The Coral Castle mystery

Coral Castle is a mystery that fascinates me a lot. It is a stone structure in Florida, near Homestead, built by a single man: Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant just over five feet tall. Ed supposedly built it entirely by himself, moving blocks weighing tens of tons, and some believe he knew a great secret.

The story of Coral Castle

According to the story told by Coral Castle itself, Ed was 26 when his fiancée, sixteen-year-old Agnes Skuvst, left him the day before the wedding, in Latvia. He left for the United States, fell ill with tuberculosis and, convinced that magnets had helped him recover, became interested in magnetism. When people asked him why he was building the castle, he would vaguely answer that it was for his “Sweet Sixteen”. In his booklet A Book in Every Home, however, he implies she was more an ideal than a real person, and according to a Latvian source the girl did exist but was called Hermīne Lūsis.

Around 1923 Ed bought a plot in Florida City, then an extremely remote place on the edge of the Everglades, and began building what he called “Ed’s Place”. Around 1936, when talk began of developing the area, he decided to move and take the castle with him. He spent three years moving all the blocks he had already worked to a new plot 10 miles to the north, outside Homestead.

He named the new place “Rock Gate”, after the huge revolving gate he had built into the back wall, and worked on it until his death in 1951. Altogether it took him more than 28 years. The name Coral Castle came later, when the new owners turned it into a tourist attraction. Ed lived on the second floor of the tower and guided visitors himself, charging ten cents in Florida City and asking a twenty-five-cent donation in Homestead. Those who had no money got in free.

The mystery of Coral Castle

The mystery lies in the fact that the park is made of extremely heavy blocks: about 1,100 short tons of stone in all. Each piece weighs on average around 15 tons, the largest about 30, and the two tallest monoliths stand 25 feet high. The stones are fitted without mortar, held together by their own weight, with joints so precise that no light passes between them. It is said that Ed, five feet tall and about 100 pounds, cut, carried and assembled everything alone. How did he do it?

The castle, by the way, is not made of coral, as the name suggests. It is made of oolite, a limestone typical of south-eastern Florida that also contains fragments of fossil shells and corals, and which there lies just a few inches below the soil. Ed quarried it right on site: the pool and the pit beside the north wall are his quarries.

He is said to have worked at night because he did not want to be seen, and he certainly never explained to anyone how he did it. To those who asked he would answer “It’s not difficult if you know how”, or:

I understand the laws of weight and leverage well.

He also said he had discovered “the secrets of the pyramids”. Some teenagers claimed they had seen him make the blocks move like hydrogen balloons, and the only “special” tool Ed ever mentioned was a mysterious “perpetual motion holder”. This is where the theories about reverse magnetism and levitation come from.

The reality is less magical but, to me, no less incredible. A witness, Orval Irwin, saw him quarry the stones and raise parts of the wall, and illustrated his methods in the book Mr. Can’t Is Dead. In 1944, moreover, a short documentary was filmed showing him at work. Photos and accounts show that Ed used pulleys and simple tools, together with a deep knowledge of leverage. One man, simple tools and almost thirty years of patience.

The secret of the revolving gate

The most famous structure in the park is the revolving gate: a stone block of about nine short tons, eight feet tall, fitted into the wall within a quarter of an inch. It was balanced so well that, it was said, even a child could turn it with the push of a finger.

Its secret was only discovered in 1986, when it stopped working. Removing it took six men and a 50-ton crane. The engineers found that Ed had drilled through the block from top to bottom, inserted a metal shaft and set it on an old truck bearing. It was the rusting of that bearing that had jammed it. The gate was put back in place on 23 July 1986 with a new shaft and bearings, but in 2005 it jammed again. It was repaired once more, but it has never again turned as easily as it once did.

Ed’s end

In November 1951 Ed fell ill. He hung a sign on the gate reading “Going to the Hospital” and took the bus to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. He died twenty-eight days later, aged 64, of a kidney infection. Among his belongings were found 3,500 dollars, earned from tours, his pamphlets on magnetism and the sale of part of his land. He had left no will, and the castle went to a nephew from Michigan.

In 1984 Coral Castle was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. It inspired Billy Idol’s song “Sweet Sixteen”, has appeared in programmes such as In Search of… and Ancient Aliens, and some call it “Florida’s Stonehenge”.

If you like, you can visit Coral Castle which, after being sold following Ed’s death, is now a museum.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Coral Castle
• Coral Castle Museum – official website