I'm Dylan Thoris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And if you listen to the show regularly, you'll know that we really love to hear from

all of you, the listeners, and today I wanted to share a voicemail that sent me down a

bit of a rabbit hole, a really giant rabbit hole.

Hi, this is Sean Small.

I remember this story because I'm up in the middle of nowhere Iowa, where I was raised

as a kid, and I was about three or four years old when my dad took me to the Fort Dodge

Museum.

The Fort Dodge Museum was a recreation of a Civil War era fort in kind of North Central

Iowa.

He was very excited about bringing me to this museum, and it had a few old cabins and

old-school house and old church, and I don't remember much until my dad went into the

very back of the Fort.

And then the very back of the Fort, kind of right outside of the walls, there was a little

octagonal building, and it was separated off from everything else.

I remember as a little kid going up the steps, and my dad told me that this building contained

a giant, a petrified giant, and he painted the picture that this was a real petrified giant.

And when he took me in, you go around a wall, and there was this 10 plus foot gigantic stone

petrified man laying there.

And everything about it was bigger than usual, I mean everything.

And I just got there amazed.

...