What do you think about this?
If you stand on the cliffs at the western edge of San Francisco, just past the Cliff House, you can look down at the concrete bones of what was once the largest indoor swimming complex on Earth.
Adolph Sutro, the millionaire engineer who became the city’s mayor, opened the Sutro Baths in 1896. Three acres of glass and steel, seven saltwater pools heated to different temperatures, slides, trapezes, a museum of curiosities, an amphitheater seating thousands. At high tide, the Pacific itself rushed in through a tunnel and filled the pools in an hour. At low tide, the pumps did the work.
For seventy years it was the place where San Francisco came to swim, court, gawk, and gather. Then on a June night in 1966, while the building was already mid demolition, it caught fire. Within hours the whole structure was gone. Witnesses said the smoke rolled blue and green and orange as the chemicals and the redwood beams gave themselves up to the ocean wind.
The fire was never solved. The owners collected the insurance. The ruins were left exactly where they fell.
Visit today, and you can walk down the path and stand inside the foundation. Old concrete tanks still hold seawater. A tunnel runs out under the cliff and opens onto the Pacific. People say they have heard voices from the rocks at dusk. Photographers who shoot inside the cave system describe orbs, footsteps, the unmistakable feeling of being watched by something that does not want to leave.
What if the joy and pain of a hundred years of human gathering really does soak into the walls, and the place we tore down never actually left?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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