Transcript:

uh the last rule and it’s a weird one is that uh at any time you address uh bradley you have to call him sire yeah it’s weird we have to do it too don’t feel you know like we’re picking i don’t think i don’t get it i don’t get it we do it anyway you know that’s just how it it’s weird very good i’m just going to take some lipstick and mark that over his picture okay perfect yes don’t forget don’t forget that you don’t have to use it when you’re speaking about me in third person though that’s for you and wait how do i speak about you in third person

well he’ll do it he does it a lot so he did you just follow his lead right yeah gotcha yeah okay are we ready yes i don’t have anything pl oh bradley’s got his lipstick going on he mentioned lipsticks and i was like hey you know what everybody told me we’re going to need lipstick yeah what is this it’s a melon medley oh it’s pretty tasty that’s does it taste like i always everything that you get with matt that’s that’s melon i always expect to taste like old watermelon bubble yum kind of my face kind of yeah and it’s blistex so it’s actually good quality stuff wow yeah actually works uh all right uh welcome to the secret podcast uh we’re here today it’s me george brett um bradley the sire apparently and uh stephen poff stephen poff is a friend of mine who’s he’s been down to st augustine several times uh we worked on new orleans a little bit together uh we’re going to talk about um some special thoughts and some ideas that we’ve had about saint augustine because we’ve been you know pretty in-depth into this one yeah i’ve got a lot of thoughts yeah stephen can you tell us uh really quickly how you got into the hunt uh actually uh my friend travis shuler um who i’m sure you guys know you know you’ve probably seen him in the um and the facebook groups uh plenty but he works on new orleans uh and he was doing a dig over there and invited me to the dig and had a ton of fun and at that point um i was hooked i think about a couple weeks later i was in saint augustine uh just had a spur of the moment decided i knew where it was and um and came down and obviously i don’t have a castle i didn’t know where it was oh that was that’s not the case so we thought this was a cask revealing guys this is over let’s end this right now all right sorry next no no stay stay

so cool so and by the way one when was this when did when were you in st augustine oh shoot that would have been years ago right i feel like it was about three years ago it was short it was probably within the first year of the um uh the expedition unknown uh the first time it came out it was about it was within that year yeah travis is a great dude too i really hope he gets some headway in new orleans for his sanity he’s super knowledgeable and he is has a wealth of knowledge on a few laptops that are at his house right now he he posted pictures of like the legator lamp but there were candelabras and it looked like they were on his like fireplace i think i think that might be the case he just got a new house he i think but i think he bought like legator from montreal candelabras like they were super awesome looking candles go check that out yeah you didn’t send that to me and holders are awesome i don’t know i’ve got an important question and i can tell by your background that stephen you’re going to be a subject matter expert is it at or at 80 i mean i always call it an ad at but i think technically it’s probably atat you know but it’s kind of like the you know the ats you call them chicken walkers i don’t think that they have chickens and you know on indoor but uh there’s definitely chicken walkers on indoor there you go that’s all i wanted to know guys the rest is up to youtube oh fun fun this is how the podcast works it’s just a it’s a [ __ ] conversation that we added together to sound like we know what we’re talking about this is this is going to come out sounding like super let’s talk saying augustine edible sorry go ahead yeah let’s talk st augustine all the times all the times you’ve been to saint augustine with me i don’t think we’ve i don’t think we’ve been to the fountain of youth right you’ve never really been a fountain youth guy well i mean well funny enough i go every time uh that i’ve been up there yeah um well the first time i went i didn’t go technically i didn’t go to um the fountain of youth but i was all around it i definitely did um you know go to magnolia um i had obviously you know the first thing you want to do is go to water street right look across the street at you know fountain of youth so i did that um but yeah i’ve never been uh i feel like no one else has found it there and it’s been dug up plenty that uh i had other thoughts and i wanted to explore those so yeah every time i’ve been i’ve i’ve generally you know gone on the island yeah and i think we kind of i don’t think either of us when we realized that we were both looking in basically the same place i don’t think either of us realized that we were both basically in the same place yeah right no um which which was fun because like i had i was all alone in my search for the longest time in this one little place yeah and then suddenly oh somebody else is here nice well i was a little scared too yeah because i think taurium yeah it’s amphitheater the amphitheater i mean yeah yeah okay and i think that that was the thing that you you actually i was on my way down um and had uh messaged you and you kind of gave me a hint that you were in that area i was like oh man damn it yeah i’ve been digging there for like been digging there for like a year it’s crazy because it’s a weird place because there’s not much verse stuff there right there’s just not a whole lot all of the good verse stuff is the fountain of youth but the image stuff that’s there is crazy it’s like there’s nothing there’s nothing at the fountain of youth that matches everything that matches us in that one little park yeah on the island yeah so how initially how did you how did you interpret the whole of the the st augustine puzzle to get you to that spot well i mean oddly enough i mean even though you’re saying that it doesn’t match up as much with the verse um like the thing that i kept coming back around to was the whole silver salt um limestone shell and limestone because the more i kept thinking about that um that section i kept going like what are these things have in common like i know that everybody kind of talks about coquina right but like the silver you know silver salt part right and i thought oh well like all of those things are things you get out of the ground all of those things are things that you would quarry out right well there’s really only one one place where that takes place well one is that the amphitheater is the old quarry right um and the the lake notina i don’t know if anybody knows that that’s what it’s called but it’s called lake notina um that’s at the amphitheater is um is the old quarry and then the actual quarry that you can kind of enter in from like right there at the entrance of the state park um which by the way has a green picket fence and above it you have to enter through um bending branches to get to the quarry um that was where i first i was like okay well this is the quarry these are all the things that go along and at that point i realized as i started going in there um that there’s a trail that leads directly like if you just go into the quarry and you just keep walking uh there’s a trail that goes and it leads directly into the amphitheater and directly into that garden um in the back stage of the amphitheater and then that’s where i started going like oh my god like once i got in there i was like there’s a whole boatload of you know things in here that actually do kind of make sense so let’s uh let’s give people a little bit of an idea of what we’re talking about because this is this is an area not many people even really if you live in saint augustine you don’t really know about it unless you you’re old if you’re old you know about the amphitheater you know about coquina gardens but past like 1986 or whatever you don’t know anything about this area um so the state of florida used to have a state play it was called the cross and the sword it was uh written i think like 1965-ish it was written by paul greene it’s the same guy that did um the lost colony in roanoke uh and saint augustine held this play in the same way that the lost colonies held in roanoke they they built a large amphitheater with a park around it and they did this play every day during the summer um in the same way it’s done we’re gonna go back to this a lot in the same way it’s done in roanoke um then you know later like interest in the in the place or sort of started to wane and i think in the 90s like the early 90s um i’m sure stephen knows exactly when this was um it was basically shut down and and turned over to it was like uh the entire the entire park was demolished the amphitheater was demolished it was it was rebuilt it was essentially sold over to the city and now they use it for concerts but back in back in the 80s it was a major tourist attraction um it was where you go to see the state play the cross and the sword and the cross and the sword is about sort of the the the ponce de leon coming over isn’t it menendez i’m pretty sure it’s about menendez and his interactions with the with the tamaku and indians yeah so we see a lot of parallels between this this um this park this location and fort raleigh in in roanoke um this is a whole lot of parallels but like i said now since since it was demolished the gardens were no longer kept up there they’re essentially they’re overgrown they’re just basically a forest if you didn’t there’s pads and things in the back but if you didn’t know they were there you would never be able to find them um and steven’s right if you start at the uh anastasia state park there’s a trail that leads right to the entrance of them so it’s a it’s a super interesting place it is and then if you start you know there’s things that you know look it could be confirmation bias because i think there’s you know there’s plenty with all of this is you know you can start going like oh well this would be this and this would be that but i mean i think that that’s how a lot of you know the three caskets have been found like you know you could confirmation by yourself all into it until you get to the actual place and you go oh no this does actually make sense this could be that this could be that but you know there are certain lines like first of all one of the things that is interesting um laura olsen um who um is now she’s also looking for the cask there in florida but she was actually part of the play and she i reached out to her uh early on and was like i’d kind of found her through um one of the facebook groups for cross and sword and uh she told me um that that play you know started at dusk that was like part of the deal right and and i was like oh well there’s so much of this verse that’s about light and dark night and day right and so i started thinking about like whenever you take that trail the trail actually leads directly to backstage it leads right there to where you would have seen stars moving by day right because they’re getting ready for the play right and in that same area when it turned night they would be on stage but the thing that you would see moving back and forth uh because of the play was the the ship the sails they had a a ship um in fact i have a picture of it here um there’s a ship um it was built on railroad tracks behind the stage yeah and they would they would then they would roll it they would be pushing fourth lost colony yeah exactly like lost colony right so there’s your sail so not only would you see the you would see the stars of the play by day but you would also see this right here this um this boat that they would just basically keep pushing back and forth you know behind the stage um people didn’t ride on it from my understanding laura says that nobody got on it or did anything they just basically pushed it back and forth it was just a prop um but uh yeah so you know once you get things like that then you’re like oh well that whole stars by day sales by night thing makes a whole lot more sense you know yeah it could very possibly be it fountain of views because that makes a whole lot of sense as well but if it’s not at fountain use it’s and it’s at the amphitheater then this also works to me really well so the bad thing about the amphitheater now is once it started getting a little run down there was a lot of theft um some of the signs were stolen the the whole place was ripped up um we know that there were walking paths starting at the um anastasia state park we know that there were walking paths and along the way there were signs that explained what you were seeing most of those are gone now in fact most of the things that we’re going to refer to that are that you know could have been represented in the verse they’re not there anymore um i know as soon as you as soon as you start walking down the trail there’s a sign that explains to you um what the what the different trees are that you’re seeing and they they specifically call out the tall tree which they use a i think it’s a redwood um some sort of red wood tree that they specifically call out as a tall tree there’s a lot of little things in this park and they’re just not here anymore and no one can find them we’ve we’ve talked to or at least i know i have stephen you’ve probably talked to groundskeepers too where they found a couple of signs but can’t find all of them can’t find most of them yeah as far as the uh the labels on the trees and things like that i don’t have any documentation on that i do have documentation on um some other things like for instance when you when you go into the park um there is a let’s say pull this out very quick um

