting on an old truck bearing. The shaft was precise,
35:48
Speaker 1: was the precise center of gravity a millimeter off in
35:53
Speaker 1: either direction, and the gate doesn't move. It just sits there.
35:59
Speaker 1: A night ton obstruction and calculated this center of gravity
36:07
Speaker 1: having nine ton irregular stone slab alone at night, used
36:13
Speaker 1: no computers and no instruments beyond what he brought with
36:18
Speaker 1: him in a wheelbarrow. He was not a structural engineer.
36:25
Speaker 1: He was a coral carver with a fifth grade education
36:29
Speaker 1: and a theory about magnets. And he builds a thing
36:34
Speaker 1: that stumps engineers to this day. Felamann's Temple and a
36:42
Speaker 1: silence of iron. I want to go further back because
36:47
Speaker 1: the template of the impossible builder is not new, it's ancient,
36:53
Speaker 1: the First Temple of Jerusalem. And I'm pulling here from
36:57
Speaker 1: the Book of Kings in the Testament of Suloman, a
37:01
Speaker 1: text that reads less like a scripture and more like
37:05
Speaker 1: a very alarming construction log book. Tholoman did not want
37:12
Speaker 1: iron tools used in the building of the temple. This
37:17
Speaker 1: is documented in First Kings six seven, and it states
37:26
Speaker 1: explicitly that the house was built using stones cut and
37:30
Speaker 1: prepared elsewhere, so that no hammer, no x, no tool
37:36
Speaker 1: of iron was heard on the site while it was
37:40
Speaker 1: under construction. That is the strange architectural restriction. Iron is useful.
37:48
Speaker 1: Iron is how you build things. In nine fifty seven BCE.
37:54
Speaker 1: You don't voluntarily work without it unless you have a
37:57
Speaker 1: very good reason. The reason, according to the Testament of Solomon,
38:04
Speaker 1: is that Solomon wasn't using human workers for the load
38:09
Speaker 1: bearing heavy lifting. He was using bound demons, and some
38:16
Speaker 1: of them had a pathological sensitive sensitivity to iron. The
38:25
Speaker 1: text to reads like a project manager's nightmare. Solomon had
38:30
Speaker 1: a magical ring, the Seal of God, given to him
38:34
Speaker 1: by the archangel Michael, and he uses it to conscript
38:39
Speaker 1: a roster of supernatural entities. Each entity is a is
38:44
Speaker 1: a sign based on their specific elemental properties or nia's
38:52
Speaker 1: shape shifting shadow entity assigned to the quarries cuts stone
38:59
Speaker 1: on a women with mule legs spins a massive rope
39:07
Speaker 1: capable of lifting systems. Eep Ephyspus described as a localized
39:17
Speaker 1: violent wind vortex summon specifically from Arabia for one task,
39:23
Speaker 1: to move a single cornerstone that no human crew could budge,
39:29
Speaker 1: the cornerstone of the entire temple. The stone is moved,
39:35
Speaker 1: the cornerstone is set in absolute silence. And here's what
39:40
Speaker 1: makes this interesting from material science perspective. At the base
39:46
Speaker 1: of the temple mount you can still see these stones
39:50
Speaker 1: in the Western Wall tunnels. Today these are single limestone
39:55
Speaker 1: blocks weighing over five hundred metric tons five hundred for context.
40:04
Speaker 1: A modern heavy lifting crane at full capacity handles around
40:11
Speaker 1: three thousand tons, but a crane is a machine. In
40:16
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven BCE, the theoretical maximum physical force available
40:24
Speaker 1: to human workers using ropes levers in ramp system tops
40:30
Speaker 1: out around fifty tons before the physics simply collapse. Those
40:38
Speaker 1: blocks are there, they exist, they have been measured. The
40:43
Speaker 1: gap between what humans could do and what was done
40:48
Speaker 1: has never been satisfactory, satisfactorily close by mainstream archaeological archaeology.
