Dorian Gray said:
Joshua:
Perhaps. I'm talking about the house/residence/castle thingy involving heavy stones that weighed tons that some old man supposedly built by himself. It's in Florida, I believe. I have the name wrong, obviously.
The
Coral Castle, in Homestead, Florida, was built single-handedly by one Edward Leedskalnin from Latvia. Ed was around 33 when he began construction on the complex in 1920. Although Coral Castle wouldn't exactly qualify as an archaeological mystery, I shall touch briefly upon it.
Over 95% (roughly) of the sites you will encounter while doing a web search for the Coral Castle will be mystical in nature. Some of them promote a few glaring misconceptions, embellishments or omissions, and of course similar sites simply copy and spread the misinformation (since they all get their information from each other anyway). A good example of the sort of bad information you can get comes from the very first site you'll get by searching "Coral Castle" on
Yahoo.
By way of example, one of the things that is expounded by sites which allege Ed possessed magical mystical neato powers is the fact that when Ed came to America from Latvia, his formal education was only equivalent to around the fourth grade. The unspoken yet painfully obvious
implication here is that Ed was simply too stupid to be able to conceive of any
scientific or mechanical means of doing what he did, and of course that's not true; because somebody's
formal education ends at one point does not mean they stop learning. Indeed, Ed was
remarkably intelligent, and he eagerly educated himself with his spare time. He studied books and learned from them - which leads us to the next mystical claim often touted by such sites; namely, that Ed was "often seen to study books about magnetism and cosmic forces". The implication here is that Ed learned and was subsequently able to tap into some obscure natural cosmic energy source to do his work. Oddly, you hear this sort of claim a lot...that by studying old library books, people unlock the secrets of mysterious and powerful energies. Well, if that's all it takes, then I'll see you at the library. Meanwhile, I don't know how many books about "cosmic forces" were around in the 1920's, but it
is a fact that Amazing Ed used the knowledge gained from reading books about electricity to built his own AC generator. Mystical!
Some of these sites put forward completely unsubstantiated claims, without even
bothering to attempt to qualify them, as if you're just supposed to believe them. The above-linked site is a prime example. Check out these bits of info...
Some teenagers spying on him one evening claimed they saw him "float coral blocks through the air like hydrogen balloons," but no one took them seriously. If their testimony can be believed, they were the only witnesses to the construction of Coral Castle.
You get this problem a lot, with many different claims on many different topics. It makes for a nice addition to an article - throw in some anonymous passerby who just happened to be driving down the road, and all the sudden you've got all the proof you need for a mystical explanation. Deus ex Machina. Who are these "teenagers"? Who heard their story and decided not to take them seriously? Look around...there's no evidence to support this claim at all; it may as well have been made up - and knowing what
FATE will publish, it probably was.
He never shared the secret of its construction with anyone, saying only that he had rediscovered the laws of weight, measurement, and leverage used by the Ancient Egyptians, and that these lost principles somehow involved the relationship of the Earth to certain positions of the heavenly bodies.
Leedskalnin is quoted as saying, "I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids. I have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons."
These two paragraphs are almost just fine. They are entirely accurate, except for the claim thrown in at the end of the first paragraph. Weight, measurement, leverage - he made those claims, but Ed has
never been quoted as saying these principles "involved the relationship of the Earth to certain positions of the heavenly bodies". Not only that, but considering Ed worked every single night for 20 straight
years to build his castle, it doesn't make sense that Earth's "relationship" to certain positions of the heavenly bodies should be involved, because no heavenly body keeps its position every night for 20 straight years.
Even the purpose of Coral Castle was deliberately obscured. When asked why he assumed such an enormous undertaking, Leedskalnin smilingly explained that it was built entirely for his "Sweet Sixteen," Agnes Scuffs, a woman he once asked to wed, but who never left Latvia, where she married even before he arrived in Florida. Revealingly, he never contacted Agnes after coming to America. He seems to have used this tale to politely put off unwanted curiosity.
Ed was actually engaged to Agnes Scuffs, and she called off the wedding the day before it was supposed to take place. That was actually the reason Ed left Latvia; and it wasn't just an "excuse", he was very insistent that the Coral Castle was built for Agnes.
And lastly,
He was born in 1887 into a farming family at Stramereens Pogosta, a small village near Riga, Latvia, but emigrated to North America before the outbreak of World War I.
This is important, because the answer may speak closely to the real "mystery" behind the Coral Castle. The above quoted statement is simply wrong. Ed was born in 1887 near Riga, to be sure...but not to a "farming family". Ed Leedskalnin came from a family of
stone masons.
If you want some entertainment, find some way to get a hold of the Coral Castle episode of
In Search Of.... The people interviewed on that show go as far as insisting that Ed could mentally "douse" for subterranean deposits of coral, and there's a lovely "reinactment" where he raises a block from what looks like the middle of a grass field.