there’s a monument that’s out there i’ll tell you well we’ll just go to the vr player well first of all there’s this right um yeah we’ll get to that in a minute um oh and i’m just like that thing on the left is there that blue

yeah that’s exactly i mean copy of the painting why are you guys doing this right now you guys should be out there digging

so while he’s pulling this up um george the only things i really know of this area are things that you have told me that you found um am i cool just to talk about whatever you’ve told me or i think so i don’t think i’ve told you anything of steven’s i don’t think there’s anything of stevens he hasn’t put online well there’s a couple of things i’m going to reveal in there well yeah any of my stuff you can talk about i’m fine with it i don’t care okay um so when you walk in there so there’s essentially the trail to the garden when you first walk up the steps there’s like this monument that’s right here and it used to have a plaque on it um and that one said hold on i’ve got my notes here um it said this garden dedicated to the public 1967 chair cherokee garden club so not that that’s super important but it is one of those things like uh like george said that they you know have ripped off there and it’s that’s not there anymore also um slightly behind that there’s a magnolia tree and it was um let’s see i do have a picture of um these two ladies who were dedicating so they were at the same time that they were dedicating that monument that was there they were also dedicating um this they put it up at this tree and it was basically to this lady named joyce who had been a part of um building the the trails and everything through there and then um but she had gotten sick and wasn’t able to do it anymore so they kind of dedicated that to her but yeah so there was things like that like george is pointing out that you know have since been vandalized and it’s not there anymore and i think it’s important for listeners or viewers to keep in your head like when we say a garden you’re that this place was a garden you’re thinking like it’s just a you know like a big flower bed when it was absolutely not that this is probably 20 30 acres maybe with winding concrete paths huge ponds like concrete ponds with stones built up for walls huge waterfalls water wheels um invasive plants that the state’s now trying to remove like it it was a legit it was a spectacle back then and the the the the ladies the the gardening club took a a great deal of pride in it um it’s not a normal it’s i mean it’s it’s more impressive than um the elizabethan gardens to me so that yeah it was it was beautiful i’m glad you mentioned that because that that’s actually what i was going to ask would this be a place where more more than just known to locals um people would come down and maybe visit it if they were in the area they knew about it people knew about the play

this on the 80 on the 70s in in the 60s 70s and 80s this was on the same level as the fort in regards to tourism i mean it was advertised everywhere it was on all of our brochures it was as soon as you would as soon as you would drive on the island there’s a huge um a huge wooden painted sign like a very impressive sign that tells you how to get to the amphitheater then when you would pull into the amphitheater the entire front facade the the road-facing facade of it was built up like a giant wooden fort it was it was huge so yeah it’s not something that that would be hidden from tourists at all it was it was very visible and like i said kind of on the same level as the fort if you were going to saint augustine you’re going and so do you think that um

maybe maybe byron was looking at fountain of youth or or at least that area and then goes oh rather than fountain of youth this seems like a great place and i can bury lots of clues here or find lots of clues with this place or what would make him choose it over something like fountain of youth i ain’t gonna i ain’t gonna buy a ticket to get into this place like that’s that would be that would be the biggest thing to me i mean we you you can’t really argue that that byron went to the fountain of youth um even if there wasn’t something buried in saint augustine i would still say if byron uses the word cask he went to the fountain of youth because there’s legit only one place in the world where the word cask is used for a container and that’s inside the fountain of youth if you didn’t go into the fountain of youth you wouldn’t know that uh you wouldn’t know that exact same right it’s spelled the exact same way yeah um i would say like if you had to choose one over the other i would say this is a not a private place it’s not an attraction it’s not somewhere you gotta pay to get into you can you can go there in the middle of the problem