40:58
Speaker 1: And a temple was built in silence. Every stone cut
41:02
Speaker 1: somewhere else and fitted so precisely on site that no
41:07
Speaker 1: adjustment was needed. No hammer, no chisel, no sound, just
41:12
Speaker 1: the weight of impossibly large stone lowering itself onto and
41:18
Speaker 1: possibly precise alignments. A fifth plus being a localized wind vortex.
41:33
Speaker 1: It turns out, is a weirdly useful physical description of
41:37
Speaker 1: something that could move a five hundred ton block. You
41:42
Speaker 1: just need a lot of it directed precise, silent. We
41:47
Speaker 1: don't have anything that does that. In nine and fifty
41:53
Speaker 1: seven BCE, apparently sulemanded. We've talked about buildings that contain
42:02
Speaker 1: buildings whose math came from somewhere outside human knowledge. Now
42:07
Speaker 1: let's talk about the third category, buildings that were touched.
42:12
Speaker 1: Because if the first category is about keeping something in
42:17
Speaker 1: and the second one is about building something impossible, the
42:20
Speaker 1: third one is simply the aftermath. What a physical structure
42:26
Speaker 1: looks like after a non human entity has passed through it.
42:30
Speaker 1: The answer, consistently across cultures and centuries is it doesn't heal.
42:44
Speaker 1: The threugh Kerch one of the most famous cathedrals in Germany.
42:50
Speaker 1: There is a footprints on the stone floor. It's been
42:54
Speaker 1: there since the late fifteenth century. The story goes that
43:00
Speaker 1: architect George Vaughan Raddisburg made me deal with the devil
43:07
Speaker 1: more construction funding. The devil's one condition, no windows, a
43:12
Speaker 1: dark monument to the abyss, no light of God allowed
43:17
Speaker 1: to enter. The building went up. When it was complete,
43:22
Speaker 1: the devil stood in the entrance foyer to inspect his
43:25
Speaker 1: investment from that specific advantage point, and only that advantage point.
43:33
Speaker 1: The building's massive internal pillars aligned perfectly to block every
43:39
Speaker 1: single window. The devil saw darkness, he saw his end
43:44
Speaker 1: of the deal. Honored, he took one triumphant step forward
43:49
Speaker 1: from that new position, the pillars no longer aligned, row
43:55
Speaker 1: upon a row of massive steamed glass windows with light.
44:01
Speaker 1: He had been tricked. The architect had designed the sight line,
44:07
Speaker 1: the exact angle of deception, into the structure itself. The
44:14
Speaker 1: devil stamped his foot in fury and left his footprint.
44:20
Speaker 1: Ititch black, permanent in the shape of a human foot
44:25
Speaker 1: with a distinct spur at the heel. Remains at the
44:29
Speaker 1: stone floor of the fruit Kirch entrance to this day,
44:36
Speaker 1: deeply burned in unscrapable. They've tried, They've kept trying. I
44:44
Speaker 1: want you to understand the material reality of what that means.
44:50
Speaker 1: Stone is not mit malible under a foot. A human foot,
44:56
Speaker 1: even a heavy human, leaves no impression in polished stone floor.
45:03
Speaker 1: The thermal energy requires to leave a permiment burn mark
45:08
Speaker 1: in granite from a single football is extraordinary. The marcus
45:18
Speaker 1: not carrying it is the marcus, not a carving. It
45:22
Speaker 1: is not a decoration. It was not put there by
45:25
Speaker 1: a stonemason. It is a scar, an exit scar, the
45:30
Speaker 1: physical record of a very bad day for a very
45:33
Speaker 1: old entity. And if the immunich footprints is a single
45:39
Speaker 1: incident contained to one building. The devil's footprints are something
45:45
Speaker 1: else entirely. February ninth, eighteen fifty five, the country of Devon,
45:52
Speaker 1: England wakes up after a heavy blizzard to find tracks
46:00
Speaker 1: hoofprints in the snow, woven exactly four inches long, three
46:05
Speaker 1: inches wide, arranged not in a staggered pattern of a
46:10
Speaker 1: four legged animal, but in a perfect single file line
46:14
Speaker 1: indicating a bipedal entity walking with un natural absolute balance,
46:22
Speaker 1: one foot directly in front of the other, eight inches
46:26
Speaker 1: spasically continuous. The trail covered over a hundred miles across
46:34
Speaker 1: multiple towns in a single night. Here's what's important to
46:41
Speaker 1: understand about how this trail behaved with respect to human architecture.
