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Okay, I want to start with the story. It's the
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twelve hundreds of Bohemia, which is what we call now
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called the Czech Republic. There's a patch of land in
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the forest north of Prague, no road leading to it,
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no river nearby, no town to defend, no trade route
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to protect, but every conventional measure of medieval castle building.
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By every conventional measure of medieval castle building, this land
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is worthless. And yet someone decides to build a castle here,
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not just any castle. They built the chapel first, Before
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before there are walls, before there are living quarters, before
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the thing is even remotely habitable, they build the chapel,
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and they build it directly on top of a large,
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deep hole in the ground. Now here's where it gets interesting.
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According to records from the period, the whole was not
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a mine shaft. It was also not a well. It
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was not a geological feature anyone found particularly useful. What
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it was, according to people who lived near it, was
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a problem. Creatures were reportedly coming out of it, winged
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things half human that emerged at night. The locals wanted
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nothing to do with it. So before anyone bothers with
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the practical business of I don't know a kitchen or
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a well. They put an altar top of the hole.
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And then this part I want you to sit with.
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They allegedly lowered condemned prisoners into the pit on a
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rope as a test to see what was down there. Now,
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the prisoners who came back up came back wrong, like
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white hair, and aged decades, and appeared in what appeared
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to be minutes screaming incoherently. One of them even reportedly
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died shortly after being pulled out. Nobody went back in
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after that. Welcome to broadcasting Seeds. I'm Ben Attantan, and
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today we're going to Huska Castle. We are going to
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figure out what is in that hole, and we are
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going to work backwards through medieval records, Nazi docum, and
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the Book of Revelation to get an answer, because I
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think there is one and it is not comfortable. Let's go.
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Let's start with the crime scene. When investigators are trying
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to figure out what happened at a location, the first
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thing they do is look for things that don't fit,
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things that shouldn't be there, things that break the pattern.
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And Huska is nothing but things that break the pattern.
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The castle sits in the forest in the Cochrinsko National
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Park area about forty about forty kilometers ish north of
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Prague and what it was built in the mid to
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late twelve hundreds, Okay, most likely under the orders of
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who was the king of Bohemia at the time, and
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it is by any reasonable assessment in the completely I
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mean completely wrong location. Here's what a medieval castle is
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supposed to have near it. Okay, a water source, preferably
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a river or well, because you can, you are going
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to need water, both for daily life and for surviving
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a siege if somebody's attacking a trade route or a road.
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Because the economic value of a castle is partly in
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controlling the movement of goods and people. You tax the merchants,
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you protect the roads, You project power. A strategic advantage,
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a hill, a cliff on one side or the other,
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a natural choke point right, something that makes the castle
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hard to attack and easy to defend. Huska has none
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of these. There is no river, the original construction had
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no well. It is not on any major road. It
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has no real strategic value in terms of controlling territory
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or projecting power. It sits at the edge of a cliff, Okay,
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which sounds useful until you realize the cliff faces the
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forest rather than any direction from which an enemy would approach,
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and yet someone spent enormous amounts of money and labor
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to build it. Now, historians have tried to retrofit explanations
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for this. Okay, maybe it was a hunting lodge, Maybe
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it was a administrative center. Maybe it served some regional
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function we don't fully understand. Okay, these these are reasonable
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attempts to explain a building doesn't make sense. But here's
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the thing about those explanations. None of them account for
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the chapel. In medieval castle construction, the order of operations
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was practical. You build what you need to survive first, walls,
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water storage, defense. The chapel comes later, when you have,
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frankly the luxury of it. At Huska, the chapel was
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built first, before the castle was habitable by anyone's definition,
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and the chapel was there. That is not an administrative
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center being practical. That is a response to something urgent.
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And the chapel is not just first. It is placed directly,
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and I mean directly, with apparent deliberateness, over the largest
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pit on the property. The pit itself is subject to
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some debate in terms of its exact dimensions, but historical
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accounts describe it as deep enough that no one could
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see the bottom, and wide enough to be significant. It
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was not a natural cave, not a mind shaft, not
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anything that served a practical function. It was just there
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and someone decided to put the altar on top of it.