yeah that’s cool so i was just going to say that yeah the the the amphitheater itself like you know the ticketing area like you have to pay to get in but the garden itself is you know i mean even to this day like if you go down there on a saturday there’s like you know people out there with their bikes there’s people walking their dogs there’s people um now they’re not frequently in the garden because i think most people it’s pretty grown up in there so they don’t do that but there there’s plenty of people using that area in general for you know recreation yeah locals kind of know that this is the one part tourists don’t know about so we can go there to be alone yeah we also know like we don’t want anybody else to know about it because it’s how we see three concerts because if anything’s playing at the amphitheater you just go hang out with my garden listen right um but back in the back in the 70s and 80s this was laid out the same as as fort is it fort riley or fort hamilton am i saying it wrong for raleigh it’s fort raleigh right and for raleigh’s in roanoke yeah i don’t yeah i don’t know where fort hamilton is okay for some reason i had fort hamilton right um it’s it’s laid out the same as fort raleigh in the in the 60s 70s and 80s wherein there there weren’t really any gates right you could walk to the stage if you wanted to um the ticket office was closed but you could just walk right around it and go to the stage as far as i know because the gardens extended into the amphitheater which is uh going to become important soon um so so there there are a lot of similarities um obviously that we’ve talked about so far between roanoke and um and this puzzle um and we’ve talked about puzzles coming in twos we’ve talked about a lot of similarities popping up in other puzzles um so you know there may be a link there that it’s just um their sister puzzles somehow and that uh they’re going to be very very similar and if it is backstage then it lends credence to the idea of the roanoke puzzle also being somewhere in the actual theater grounds especially when it says look north to the wing and dig we have the wing of the theater which is um you know a strong idea uh my question is you know we found soloy how do we tie that into this song well so i i can get my sort of stretchy where people are going to be like nah that’s probably not it wait stephen do you have a way to tie in soloy i mean i just imagine that this is about um if i were byron and i didn’t know that much about it and i just knew that like hey i went to the fountain of youth right and he’s right now and all this stuff that’s there he’s like oh well the tribe here was soloy right well that play you know cross and sword is all about you know menendez and tanzas and you know the um the the slaughter and in saint augustine so if i were byron and i wasn’t super well versed on what tribe it was there i’d be like oh salloy it’s the soloy tribe this is about the indians that that’s where i get that but the other thing you know that that i don’t know if anybody else picked up on this but that you know if we’re going to talk about acrostics that um actually john michaels point out um was it there’s another acrostic um uh at um

yeah or at boat if if it was john hartopy well was it john harper okay um yeah that was um at the base of the tall tree is actually an acrostic for at boat well if we’re talking about again with the years past i mean the um with the uh starts me by day and and sales passed by night um and that being the boat and you know yeah is it that boat jump i mean jumping jumping right to the at boat you’ve got the two largest palm trees that are in the park are back by the they sort of flank the boat on either side of the boat or two giant towers that are called moon towers like there’s there’s a lot of cool stuff back there but i think we might be jumping ahead a little bit like tear drops keep me in line like moonlight and tear drops um how do you guys reconcile the first chapter it being a very prominent i’m glad you asked yeah like it being a very prominent you know at the entrance of the fountain of youth wouldn’t you think that that would lead you right into the fountain of youth so you know there’s a funny there’s a there’s a funny story just as a side note to the fountain of youth that uh i want to tell before stephen goes into his idea um the first chapter on the fountain of youth if you if you ask um john fraser he’s not sure it was there in the okay one he said it was named by his father he said it would have been right around that time he said it could have been 80 it could have been 82 he’s not exactly sure now having said that i think i’ve seen photos of it in the 70s where it says that but we’re not 100 sure anymore according to john frazier who i take his opinion on this uh as as pretty well um whether that was there but yeah okay so let’s run under the under the assumption that it that it was there yeah that it was okay what are you thinking stephen um well so uh you know my thought and i haven’t seen this ever mentioned before and i’m i’m i would be surprised though if somebody didn’t um somebody else didn’t notice this as well so you know i literally sort of went okay well first chapter of what i mean first chapter of american history well that makes sense i mean so the first chapter of american history would be saint augustine right so you could throw that away if you wanted or you could get literal and so i literally went to the first chapter of um the secret and it says um man built his cities and his villages and diminished the fair people’s domain where once lived a goblin there rose a tavern and where uh once swim a river maiden a water wheel spun and that’s like if i remember correctly that’s the only part of the first chapter that mentions water at all um and i was like oh water wheel so we’ve got literally um a water wheel

at essentially the entrance so i’ve talked to a couple of people you really wouldn’t notice it now if you went in there because it’s incredibly grown up um but uh i’ve talked to one of the guys who well first of all talk to laura whose dad was the um he was sort of the caretaker and the creative director there during crossing sword and then in uh i believe it’s in 85 i’m gonna i’m gonna forget the guy’s name though but i’d i walked through him like with an hour and a half and interviewed the guy and he was telling me about um what had been there um before and um and so if you look right here um there is our water wheel and what he uh referred to as the duck pond right there so i don’t know if you can see it directly in the center there but there’s a water wheel when you go in there now that water wheel the remnants over there the wheel itself is not there um but the all the you know everything else that sort of holds it in place and collects the water but the other thing that you you oh by the way too if we want to talk about um still can hear the honking there’s uh there was our geese that were somebody’s there um they were there yeah well all you would need for byron is the duck bond yeah would need right um in in the book uh not the webster’s dictionary byron says that ducks honk and then to add a little to add a little bit of um of support to your first chapter that wouldn’t be the only time that the book uses something from like in a verse from the front of the book because everybody in milwaukee always you know questions what’s a wonder stone well the book tells you yeah in the first chapter of the book what a wonder stone is right so that that’s just another thing that would kind of help support your idea of the first chapter with the water wheel right and again so one of the things i was going to say about this right quick is that so the the caretaker that i spoke to said that basically there was only one thing that was ever lit in there and it was this area right here and it was sort of like it was clear whenever it was he what did he call it he called it like a um diorama i think it’s with the term he used which is not necessarily correct but um when you would come into the amphitheater and you would go park your car over on the left there was this water wheel in the lake and or a little pond duck pond and a little fountain and um and it was just very picturesque this was the part of the garden that was the most visible um at night um you know and during the day you know obviously you could see it but and there was more to the garden but if you were coming there at night the only thing that was really lit up was this water wheel

have either of you read crosston sword yes where does the first chapter or the first um act of that take place uh on like in