46:53
Speaker 1: It did not go around buildings, It did not detour
46:57
Speaker 1: around walls. The trackshold are broach a fourteen foot brick wall,
47:02
Speaker 1: step at the base and reappear on the rooftop above,
47:07
Speaker 1: continuing in an undeviated straight line on the other side,
47:16
Speaker 1: not over it, just appearing on the other side, as
47:20
Speaker 1: if the wall simply wasn't information the entity was the
47:25
Speaker 1: entity was processing. In one documented case, the tracks entered
47:31
Speaker 1: a drain pipe two inches in diameter, tracked through the
47:37
Speaker 1: interior of the pipe, exited out the other side two
47:41
Speaker 1: inches Clergy across Devon reached that the Satan had physically
47:48
Speaker 1: walked the county that night, that he had paced its
47:53
Speaker 1: boundary boundaries, measured its dimensions, and filled what her paperwork.
48:01
Speaker 1: One files when one files, when is claiming a geographic
48:08
Speaker 1: territory in the name of the infernal. There was no
48:13
Speaker 1: blizzard in the following night. There were no more tracks
48:20
Speaker 1: whatever completed its survey. That an evening had gotten what
48:24
Speaker 1: it came for. Let's go to the Irish coast, to
48:30
Speaker 1: the Hook Peninsula and County Rexford, where the coastline is
48:35
Speaker 1: so brutal and so rocky that for centuries it claims
48:40
Speaker 1: ships with casual regularity. There is a mansion on this peninsulas,
48:48
Speaker 1: Loftis Hall, widely regarded as the most haunched house in Ireland.
48:54
Speaker 1: The story started in seventeen seventy five Charles Tottenham in
49:00
Speaker 1: the bleak isolated mansion with his second wife and his
49:05
Speaker 1: daughter from his first marriage, Lady Anne. In winter, the
49:10
Speaker 1: peninsula was almost entirely cut off from the rest of
49:14
Speaker 1: the country. Storms rolled in from the bay with nothing
49:21
Speaker 1: to slow them down. During one of these storms, each
49:25
Speaker 1: ship appeared in the bay. This was not unusual. Ships
49:31
Speaker 1: shelter on the peninsula regularly. What was unusual was the
49:36
Speaker 1: man who arrived at the door shortly after Paul arisocratic,
49:42
Speaker 1: extremely well dressed, charismatic in a way that Anne apparently
49:46
Speaker 1: found devastating. He said he was a merchant stranded by
49:53
Speaker 1: the storm, and could he please stay. He stayed for weeks.
49:59
Speaker 1: He was charming, he was generous. He played cards with
50:03
Speaker 1: the family every night in the drawing room, and he
50:06
Speaker 1: was impossibly good card He wasn't a possibly good card player,
50:12
Speaker 1: and Anne fell completely catastrophically in love with him. Then
50:18
Speaker 1: one evening, she dropped a card. She reached under the
50:22
Speaker 1: heavy oak table to retrieve it, and she looked up.
50:27
Speaker 1: She had taken his He had taken his writing boots off,
50:32
Speaker 1: and where his feet should have been too coarse black
50:36
Speaker 1: covid hoofs and screamed. The stranger stood up and instead
50:45
Speaker 1: of using the door, instead of doing anything physical but
50:50
Speaker 1: to material human being would do. When discovered, he became,
50:57
Speaker 1: according to the state's owned journals, localized violent vortex, a
51:02
Speaker 1: ball of fire and sulfur smoke. He went up, not out,
51:08
Speaker 1: not through the door earth or the window, straight up
51:12
Speaker 1: through the ceiling, through the roof, leaving a gaping, charred
51:17
Speaker 1: hole in that open in that opened that drawing room
51:22
Speaker 1: to the Irish guy. Here's where this story becomes architectural.