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I want to make sure we are being precise about
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this though, Okay, please, because it matters. The positioning of
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an altar in a medieval chapel is not accidental. Every
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element of medieval sacred architecture had theological meaning and the
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direction the altar faced, the saints depicted in the frescoes,
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the choice of dedication for the chapel, all of it
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was intentional and communicating. Husca's chapel is dedicated to no
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other than the archadangel Michael. If you know anything about
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Michael and scripture, you know he is not a comfort,
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a comfort and peace figure. Michael is the warrior. He
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is the one described in Daniel as the Great Prince
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who protects God's people. In Revelation twelve, he wages war
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against the dragon. In Jude, he contended with the devil
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over the body of Moses. In Jewish and early Christian tradition,
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Michael is the angel who you call when you need
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something fought, straight up, warrior archangel. The medieval church dedicated
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this chapel to Michael. They put it over the whole.
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The altar sits on top of the pit. That's not decoration,
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that is strategy. One more detail before we move on,
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because it is one of the stranger pieces of evidence
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in this case. Inside the chapel there are frescoes dating
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back to the original construction, medieval paintings, some of them
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well preserved, depicting religious scenes. One of them shows an archer. Okay,
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the archer is drawing a bow, and the archer is
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doing something that in the medieval world carried significant symbolic weight.
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The archer is left handed. In the twenty first century,
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we have approximately zero cultural baggage about left handedness. Right
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about ten percent of the population is left handed. I mean,
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I have a daughter, two daughters that are left handed.
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Good for them, right, fine, no big deal. In the
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medieval world, it was different. The Latin word for left
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is sinister. That is not a coincidence. In terminology, left
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handedness was associated with evil, with the devil, with the demonic.
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The right hand was the hand of God, the hand
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of power, the hand of blessing. The left hand was
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the but the other thing. Someone put a left handed
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archer in the chapel at Huska, and they either knew
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exactly what they were doing or they made a very
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very strange mistake. I do not think they made a mistake.
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So we have a castle built where no castle should be,
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with the chapel, where a foundation should be dedicated to
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the warrior archangel, you know, placed over a hole decorated
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with imagery shaded with the demonic. That is your crime scene.
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Now let's talk about the witnesses. Let me be honest
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with you about the nature of the evidence in this section. Okay,
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medieval documentation is not what we would call rigorous by
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modern standards. We are dealing with chronicles, late and local
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oral traditions and records that passed through many hands before
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they made it to us. Okay, I am going to
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tell you what the historical accounts say, and I am
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going to let you weigh them. You have to weigh.
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What I will also tell you is that the pattern
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is consistent across a very long period of time, which
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is itself a data point. The accounts of strange phenomenon
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at Who's go back to before the castle was built,
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the local population of I mean avoided the area because
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of what they claimed to see near the hit. The
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descriptions are consistent in their broad strokes, Okay, things coming
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out of the hole, things that did not look full
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of human, winged figures, dark in color, that appeared mostly
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at night. Some accounts described these figures as half animal
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half human. Others described them as winged and dark without
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further specification. One recurring description involves figures that moved with
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unusual speed and appeared and disappeared without explanation. There are
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also accounts of headless, so crazy, headless black horses in
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the area, which I mean, which is a specific enough
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detail that it is worth noting. Headless horses are not
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a generic ghost story. They are a fairly specific image,
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and they appear in the accounts associated with Who's Gut
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in multiple independent sources. Okay, I want to be careful here,
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because I do not. I am not going to tell
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you that every account is credible because I can't, or
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that none of them are embellished because I can't. What
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I am going to tell you is this. If you
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look at the range of phenomenon reported near Who's Gut
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across several I mean several centuries, two things stand out. First,
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the reports predate the castle. Okay, the castle was built
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because people were already reporting something. That is a meaningful
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chronological detail. Second, the reports do not stop when the
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castle was built. Ceiling something does not always mean it stops,
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but it means it could be contained. The prisoner story
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I mentioned in the opening deserves more attention than it
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usually gets. Okay, The broad outline condemned prisoners lowered into
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the pit on a rope to report what they found,
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prisoners coming back aged white hair incoherent is consistent across
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multiple accounts of Huska's early history. The details vary, of course,
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as you would expect from oral tradition, but the core
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claim is specific and repeated. Here's what makes that claim interesting.
