In the same vein as the arcane Georgia Monuments, upon which we’ve reported before [see here and here], is the so-called “Coral Castle” in southern Florida.
“So-called” because it isn’t really a castle so much as a strange assortment of monuments, many of them astronomical (half moon, Saturn) and megalithic, more like Stonehenge than Windsor.
Like the Georgia Monuments — as well as Stonehenge — there are alignments through which one can precisely spot the North Star and other celestial features.
A working sundial calibrated to noon of the Winter and Summer Solstice is so accurate it tells time within two minutes.
There are 1,100 tons of coral limestone blocks here, and the chief mystery is how a fellow named Ed Leedskalnin, who immigrated from Latvia, hand-carved and stacked the rocks by himself — for that’s what he did: cut them from a quarry with tremendous precision and lifted and moved them — at one point relocating the entire complex to a new spot ten miles away when he felt encroached upon by new developments in the Miami area. That relocation took him three years. We’re talking three million pounds.
And he did it alone.
If that isn’t mysterious enough: Ed worked at night, by the illumination of large lanterns.
The entire complex took him from 1923 to 1951 to complete. This was a man who was just five-feet-tall and a bit over a hundred pounds!
How did he lift blocks that in some instances weigh up to 58 tons?
Here you get all kinds of fantastic speculation.
He levitated them, claim many. He was tapping into “ley” lines. He had come across a secret occult force. It was the same thing that ancient Egyptians employed for the pyramids (and Druids for Stonehenge), say those who fancy exotic imaginings.
Oh, the folklore: school kids spying on him at night are said to have seen Ed singing to a block of stone and causing it to rise like a hydrogen balloon.
Magnetic secrets?
You get the picture.
Rubbish, say the more mundane:
It was simply a matter of an obsessed fellow cleverly using winches, wedges, roller logs, tripods, and chain hoists, which make a block look like its floating as it’s lifted and which even a small man could operate, if he knew how to find the center of gravity of an object and position them.
It goes back and forth. The manager, Laura Maye (it is a tourist attraction), insists that tripods and hoists could not have been used because some blocks are higher than the tripods he did use (for some aspects of his work).
In all probability: the blocks of limestone were hoisted mechanically. Back in Latvia, after all, Ed’s family had been in the quarry business.
Probably, Ed Leedskalnin, was simply an eccentric, brilliant, and certainly very patient man, on a strange mission, ostensibly to show his love for a young lady who once had jilted him. He certainly used hoists for aspects of it. This can be seen in rare photos and a bit of old film shot long ago, way back before video.
There are normal explanations.
Yet, there is something that perhaps goes a bit deeper.
The place is like an onion, the manager insists. One layer involves the history, another the mechanics, and then the “vibe.”
She claims there’s a spot where a person can stand and either experience extraordinary strength or unusual weakness, depending on if a gate there is closed.
We decided not to try it and never did enter the actual grounds. Stuff can rub off, when we are too curious.
And this place reminds one of spots around the world that have an occult limning — not just the Georgia Monuments, Great Pyramids, and Stonehenge, but other sibylline wonders.
Perhaps this supposed strangeness is why it attracts New Agers: for Coral Castle used to have “Psychic Sunday” once a month, when two fortunetellers would set up shop in the gift store.
Just a marketing ploy?
It was one reason we decided not to bother entering.
— M. H. Brown
[Footnote: Where a shrine in Key West is famous for keeping storms away, this “shrine” seems to have attracted one. For when Hurricane Andrew swept across South Florida, it made a direct hit on Homestead — the city where the monuments are located — the eye moving precisely over Coral Castle (where, despite those tornadic winds, no monument budged).]
[resources: The Spirits Around Us]