that’s a good question i can’t remember now if it’s in spain or if it’s in st augustine but i’m pretty sure it’s in saint augustine yeah i recall reading it laura sent me a version of it i have not read all of it um we did talk about the first chapter on it and see anything notable in there um no it’s nothing really notable gotcha but the the difficult thing about uh paul green plays just like uh the um the lost colony is there’s so many versions of it that’s like they changed it every year they changed the they changed the script every single year so the the local library the st augustine the main branch library has one from like has a copy from 1984 and that’s the one i read so if anybody wants to check it out it’s at the library well um and just occurred to me as well another interesting idea with tying it to the amphitheater is um you know in roanoke you have the references to the painter white well you might have references to paul green with the green picket fence i don’t know just throwing it out there but yeah but in the so in the 70s there’s a there’s a newspaper article at the historical society um if you go to the historical society they got a big file on the amphitheater and in one of the news articles in that file there is a thing where the boy scouts came down to the to the gardens and worked with the ladies auxiliary i think and they installed green picket they they installed and painted green picket fences all right laura told me because i was asking her about you know laura has been there since she was like five years old and so and she acted in it her dad was like you know the director um she doesn’t recall seeing the green picket fence which to me i i still feel like the green pick offense is the the entrance to the um uh the entrance to the quarry um and there’s currently one there now uh i can’t prove that there was one back then but um but the other thing that laura said was the only place you really recall there being a fence um when we walk i walk through it with her is um if you were standing up where the um the monument is there’s like a steep grade that drops down into the um the lake that’s out there um and she said she thought she remembered there being a fence along that to keep people from uh you know into the lake falling in the lake that could have been where the fences were installed i’m not real sure absolutely the article like the article doesn’t say where they were um just that they installed a lot of them so maybe that was it maybe that’s what they’re talking about yeah um that one i think is lost to time this this quarry what um do you know what they pulled out of the quarry so yeah it was a coquina quarry uh it was 100 percent of cocaine according to everything that’s built that was built in saint augustine from almost from the time it was founded until the quarry shut down um the stone was pulled out of that quarry so the fort was built out of that quarry um the parts of the fountain of youth were built from that quarry basically everything was built from that quarry yeah you know the other thing to point out that you know you were asking me earlier about how i got down to that area and again i’m sure people have pointed this out before but you know the the shape of the the rock not only outlines florida sort of right but it also sort of looks like the island itself you were able to look at a map of the you know anastasia island it looks very much the same shape as what in in there’s a sort of a motif like there’s sort of a um uh there’s just sort of a direction from the top left at the bottom right right and if you look that it’s like it looks like a1 right it looks like the highway that leads from the top left down to the bottom right um and that’s another thing that i think sort of gets me out to that area so the in this image in this painting there’s only ever been a couple of things that we’ve been able to identify there’s the the famous alligator that i was never able to see until and john michaels always made fun of me for the the alligator yeah there’s the rock yeah i see it now he had to be pointed out to me and i was like oh that’s super obvious why did i miss that [ __ ] there’s the rock in the middle of the water right and people are always like why is this rock just sitting in the middle of the water but what is a land mass surrounded by water it’s an island yeah right it’s just an island sitting in the painting well and that to me that’s the easiest way to get you to the island there’s only one island in st augustine we call it the island yeah well and i think that that represents multiple things obviously i mean one i mean i don’t disagree with that at all i mean clearly um you know we we can here i’ll go back to um

i’ll go back to our rock uh

so

so like i i’ve been all over st augustine like that right there looks to me like that right there yeah it was even better when it had the giant palm tree behind it right yeah exactly there was one right back here so to actually think there’s a picture of that on 12 treasures right i mean i think to me there’s no mistaking that but you know there’s other places around saint augustine where there’s little tiny versions of these rocks and there’s that one that’s out there on what highway 16 um out by the old fountain of youth or whatever whatever they call it um yeah like so i mean i guess that could be subjective but to me paired with all the other things that’s in here this is not subjective anymore but and it’s it’s also important to point out what that rock is like right now it’s just a rock in the middle of a parking lot but back when the play was going on that that was the sign for the cross and the sword it had a giant cross a giant sword on it was the first thing you saw when you came into the park right like you drive into the driveway it’s right there on the left you can’t miss it it’s five foot tall eight feet wide like there’s no way to miss huge it’s bigger than it looks in that picture like you stand next to it it’s like taller than you are yeah um but you know the other thing that i see it as is like if you’re looking at you know if you’re looking at the the painting is a relief of florida right um i mean it’s it’s lake okeechobee right i mean it’s it’s mirrored in the water and it’s it’s essentially also the shape of lake okeechobee um which is another confirmer for florida which you know i i’ve got thoughts about that as well but i don’t know if i don’t know we want to save that to the end or not it is your show we’re going to go where you want to go yeah i don’t know is there anything else you want to walk through before we get to that point i don’t know i mean bradley’s or brent’s privy to that part of it um he is no i don’t i don’t know that he is i i haven’t told them anything that you haven’t put online so unless you’ve put it online in that case let’s walk through a couple other things we’re talking about visual confirmers just in the park right just things that you can actually see right now um let’s go back all right so obviously this is like one of the you know one of the major confirmers if you just and to me that’s another thing if like you were just looking at parks around you know if you were in 1983 and you were looking at parks around in the st augustine era and you walked in here and you saw this you’d be like oh okay i need to keep looking right um what people can’t see in this photo is these rocks actually have kind of like groove cut-in marks on them um yeah from when they were mined so they have the markings on them exactly you can’t see that in this image but they’re there um so one of the other things that stood out to me a lot um when i walk through here and i’ve been looking for before i even came to the amp was somewhere that looked like this to me this right here looks like rushing water under a bridge it just it looks like we’re looking sort of across the bridge and the two little peaks there are like the peak of the bridge um and so i’d been looking around saint augustine for that sort of thing because you know the whole thing is about written in water and there’s so many references to water in the um in the verse and so i was looking for that well here’s here’s the deal like first of all here’s the footbridge um that’s when you go there you almost don’t even know you’re stepping across this bridge and i had to clear this out like and stomp down all this stuff but this is made of kokina right here and right here is essentially a trough now you can’t see it but if you were there at the space you can feel along it there’s like a trough that sort of runs down into the lake and um and so a lot of the stuff that i see in the painting which to me looks like rock and coquina is all sort of found in this area so there was the bridge i feel like i was looking for right that also leads out into the duck pond

there’s also at the be at the front entrance behind the um uh let’s see where am i so the the rock the big rock is like straight ahead in this image right here but one of the things again you can’t see right now i had to clear it out and george can tell you when you’re there it’s a lot easier to see this but there’s this is a pool this would have been another pool of water right here um and there’s like a let’s see i think it’s hidden over here by this tree but there was there’s also a like a bird bath over there but this is the shape of what i called the marlin at the bottom here and there was water rushing into it from above it had like a like a waterfall that came right into here um the other thing is whenever you’re

what i call the steps

and uh so there’s a couple of places like this out here but this was the first one where i really was like oh wow this looks exactly like it like there this is this would have been where water would have came down through here and it would have pulled in here and you also have this series of steps right here that to me line up and look like it um they also had a one of these that led into the marlin pool the thing that i call the marlin um but that that was another visual confirmer to me and one of the things that again you can’t see until you’re like in there and you really start kind of digging in and like stepping into these areas is that this whole garden was the you know to me like the written and water part like there’s no place in saint augustine where you would have had to my knowledge anyway this amount of like it’s basically a little water park