51:29
Speaker 1: The Tottenham family hired carpenters mason after mason after mason
51:36
Speaker 1: over subsequent decades. Every time the hole was sealed timber, plaster, stone,
51:42
Speaker 1: the materials would warp, fracture, or collapse inward. The following night.
51:49
Speaker 1: The builders physically rejected every attempt at repair. The hole
51:55
Speaker 1: to ceiling where the entity exited remained structurally open, a
52:00
Speaker 1: wounds that the building refused to close. Lady Anne did
52:05
Speaker 1: not recover. She went on. She went into what her
52:10
Speaker 1: family described as severe psychotic break, Unable to eat and
52:16
Speaker 1: able to communicate, unable to stop waiting. He put her
52:21
Speaker 1: in an upper room in the mansion, the tapestry room,
52:25
Speaker 1: and she sat in a wooden chair, knees pressed to
52:30
Speaker 1: her chest, staring at the window at the bay, waiting
52:34
Speaker 1: for the ship to come back, waiting for him to
52:38
Speaker 1: come back. She died years later, still in that chair.
52:44
Speaker 1: Her body had become so rigidly locked into that fetal position,
52:50
Speaker 1: her muscle so permanently contracted from years of that posture,
52:55
Speaker 1: that the family could not straighten her for a traditional burial.
53:02
Speaker 1: They buried her in a specifically constructed square coffin because
53:08
Speaker 1: she could no longer be unfolded. Now here's where Heiri's
53:13
Speaker 1: where the coda to this story. Here's a coda to
53:19
Speaker 1: this story, the detail that elevates it from tragic to
53:23
Speaker 1: genuinely eerie. In the late eighteen hundreds, the old hall
53:28
Speaker 1: was demolished and rebuilt in a massive Neo Gothic structure
53:33
Speaker 1: that stands today. The centerpiece of the new build was
53:38
Speaker 1: a hand carve's Italian oak granite staircase. Builders commissioned just
53:44
Speaker 1: three identical versions of this hyper complex, interlocking design, one
53:51
Speaker 1: for the Vatican in Rome, one for the Grand Saloon
53:54
Speaker 1: of the Aramass Titanic, and one for the Lotus hull.
54:01
Speaker 1: The Vatican is, the Vaticans is fine, the Titanic is
54:05
Speaker 1: somewhere in the bottom of the Northern Atlantic. And I
54:10
Speaker 1: wanted to loft his hall fand in a building that
54:13
Speaker 1: to this day visitors described as producing a single consistent
54:20
Speaker 1: sensation in the tapestry room, not the sound of footsteps,
54:26
Speaker 1: not the smell of sulfur, but a physical pressure, invisible crushing,
54:32
Speaker 1: a weights on the chest, the exact position of a
54:37
Speaker 1: woman who's spent the life, who spent the rest of
54:41
Speaker 1: her life waiting two hours north of Loftus Hall, on
54:49
Speaker 1: a bleak hilltop in Dublin, in the Dublin Mountains, there
54:54
Speaker 1: is a story that runs on almost exactly the same template,
54:58
Speaker 1: same card game, same dropped card, same revealing discovering under
55:03
Speaker 1: the table, but this one ends differently. Montpellier Hill, seventeen
55:11
Speaker 1: twenty five. William Connolly, a wealthy Irish politician, decides to
55:16
Speaker 1: build a stone hunting lodge on the summit to save
55:21
Speaker 1: money or to make a point, depending on your interpretation.
55:25
Speaker 1: He uses the stones from an ancient Neolithic passage tomb
55:33
Speaker 1: he found in this site, a two of one thousands,
55:38
Speaker 1: a two thousands of years old, a two that was
55:41
Speaker 1: in every traditional sense sacred. He tears it apart and
55:48
Speaker 1: builds his lodge out of it. Almost immediately, a freak
55:52
Speaker 1: localized storm, not regional, local lives targeted rips the wooden
55:59
Speaker 1: roof completely off the structure. The locals take this as
56:04
Speaker 1: an obvious message. Only undeterred had their roof rebuilt entirely
56:14
Speaker 1: in stone arches, oppressive vault like more tomb than hunting lodge.
