I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's

news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

If you've been listening to this show for a while, strangers, the premise of today's episode may seem familiar. A mysterious eccentric man experiences an emotional upheaval. His feelings

bring him to unexpected places, and he channels those feelings into grand

art, namely into a castle. He builds a literal castle. Nearly two years ago, we told you the story

of Boyce Gully and the mystery castle he constructed just outside Phoenix, Arizona. The mystery castle story

is strange, yes, but it's also a love story, the love a father had for his daughter, a love

that made the father spend years in the desert, crafting a complex, beautiful, life-sized sandcastle

for the daughter who he hardly knew.

Love is a notoriously strange thing in its own right, and today we will once again be telling

you a story of a man and love and a castle. But this time, things are less beautiful, or,

well, maybe they're just a lot, weirder.

You'll see.

Once upon a time, a man named Edward Lee Skollin was living in Latvia.

According to his official biography, Edward was 26 years old in 1921, and it's noted that he was a small man. According to the

St. Lucy News Tribune, he was five feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds. Keep that factoid in

mind. And according to the Miami Herald, Edward was also a man of little means and no formal education. That said,

things were going well for Edward, in that he was in love with, and engaged too, a girl named

Agnes. We don't know much about Agnes, beyond her relationship with Edward. In some articles,

her name is recorded as Riga, though most

do call her Agnes. She was younger than Edward by some years, and her primary personality

trait in most sources is not so much a trait as an event. According to the News Tribune,

...