um george so i guess for for for audio people what we’re talking about right now are um if you if you go into this park it’s hard to it’s hard to imagine scale even with video if you go into this park everything that we’re talking about right now is within sight it’s it’s in an area the size less less than the size of a baseball field from one point to the other um there’s a bunch of pools and a bunch of the pools sort of look like parts of the paintings um and they all sort of make a path uh if you if you started the rock you go you’ve got the water wheel and then you’ve got what he’s calling the marlin pond um the duck pond is behind all of it um so yeah and and they do like i i kind of agree and in the in the in the world of people showing me things and being like this is this these are a little more concrete than some of the other things that people have told me like i i can i can at least visualize what you’re seeing here um it’s hard to know for sure because it’s so overgrown because there’s just there’s just [ __ ] everywhere like we don’t we had no idea what this looked like in the 80s i mean literally when i when i got in there um they were like the pool the thing that they call the duck pond is like was literally not visible like i went into it and stomped down like i kind of found the edge of it and then went around and stomped down the edges of where the coquina but essentially it’s you know there’s a lot of things in the painting that kind of look like like teeth around the edges of the you know i think the part where people call the uh the the blade you know or the the bird wing or the bird that’s at the top right corner yeah if you think about it as a pool of water with the the teeth part that surround it being the coquina like that’s exactly kind of how all the pools in there are they’re all they’re all these little rock troughs with coquina edging all around them and then when you see those you can suddenly start seeing a lot of things that are you know what seems to be represented in the painting and there’s no other place around saint augustine i think that comes even close to that except maybe out at the marina they have like a they sort of have like a weird sculpture pool out in front of the marina that you know kind of has that same thing going on but you know not like that but not not nearly as yeah not nearly as as visible to tourists as the app would be and then past that if we want to reveal this so okay here’s you know i i feel like i’m i’ve been walking around with this for forever just because i feel like i needed to keep this

under wraps while i was trying to look at things but at this point i feel like i’ve run out of options and maybe somebody else can you know find something else but one of the things that shocked me um when i found it um was it so i’ve been doing a lot of research on the amp and was like what was the gardens looking like doing a lot of digging with the historical society which is i mean they are a wealth of knowledge over there um have a ton of pictures their website is actually very very useful um but what’s kind of cool about it is that there are sometimes just descriptions of things that are on the historical society site and they’re like well if you want to see the picture like contact us and we’ll send you the picture or we’ll do a clipping or you can just send them an email and say hey you know i’m looking for information about so and so don’t tell them about the secret because that tends to yeah they won’t help you yeah that shuts down the conversation what do you say immediately what do you say you’re looking for

well you’re taking for very treasure yeah i i kind of told them that i was doing a little uh a documentary on the um which it wasn’t uh i mean in the end i have a lot of footage so if if i ever find the cask or somebody does i’ve got footage to put together this documentary yeah i was basically said that hey i’m doing like a you know some research and a documentary on the the amp and you know i found that they had this but i can’t find pictures of that and um so they started kind of digging and doing research for me and they started sending me pictures well one of the things so i just want to preface this before i show it when you look at the when you look at the painting right it’s like a it’s like a relief right because if it if we’re saying that the water is the shape of florida right um and then the land mass that’s in there is actually the shape of like the water right it’s kind of opposite of what we would expect to see but so you know but we’ve read it as like hey here’s the the panhandle of florida here’s the rock is like where lake okeechobee is so what if you’ve been looking at that right you’re like oh it’s like what it’s like florida is like a pool of water right and you walked in and you saw

this right here which is florida

and look at the reflection underneath it look at that and some trees right behind it where you could have you can almost see the reflection of a tree right behind right beside the uh right there beside the the reflection um so whenever i saw that i flipped my lid i was like oh my god this is this was there this was like the thing that was in there and look at it surrounded by cocaine iraq right and that right on the right-hand side where um essentially where the st augustine was that’s where you have a waterfall which probably also is what the steps look like in the painting but we can’t see those any longer and it would have dumped from into the place where saint augustine was into this pool of water shaped neat

yeah i never did pretty compelling until he until he showed me that picture i had no idea it was there so do we know where that was yep um hold on see so this is the amp as this is an amalgam actually of what the amp looks like now as as this was from the architectural firm who um who redid everything and if you look right i don’t can you guys see my mouse no no no okay there’s like you see where number five is though right uh yes right to the left of five there’s a little blue area right there yeah and that is where it was i don’t see a number five exist can you do that area can you point out where number it’s between four and six okay um can you be a little more specific so if you’re if you’re looking at the if you’re looking at this giant so if you look at the top right the number you see there the first number you see circles look straight down that’s three and then one underneath three