56:23
Speaker 1: By the late seventeen hundreds, this building has become the
56:26
Speaker 1: meeting place for the Irish Health Fire Club, a society
56:31
Speaker 1: of aristocratic libertines who treated satanism as a recreational activity,
56:39
Speaker 1: and who would at their midnight meetings leave one velvet
56:44
Speaker 1: chair at the head of the table auspicuously empty, built
56:50
Speaker 1: it with the finest wine waiting for their patron on
56:55
Speaker 1: one stormy night. And notice how often this happened on
57:00
Speaker 1: stormy nights. How storm seems to be a formal invitation.
57:05
Speaker 1: A stranger arrived and joined the card game. A player
57:10
Speaker 1: dropped the card, reached under the table oven hoofs. This
57:17
Speaker 1: time there was no scream, no exit through the ceiling.
57:22
Speaker 1: This time there was fire, immediate total structural fire. The
57:28
Speaker 1: building was gutted when it burned out. The stone vaulted
57:37
Speaker 1: when it burned out. The stone vaulted ceilings were made
57:40
Speaker 1: because stone is stubborn, but it was blackened, coated in
57:45
Speaker 1: an oily, thick soot that centuries of Irish rainfall have
57:50
Speaker 1: been unable to clean. The building stands on the hilltop
57:55
Speaker 1: today as a roofless stone shell. The trees around it
58:02
Speaker 1: don't have birds. The feels within the perimeter of the
58:06
Speaker 1: walls grows nothing. People who leave audio corders running inside
58:13
Speaker 1: the ruins describe consistently picking up the low rhythmic sounds
58:18
Speaker 1: beneath the wind noise, a purring, very deep, very regular,
58:26
Speaker 1: very much like somewhat like a very much like something
58:29
Speaker 1: like an enorm very much like something enormous that that
58:34
Speaker 1: is resting and not asleep. Researchers and hikers avoid that
58:40
Speaker 1: site after dark, not because of any formal prohibition, but
58:45
Speaker 1: because of something more instinctive, a feeling describes with remarkable
58:54
Speaker 1: consistency by people who've never compared notes. That's emptiness inside
59:01
Speaker 1: those stone walls. It's not ordinary emptiness. That something is
59:07
Speaker 1: using it, not visiting, not haunting, reciting. Before we get
59:15
Speaker 1: into our final acts, I want to talk briefly about geography,
59:19
Speaker 1: because here's a pattern that emerges when you start mapping
59:23
Speaker 1: these sites. The Sacra dis Son Michelle in Piedmont, Italy,
59:34
Speaker 1: ancient stone complex built on the peak of a mount
59:41
Speaker 1: her Surion know in the tenth century structurally improbable, a
59:47
Speaker 1: massive building carved into a vertical cliff, based that tenth
59:52
Speaker 1: century technology had no business accessing, let alone building on
1:00:01
Speaker 1: local local history courts. A hermit named Giovanni Vincenzo who
1:00:09
Speaker 1: tried to build a monastery on a nearby hill. They
1:00:12
Speaker 1: kept finding that every night the stones laid, the stones
1:00:16
Speaker 1: he laid disappeared. He watched one night and found angels
1:00:23
Speaker 1: carrying his stones across the valley to the top of
1:00:27
Speaker 1: the mountain. The angels apparently had a preferred location. What's
1:00:34
Speaker 1: remarkable as the Sacra Diche Son Michelle sits on a
1:00:39
Speaker 1: straight line, a perfect a perfectly straight geographical line that
1:00:45