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And I'll say this from an investigative standpoint. If you
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are going to make up a story to explain a
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castle built in an unusual location, this is not the
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story you would make up. Okay. The story you would
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make up would involve a heroic king or a great
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battle or a divine vision. The prisoner story. There's nothing
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heroic about it. It is disturbing and practical. Someone wanted
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to know what was in the hole, and they found
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an expedient way to test it without risking anyone valuable. Okay.
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That has the feel of something that actually happened to me,
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and that pattern logic. Okay. There is also the matter
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of the temporal distortions reports. Now, multiple accounts across very
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different time periods describe a sense of time moving different
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near the pit and near the chapel. Medieval accounts framed
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this in theological terms, the sense of being near something
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outside of time. More recent visitors to Huska, which is
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now a tourist site, describe feelings of disorientation, nausea, and
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what some report as a sense of time slipping. I'm
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not going to tell you what to do with that, Okay.
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Time distortion near certain locations is reported widely enough in
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anomaloust phenomenon research. That is a category of experience, okay,
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not not just a one off. Whether that has physical, psychological,
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or genuinely supernatural explanation is above It's way above my
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pay grade. Okay. But what I will say is that
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this pattern you have entities, temporal weirdness, physical effects on
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people who get too close, shows up in enough different
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context and scripture and in high strangeness research that I
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do not dismiss it. The frescoes inside the chapel deserve
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a second look as well, and we talked about the
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left handed archer, but there are other images that are
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worth noting. One fresco depects a woman headed dragon. This
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is not standard medieval iconography, folks. You can find dragons
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in medieval art all over Europe, but a woman headed
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dragon is very specific and strange. Okay. It may connect
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to Revelation twelve, where the dragon and the woman appear
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in opposition, but if so, it is compressed and an
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unusual rendering to say the least. Okay. Another fresco depicts
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Saint Michael or Michael the Archangel, in combat with demons. Again,
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the choice of subject matter is deliberate. This is not
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a chapel decorated with scenes of the Nativity or the
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Life of Christ. This chapel is decorated of images of warfare,
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spiritual warfare specifically. Okay, whoever commissioned the frescoes at Huska
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is telling a story, and the story was something is
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being fought right here that leads us to the most
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organized and deliberate response to whatever was happening at Huska.
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The one that decided the way to deal with this
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was to build an institution over it. I want to
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make an argument here that I think that I think
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is worth the time. Okay. The medieval Church is often
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portrayed in modern culture as either superstitious and irrational or
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corrupt and power hungry. Seems to be this case today too,
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But they or they could be both right. And certainly,
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certainly there was corruption, and certainly there were excesses, and
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certainly not everything in medieval church did the medieval Church
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did was theologically defensible. Okay, now, but there is something
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the medieval Church understood that I think we have largely lost,
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which is this The spiritual world is real, It is active,
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and it requires active engagement. Oh, we sure don't have
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that now. The people who built Huska did not sit
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down in a committee meeting and vote on whether supernatural
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phenomena were real. Okay, There was no disclosure and like
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you know, strung out for years. They lived in a
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world where the line between the visible and invisible was
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understood to be thinner than we think. Okay, I say
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that we like to think. They had a theological framework
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that included the Abyss, the bound spirits, the geographic reality
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of spiritual warfare. And when that framework pointed towards a
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practical problem, something coming out of a hole in Bohemia, right,
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they did what you do with a practical problem, They