yeah and then right to the left of that is a little florida oh there it is yeah cool so yeah there it is and so to me that’s confirmation and here’s a couple other photos see here’s another one of those waterfalls or steps and again written in water right we have florida written in water right there’s another view of it with the waterfall flowing into that and uh then we have when you say we have florida written in water does it actually say florida somewhere or are you saying there’s a map of florida in water no yeah it’s just the shape of florida written in water but to me if you can um if you’re comfortable with it i i would send these photos to george so when he’s editing this instead of using the screen share he can show the actual if you want any of this shared he can share the actual photo and it’ll just it’ll look a lot better yeah at this point i mean i think we’re giving away the farm right so why not is it this is good you’re gonna have final choice on edit so george will put it together and send it to you and then you can say thumbs up thumbs down take this out keep that um so you have a final say on edit i mean we’re cool i think i’m sorry again i i think we’ve i’ve held that back for like a year and a half or almost two years now and it’s time for someone else to see see what they can do it’s not like we it’s not like we haven’t put a shovel in the ground out there somewhere and then that one the entire area oh my god yeah brett i was going to ask if that’s gone now everything okay so that’s all right that’s i can’t i don’t know i don’t know for sure that the footers aren’t there because the whole of the amphitheater looks raised from what it used to be there’s these big retaining walls so i don’t know if they they’ve cleared everything out or if they just covered everything up i don’t know which one of those they did to me it would be easier to just cover everything up but so it might still be there but it would be it’s not underground it’s not fun so here’s the other thing about that and this is this is where no it’s not visible anymore um my thought is is that the rock out front you know kind of like uh in um like in cleveland right i mean you didn’t have to dig at all the places that are located in the photo right um they were just confirmed they were just visual confirmers right so my my hope is that you know like the rock out front and the the florida pool are just one of those things when you got there like you couldn’t deny that this was the place right because you’re like looking at the giant rock that looks like the rock and the photo and then you’re looking at the shape of florida in water just like it is in the painting essentially um with like a big rock down there by okeechobee that reflects in the water that you would see those two things and go okay this is where i start i’m in the right place and so you weren’t like digging out there but i will say that laura laura olson remembers again these are things that like i didn’t even lead her on i just asked her about the florida pool and she was like oh my god yes we used to play in that all the time it was like my favorite thing because it was lit up beautiful at night so in addition to the water wheel that was lit up at night when you would go into the theater that that pool of water was lit up as well from what i understand the entrance where that stone is that looks like the island there used to be a water feature there as well is that accurate yeah that’s the marlin pool that i was uh i was showing earlier he’s talking about the pool around the rock i’ve been told that there was a pool of water around the rock and there is a um there is there is a pool there there are there’s like footers and there’s an underground pool sort of the same as the the ones inside the gardens but i cannot find a picture with it having water in it so i don’t know when or if it ever had water in it or maybe it’s just like a surround for plants um the historical society told me that it had water in it but that’s about as far as i can get for a confirmation i haven’t seen yeah i haven’t seen any i haven’t seen any confirmation on that like i’ve looked at a lot of pictures of that rock and they’ve they’ve always they’ve always had dirt and when i when i when i said i i know i said a couple of years ago that that thing had water in it i was going off of the historical societies because it would it would make sense if it did because um yeah like george pointed out you would see the reflection of the rock but you would not see the reflection of the palm tree behind it the vampire tree as we lovely right so yeah that’s that that’s that’s very compelling stuff yeah wow i mean i i came into this uh prepared to to go yeah okay whatever and this is i wanna i wanna come down and check out the amphitheater again i can say that much so uh a couple of years back um i hooked up with uh one of the people that worked there and we were able to dig a couple of holes we dug a lot around the rock so to me my thing was always that like really really simple i have something that looks exactly like something else in the painting i want to dig next to it um and as soon as you go into the the amphitheater right behind the rock there’s a gate or at least there was there’s not any more there’s still a fence post for it and i i always ran under the assumption uh that the boy scouts were putting up green picket fences we’ve got the fence posts here we’ve got a fence outline that green picket fence was probably right there right next to that rock so you would have had a rock with a green picket fence running right beside it with the giant palm tree looks just like the painting that was my focus um when the when the amphitheater was bulldozed uh there the front the front facade like i said before looked like a giant wooden fort and out in front of the fort were a bunch of big coquina boulders well they took those boulders and they put them where that fence running beside the rock would have been so it’s basically like 10 ton coquina boulders over this one section where i really really want to dig um but i hooked up with the with the park guys and we dug a bunch of holes around that stone and we didn’t find anything um and then later on before the san francisco episode of expedition unknown i was working with those guys and we were trying to get a gpr out there we never got the gpr out there but um they still let me dig a a [ __ ] ton of holes and still we didn’t find anything um and then recently when stephen you posted a bunch of stuff online about uh about the amphitheater and someone just went absolutely ape [ __ ] out there yeah dug holes everywhere destroyed the whole like there’s still huge holes that this guy didn’t fill in yeah it’s bad around the first the first monument that he showed you as soon as you climb the steps it’s just nothing but big piles of dirt and giant holes all around the water wheel those giant holes this is why people don’t want to share stuff with you stop community yeah right it was it’s crazy it was just like i guess it was a local dude or somebody at least semi-local maybe i guess maybe he could have come down over the weekend because it all happened over like two or three days it was just that park one day it was nice and the next day we came back and it was just full of holes it was crazy yeah it was it was um disheartening to say the least yeah and and you could tell like it wasn’t like the dude didn’t have really any ideas i think you just saw steven’s stuff and thought it was great because it was everything that stephen posted a picture of had huge holes around that’s not how to dig yeah we um george and i were checking out the amphitheater one night and um we hit something that made a loud pop sound and i swear that it was an electricity line of some sort and i’m surprised that one of us didn’t die yeah y’all it is i tell you what it it’s scary out there because um that place so during covet there’s been at least a couple times i’ve gone out there at the beginning in kobe was like just slept in my car and um you know like what kind of dangerous steven you’re a brave man well then there’s like i don’t know if you know but there’s a homeless encampment in the woods there oh yeah i found it okay that’s not a secret the secret to me um yeah well and one night one night i i woke up and saw like an old guy and a bunch of teenagers with like flashlights starting to go into there and uh and i was like oh i know what these guys are about right so like i get out of my car and go up there i’m like y’all treasure hunting they’re like no we’re ghost hunting oh i was like all right and so i tagged along and watched these guys like do that but i’ve also seen things where it looked like drug deals going on out there like people waiting and other people showing up and doing whatever but um i tell you what the scariest thing to me though was one night so there there’s a there’s a section um so there’s a part where i think there’s an actual direction in the uh and the verse that’s like you know you know over the tall grass you know it’s like moon like in tear drops over the tall grass years past rains fall right so there’s a couple of places where i feel like that lines up with something right there and i was like all right but so matter of fact to me there’s a part you can go i don’t i don’t think i i didn’t drug drag it into what i’m working on tonight but there’s a um there’s a in the painting actually let’s see uh in the painting there’s an actual shadow of the monument um and can’t really make that out yeah i’ll have to send it to you it’s on it’s on one of the facebook pages but you got a blur you got a blur essentially going on there

oh that’s right that’s right here maybe if i hold it beside my face um but there’s a so i got one of those there’s i know that’s in this goal um so there’s a anyway in the painting there’s a there’s a representation of the monument and to me it was like okay well it’s trying to say that like looking over that if it was years past right because we’re talking about 1967 or whatever it was dedicated to uh in 1967 by the cherokee garden club if you were to read that and be like oh years pass rains fall and the rains are falling over by the waterfall over there you’re looking for a light right um you’re looking for the the moonlight in teardrops over the tall grass so i was like where is the only place where this would have been lit where if you after a day of digging and they’re found there’s the one place where they have a pole that has multiple light fixtures on it that would have been um lighting up the uh the water wheel and so i was like okay i have to do this at night so i can see what you would have seen then right so um i like put up uh you know when i took one of my video lights and i put it in this one part and uh then decided i was gonna wait until it got dark and then i got in my position back there and i’m sitting there in the dark you know in the dark waiting to like and actually so flash so it didn’t go off but you know it wasn’t like continuous lighting it was a flash so i’m sitting in the dark and i was popping this flash but then i heard like

but it was like something it felt like something really big and it kept getting closer and then here

and which scared the [ __ ] out of me because it was like it was like i guess it was a frog or something nearby but finally i took my my phone flashlight and i was like like turn it on and like turn to the right and there’s like a possum like two feet from me and he just looks up like what’s up man he just keeps