Speaker 1: connects seven monasteries dedicated to the archangel Michael, from Skellig
1:00:53
Speaker 1: Michael on a rock on a rock off the coast
1:00:58
Speaker 1: of Ireland, want Saint Michael and France, through the Sacra,
1:01:06
Speaker 1: through the Sanctuary of monts Sun TAngelo in southern Italy,
1:01:14
Speaker 1: through a monastery in Greece, all the way to Stella
1:01:20
Speaker 1: Maris Monastery in Israel. This line tracks exactly with the
1:01:28
Speaker 1: sunset in the summer solstice. Seven major religious sites, seven
1:01:34
Speaker 1: different countries, one straight line, one date, one entity. You
1:01:40
Speaker 1: cannot build that line intentionally. The sites were established over
1:01:46
Speaker 1: one thousand years and multiple separate civilizations who had no
1:01:52
Speaker 1: documented communication about coordinates. The line exists, whether or not
1:01:58
Speaker 1: the builders knew about it. The Angels apparently had access
1:02:04
Speaker 1: to a longer ruler. The sacra specifically, the foundation stones,
1:02:10
Speaker 1: the oldest layer of the building, are geologically mismatched. The
1:02:16
Speaker 1: surrounding mountains is local stones. The oldest foundations are rock
1:02:24
Speaker 1: type that matches a quarry miles away across the across
1:02:29
Speaker 1: the valley at the bottom of a cliff face. No
1:02:35
Speaker 1: human transport record exists. The quarry is down there, the
1:02:41
Speaker 1: stones are up here. The cliff is vertical. The angels
1:02:46
Speaker 1: apparently did their own logistics. Inside the sacra, the main
1:02:53
Speaker 1: entrance forces specific forces, a specific experience. You climb a
1:02:59
Speaker 1: mess this stone staircase cut directly into the mountain. The
1:03:06
Speaker 1: staircase the stairway of the dead. They call it. Passing
1:03:10
Speaker 1: under a thirty meter arcway in near total darkness, ascending
1:03:17
Speaker 1: towards the light. The architecture is designed to simulate a
1:03:22
Speaker 1: pacific sensation, and it's not subtle. By the time you
1:03:27
Speaker 1: reach the top, emerging into blinding illumination. You are gasping
1:03:35
Speaker 1: the building. The building is a physical experience of death
1:03:40
Speaker 1: and decision, built into stone, repeatable, designed by someone who
1:03:46
Speaker 1: knew exactly what transition felt like. I want to spend
1:03:53
Speaker 1: a few minutes on the stranger's most consistent thread. Running
1:03:57
Speaker 1: through this research the testimony of the builders. Again and again,
1:04:03
Speaker 1: across cultures and centuries, we get the same story from
1:04:07
Speaker 1: the people who constructed these impossible things. The blueprint came
1:04:13
Speaker 1: across outside, The design arrived at a dream. The geometry
1:04:19
Speaker 1: was shown to them by something that was not another person.
1:04:24
Speaker 1: The Apprentice Pillar at Rosalind Chapel in Scotland, fifteenth century,
1:04:31
Speaker 1: a master mason is assigned to carve an impossibly ornate
1:04:36
Speaker 1: pillar for the chapel being built by the Sinclair family,
1:04:42
Speaker 1: a pillar so complex he leaves the country to study
1:04:46
Speaker 1: classical stonework before attempting it. While he is gone, his
1:04:52
Speaker 1: apprentice falls into a deep trance as a dream, where
1:04:57
Speaker 1: a celestial figure shows him in complete detail the finished
1:05:03
Speaker 1: pillar and guides his hands on how to carve it.