but yeah i was just afraid like there was an axe murderer or something back in there oh man that’s the fire second yeah oh that would have been worse yeah so i will say uh i haven’t haven’t just heard that story if anybody goes out to visit the amphitheater um there is a rule you have to bring peanuts for byron yes so byron byron’s still around i saw byron the other day uh byron is a chicken that lives at the anthony is like he’s a rooster you can’t miss him he’s loud and he will follow you around everywhere you go you have to bring him peanuts or he will not be happy yes and if you ask him where the cask is buried he will take you to a place twice yeah he’s told me a place twice the cask was not there whenever i look for it but i did ask byron out of frustration and he did stop what he was doing and came but he will also scare the crap out of you the first time that i encountered byron i was walking along and he was walking behind me and then he decided to crow and uh yeah almost lost

that’s a cool chicken yeah george took me out there and we walked those paths along like there was like a fitness path or something like that and it went by pond and the entire time i was like we’re going to get eaten by an alligator one of us is losing a leg

that park like i would have loved to have seen that park in its heyday like it sounds so cool yeah it did it have it had like a oh they had a bunch of gym equipment all strong about the um it was a trail i guess for old people to stay fit it’s called the park horse yeah the park horse that’s what it was they were all numbered where is music coming from that’s my sounds like a doorbell ordered they must have ordered pizza at my house there’s uh oh fun oh and if anybody’s wondering what that panty noise is uh steven has a very adorable dog in the background um so that’s what that is he’s very cute that’s stella yeah so the park horse had a bunch of like treadmills and and ellipticals and different stuff like that in it um they finally took up the last of them just before the pandemic so they’re all gone now uh but there were a couple of them there here’s here’s part of the the parkours right here uh you can see this gentleman’s uh getting his uh her workout on yeah and then it’s crazy it’s crazy to look at that now look at that picture and know where these things are and to see what the places look like now yeah because if you if you look at the steps just to the left of where you were like that’s all overgrown forest nothing oh no that’s not that’s the that’s the stage steps okay never mind well there is i’m trying to find the other version of it too there’s another um

uh

maybe i don’t have it here but yeah there’s there’s some um there’s some pictures i have that and i can send it to you and you can post them but the um

there are some pictures i have where the it is just wide open out there and you would never know dang i want to show you though

see um

so while you’re looking for that i always try to anticipate questions that the audience may come up with or rebuttals that somebody may come up with so i was reading wikipedia and i was reading about the cross and sword and the official name cross and sword a sephonic drama of the spanish settlement of florida this play is a musical reenactment depicting florida’s early history at saint augustine especially its colonization by spaniard pedro mendez and his settlers bloody conflicts with the french huguenots and fort caroline in present-day jacksonville so it’s interesting that it covers all the way up to jacksonville as well but in case anybody’s curious and wanted to know that that’s kind of the quick synopsis yeah and it’s um i wouldn’t recommend if you if you see this and you’re like oh when i check out the gardens a lot of times when treasure hunters go to places like this for the first time they take trips and they go at night do not go to the gardens at night not because you’re gonna like get murdered or anything you’re gonna get hurt yeah like the uh if you if you listen to some of the earlier podcasts where it was it was me and john and i was talking about like digging and like breaking my foot and like getting jabbed with giant um palmetto spears yeah i wouldn’t tell anybody where i was this was where i was like it’s it’s legit you’ll you’ll be walking down what you think is a path and step off of a three-foot drop into an old lake so don’t go at night your first time at least do as we say not as we do and go with somebody don’t go by yourself by the way here are you so here’s one and i think i got to thank laura for sending me this so here’s this is a little blurry but here’s the front which george was talking about while ago that had a huge wall in the front and was lavishly decorated in the front it was beautiful um and there’s those rocks he was talking about they’ve since moved those those those rocks that are right there um in the front over to the side of the uh the big rock that we now know the one he was trying to dig under yeah um there’s the water wheel and it’s heyday um so that’s actually exceptionally similar to the entrance of um the amphitheater and raleigh exceptionally similarities here’s this bird bath is still there that’s right behind the big rock um and what i was calling the marlin pool that’s where that’s at here’s another um here’s the fountain the duck pond and the uh water wheel um but here’s the here’s the biggest thing like this is like a big beach back here and this landing where like the ducks can like none of this is all trees now like it’s all grown up like there’s it was wide open out there same like here it’s just a jungle it’s just the jungle now looks nothing like that anymore so this would have been similar to how he would have seen it back then if you if you had to put you on the spot if we had if if you were forced to dig in one place where would it be

so and please don’t um

because it’s already been done so this is this is after this you go back to those photos after this i want you to go back to those photos okay go ahead uh so here so you don’t you don’t have to if you don’t want to by the way i no i will uh so this is kind of the layout of the um of the amp like when you first or the garden i should say when you first walk in and one of the things that stuck out to me was this um so you see the thing kind of looks like an arrowhead um that is actually a big pool what used to hold water and at the the like the bottom of the shaft if you will it was where the um where the water wheel was and so i was like oh how cool it have been because it points like it literally points directly north and i don’t mean like figuratively i mean like by a compass it like aims directly north um and if you look that blue line right there is uh where it’s going from where the light is or that only light i was talking about earlier that only light directly across the monument and directly back into behind this where the steps are the waterfall back here is um there was sort of a converging area and there’s also a post back there that looks like it could have been part of a green picket fence but i can’t i can only find one of the posts but it’s kind of hidden back there um but that was the general area of where i’ve been looking and my thought was is that if i knew where the rest of those posts were um then we could have had a sort of a straight line of where to start probing and digging but it is it’s a rather large area back there it’s like you know hunting for a the proverbial needle in a haystack in that area but that’s where they’re looking for a cask in saint augustine that’s exactly right but to me that that lined up with the the um the dude the um moonlight and tear drops over the tall grass because that monument and again i can i can send a picture to to george but that monument lines up with something exactly in the painting that has a tall grass it’s essentially the thing people were talking about and um fountain of youth where they were looking for the tree or the um they were looking for the uh fountain that was over a fence or whatever it was um it’s essentially the same thing but it’s the same shape as the monument was this place all right sorry

uh what did you want me to go back to this is that what was was this place like littered with uh green picket fences at the time so steven said earlier that he doesn’t think they were that someone who uh was in the play doesn’t remember a whole bunch of them um there was a green picket fenced around around the pond um and i i know there were there were picket fences out there i just don’t know where but like if so i asked that because like if you if you found this spot and you went whoa there’s all these visual confirmers from the image and you know some of the verses lining up yeah you could you could narrow it down by uh one of one of a handful of green picket fences right yeah yeah but the the crappy thing about florida weather man is if you build anything out of wood it’s only gonna last like any any of that crap wood that they use for fencing it’s only going to last like 10 years especially that close to the salt water it’s just going to rot i mean nothing out there that’s made out of wood less so if you put up a green picket fence expect in 1973 it’s going to be about to fall over by 1983. and if you put one up in 1981 by 1991 okay be destroyed so you know who right who knows and that’s not something that that’s not something byron would have known if he if he came down for a couple of days and he saw a green pig offense he’s not going to think well weather’s going to rot this in a row or they’ll just put it right back up yeah or they’ll build another one or they won’t or whatever all right so my i had two questions about that those images um the first question i had was um are we certain that it’s a bird bath and not a sundial no it’s a bird bath it’s a bird bath okay another question is what can you tell us about the middle picture on the far right with what appears to be a cross and a fence oh uh i think that’s a optical illusion the tree right yeah it just looks like a tree yeah that’s interesting though i think it’s an optical illusion based on like where where the sun is dabbling on the tray on the tree