1:05:09
Speaker 1: The apprentice wakes up and does it immediately from memory,
1:05:14
Speaker 1: without drafts, without measurements, without any of the formal architectural
1:05:19
Speaker 1: preparation the master considered essential. It is a masterpiece, and
1:05:27
Speaker 1: call him wrap an eight colliding dragons, from whose mouse
1:05:32
Speaker 1: erupts the vines of stone, vegetation, spiraling upward, alive in
1:05:38
Speaker 1: stone in ways in a way that stone simply should
1:05:42
Speaker 1: not be. When the master mason returned from Rome and
1:05:46
Speaker 1: saw what the boy had done in his absence, bypassed
1:05:50
Speaker 1: century of architectural training through a single external transmission, he
1:05:56
Speaker 1: killed him, struck the apprent with a mallet, unlived him
1:06:02
Speaker 1: in the chapel. His face is carved in the wall
1:06:07
Speaker 1: of the Roslin to this day, a stone portrait of
1:06:11
Speaker 1: the master mason staring across the chapel at the pillar
1:06:15
Speaker 1: he could not replicate, staring at the thing he wasn't
1:06:20
Speaker 1: chosen to make. Here's the other pattern. Modern researchers studying
1:06:27
Speaker 1: in two thirteen carved stone cubes that approached Rut from
1:06:33
Speaker 1: the arches of Roslin Chapel found something unexpected. The geometric
1:06:39
Speaker 1: pattern carved into those cubes are land ny figures, the
1:06:46
Speaker 1: specific shape that form when sound waves hit a flat
1:06:51
Speaker 1: surface covered in sand. The patterns covered in the patterns
1:06:57
Speaker 1: made by specific frequencies. The entire interior architecture of Rosalind
1:07:05
Speaker 1: Chapel is a piece of sheet music. The building is frozen,
1:07:10
Speaker 1: is frozen sound. Someone carves a specific frequency into the
1:07:15
Speaker 1: stone ceiling of a fifteenth century Scottish chapel, and it's
1:07:21
Speaker 1: still there. A modern acoustic scientist still don't know what
1:07:28
Speaker 1: note you need to play making to make the whole
1:07:34
Speaker 1: thing ring something new, something stone and an apprentice, the
1:07:43
Speaker 1: design and a dream and then a human being on
1:07:49
Speaker 1: a live tam for it. Left close with one more
1:07:54
Speaker 1: castle because you deserve a closing argument, and I think
1:07:58
Speaker 1: this one makes it bangor for rust. Then India, seventeenth century,
1:08:08
Speaker 1: built by King Motto Singh on land near meditation retreat
1:08:16
Speaker 1: of a powerl esthetic sorcerer named Baba Balu Nah. The
1:08:23
Speaker 1: sorcerer gave one permission, you can build here, but the
1:08:28
Speaker 1: moment the shadow of your palace falls on my sanctuary,
1:08:33
Speaker 1: the city will cease to exist. A later prince didn't listen,
1:08:41
Speaker 1: built a tower, the shadow fell, the city was abandoned overnight,
1:08:47
Speaker 1: the entire population gone. The historians records offer no plague,
1:08:55
Speaker 1: no invasion, no natural disaster, just absence. Today, Bangar four
1:09:04
Speaker 1: is legally restricted by the Archaeological Survey of India. No
1:09:10
Speaker 1: one enters between sunset and sunrise. Not a suggestion, not
1:09:15
Speaker 1: a suggestion, a law. Here's an architectural anomaly that makes
1:09:23
Speaker 1: the site unlike anything else on this list. The massive
1:09:28
Speaker 1: stone walls of Bangar are intact. The market columns are standing,
1:09:35
Speaker 1: the stone gateways are standing. The carved decorative elements are
1:09:40
Speaker 1: standing centuries and monsoons have not brought them down. Every
1:09:46
Speaker 1: single roofed structure in the Force is roofless. Not because
1:09:53
Speaker 1: the roofs decayed, not because the structural collapse over centuries.
1:09:59
Speaker 1: Because every every time anyone tries to rebuild a roof
1:10:03
Speaker 1: inside the fort perimeter, and many have tried, and the
1:10:09
Speaker 1: government has documented the attempts, the new roof spontaneously collapses
1:10:15
Speaker 1: inward within days. Not the walls, not the columns, not
1:10:21
Speaker 1: the decorative stone, just the roof, just to covering, just
1:10:26
Speaker 1: a thing that would enclose the space and create interior air.
1:10:33
Speaker 1: Whatever the Sorcerer's curse does to this place, it does
1:10:38
Speaker 1: not want ceilings. It wants the sky to be visible
1:10:45
Speaker 1: from the inside. I don't know what that means. I've
1:10:48
Speaker 1: thought about it. I don't really have an answer, But
1:10:51
Speaker 1: I will tell you that the consistent thread of tonight's episode,
1:10:57
Speaker 1: from Huska's seal pitch to the Godlynn Hall staircase going
1:11:02
Speaker 1: nowhere to their Red Coast buke standing empty, is this,
1:11:10
Speaker 1: Some structures in the world have a purpose that was
1:11:14
Speaker 1: never ours. Some foundation contains that the contains things that
1:11:19
Speaker 1: the builders understood very well and have politely agreed to forget.
1:11:27
Speaker 1: And the most unsettling version of that reality isn't That
1:11:31
Speaker 1: isn't the haunted house. It isn't the cursed bridge, It
1:11:37
Speaker 1: isn't the demonic footprints burned into the cathedral floor. It's
1:11:43
Speaker 1: the castle with no kitchen, the perfectly ordinary looking building
1:11:50
Speaker 1: where the heaviest walls face inward, where the architecture answers
1:11:56
Speaker 1: a question no one on the tourist brochure is willing
1:11:59
Speaker 1: to ask out loud, what are we keeping? In? The
1:12:07
Speaker 1: research for this episode brought me to a quote I've
1:12:11
Speaker 1: been thinking about since I found it, not from a
1:12:14
Speaker 1: grid more, not from an occult text, but from architectural
1:12:18
Speaker 1: theorist Lewis Khan, who said the structure is the giver
1:12:25
Speaker 1: of light. He meant that, he meant it technically, he
1:12:30
Speaker 1: meant that he meant that the way a building is
1:12:34
Speaker 1: assembled creeps the conditions for how light enters the space.
1:12:39
Speaker 1: But I keep thinking about it differently after this episode.
1:12:45
Speaker 1: The structure is a giver of light. That doesn't mean
1:12:49
Speaker 1: when the structure was designed to keep everything out. What
1:12:54
Speaker 1: does a building give you when it was built with
1:12:58
Speaker 1: no windows, no fits, no room for anything to enter
1:13:03
Speaker 1: from above? What does it give you when it was
1:13:08
Speaker 1: built specifically because something needed to needed to be below
1:13:13
Speaker 1: it in the dark, and the builders were sophisticated enough
1:13:19
Speaker 1: to know that stone alone wasn't enough. They paid to
1:13:24
Speaker 1: the things on the chapel walls. They named them in
1:13:28
Speaker 1: the Fresh Coast, left handed archers, bound beasts, the geometry
1:13:34
Speaker 1: of submission. They were telling it something. They were speaking
1:13:41
Speaker 1: They were telling it something. They were speaking to it
1:13:44
Speaker 1: in the only language they could trust to read. The
1:13:50
Speaker 1: architecture architecture permanent, immovable stone, stay stone, saying you are here,
1:13:58
Speaker 1: you are below, you stay. Seven hundred and fifty years later,
1:14:03
Speaker 1: the castle is still standing. This crashing continues, and somewhere
1:14:08
Speaker 1: in a Czech Republic, eighty year old explosives are the
1:14:13
Speaker 1: things standing between a team of geologists and answer that
1:14:19
Speaker 1: people who built that chapel in fall seventy eight did
1:14:23
Speaker 1: not want anyone to find Maybe they were right, Maybe
1:14:28
Speaker 1: some basements should stay sealed, or maybe and this is
1:14:34
Speaker 1: the version that keeps me up at night. This crushing
1:14:38
Speaker 1: isn't the sound of something trying to get out. Maybe
1:14:42
Speaker 1: it's the sound of something patient, something that has been
1:14:46
Speaker 1: in a dark for a very long time. That built
1:14:50
Speaker 1: civilization to entertain itself while it waited, That gave the
1:14:56
Speaker 1: mass for impossible staircases and impossible arches and impossible walls
1:15:05
Speaker 1: through a handful of human throughout history, just to see
1:15:12
Speaker 1: what we do with it now. That is down there,
1:15:17
Speaker 1: right now, in the dark, beneath the Gothic chapel floor,
1:15:20
Speaker 1: beneath the seal pit, beneath the nazy land mines, counting
1:15:26
Speaker 1: not the seconds, the footsteps of everyone who's walked overheard,
1:15:33
Speaker 1: every single one that is this episode. I'm your host.
1:15:40
Speaker 1: This has been a phantom navigator. The show notes for
1:15:44
Speaker 1: the show notes for this episode include citations, location links,
1:15:49
Speaker 1: and a specific Grimore text reference. Tonight read them during
1:15:54
Speaker 1: the day. Do you want to have said both in
1:16:09
Speaker 1: the game. That's