but yeah it does look like a cross

but i mean some of that is still out there some of those like the the plank are the um the walkways and some of them have been rebuilt but but you know what’s interesting though i want you to see something like that like i showed you guys earlier the the walkway um and this walkway is was way more prominent back then look at that yeah like it’s nearly buried now we can barely tell but look how much more of a bridge it is right so that’s that where the water is coming out underneath the bridge that you were talking about earlier yeah yeah i see that that’s that’s that spot yes definitely compelling is that where you were when you took that 63 years of right there not even not even uh 30 years of not even um just mismanagement it’s 30 years of completely not being touched things growing up and rotting and like dying and rotting where they you know falling wherever they and it’s it’s it’s just bad vines everywhere like literally no one has touched it in 30 years it became a jungle i mean the pads are all covered up in dirt and old palm fronds or whatever i mean it’s growing up everywhere right now they cut a tree next down right right next to it and the tree is just cut up in giant chunks and it’s just laying all up in here on the other side of this again like there’s times you’re just walking past something and you would just never know what it is that you’re looking at until you know like you like george says you almost fall off of something like wait what is this and you like start kicking around like oh look at this there’s a whole other like you know trough back here or waterway or whatever but literally i mean for for a verse that talks so much about water i mean there’s so much out here regarding water yeah right and uh one thing i forgot to mention earlier that rock that you see when you first come to the amp theater it wasn’t just a rock that wouldn’t catch our attention it was a it had a big cross and sword on it and it was like the hello you’re here at the theater welcome to the show rock so it was it was something that would draw your attention to it uh it’s something that you would definitely see coming to the to the amphitheater let’s see if i have a picture of it i’m sure george has obviously got there’s one on 12 treasures yeah yeah there’s one on 12 treasures right next to the rock in the painting it’s it’s hard to deny it’s difficult i know it’s funny because i was listening to you talk uh on one of the previous uh chats a couple weeks ago or either last week and you were like well it’s hard to deny foi

i mean what you’re saying is but this one is awesome yeah yeah the fountain of youth has a lot of good verse stuff but you know if i’m if if if i’m playing devil’s advocate everything except cask everything except the word cask and the word silver because you’re not going to find anything silver in st augustine but all of the really good verse match stuff for the fountain of youth you can find all over the city yeah it’s not exclusive to the fountain of youth but again if you take that line and you’re like uh okay what are the what are the things that i have what are the things that are common with each of these things you’re like oh well there are all four things that you would have to get out of the ground you would have to quarry out of the ground silver salt limestone everything so quarry is like your answer for that if it is indeed the answer for that you know but but it makes just as much sense but i i do feel like yeah he like walked through and he was like oh here’s all the cool like terminology like you know why he’s in there he’s like here’s some cool you know uh in a way it’s almost not even inventive it’s kind of you know he just it’s almost lazy because cask doesn’t mean what cast means you know right uh well uh one day um when we were digging at the fountain of youth um and uh george you can cut this if you think uh it shouldn’t be out in the in the wild but i don’t think it’ll be a big deal steven hears it um myself george and um brian zen were out checking a few spots and we were at the back and brian was like you know this one area always caught my attention and i was always curious about it and there’s like the perfect match the perfect match uh at the base of a tall tree it was a placard um for the fort of uh somebody pine and we were like huh well what’s another word for a for a fort well it’s a base what’s another what’s a pine a pine is a tall tree this is literally the base of a tall tree yeah um but george dug all that’s my favorite and there was nothing there

we got a gpr out there and then we still couldn’t find anything but you know there are so many things that are a mystery about all of it like you know when you talk about like you know the fact that they hid the um you know the fort and the flag you know or you’ve got like you know the thing that got me was like looking at the whoever it’s supposed to be ponce de leon menendez you know whatever he has no armor on except for the helmet right but he’s got this vest and that vest to me there’s only one place in in in st augustine that matches the yellow and green on that vest and it’s right there at flagler in the which is like the hilt and so one of the things that i when i first started looking is that he’s missing all his armor he’s missing all the stuff that’s on him where do we find all that right well if you go to flagler there’s the the it’s a it’s a fountain but it’s a sundial and it’s the hilt of his sword right well now i found his sword that he didn’t have on and it’s got the the the decorations all around the hilt of the sword are the green and yellow checkered you know design on there so there’s so many things like that where you could like walk around you know uh saint augustine and go oh well this this is the only place you would find that this makes sense this is the you know but like i think i think we’re really good at making this puzzle better than it actually is like we’re really good at inventing puzzles like if you the perfect example is boston we we focused on charles gate on the two c’s or the cg or whatever for so long which is because it’s abs it’s an absolutely perfect match to that thing in the painting right which has nothing to do with it nothing at all he probably never saw it he’s probably never seen it exactly but we made like we ignored so we we ignored the like how all this fits together and focused more on this one stupid little thing and then tried to force everything else together and i think the amphitheater i think the fountain of youth we try to force a lot yeah um the amphitheater we also try to force a lot um but i think the things that we don’t try to force at the amphitheater like i think it fits the broader picture a little better um i i really i still like i’ve said it a couple of times now i still just i think we’re looking at paintings wrong i think ponce is sitting on a horse on top of a landmass planting a flag which is in essence the story of saint augustine and i don’t know that it gets any deeper than that for me yeah i don’t know that we need to look for what what what shape do the shadows make or you know what the design of the flag matches a river or what you know what i’m saying i kind of know that from boston right that’s the one place where like jjp is like oh yeah well yeah there’s just kind of spells boston right here and you’re like what what yeah you’re like funny than that it’s funny that’s your hair what i was uh the next thing i was going to mention was i would love for somebody to put just just the just the the little image of the dude on the horse in front of a kid somebody in like fifth grade or lower and say point out every little thing that you see in this what hidden images do you see because the way this horse is painted and the way the sky is shaped there’s something there that we haven’t found there’s no doubt there’s something there that we haven’t found all right and i don’t know to that point if y’all don’t mind me jumping over to new orleans very quick because i do not feel i actually go to new orleans much more than i go to st augustine but um and it’s not i try to really kind of stay out of it because it’s travis is you know he’s like my best friend and that’s travis thing and i gotta wish he finds i i hope he finds it i gotta get him on a podcast at some point you do you do i gotta i gotta i gotta get him to drill down but i gotta get him he’s popular he’s got a lot to say um but one of the things that there’s a there’s a couple of things and i’m not i’m not gonna jump into his version of anything except for for one because this is it’s been out there before but well two things one one is part of the verse and you know the the fact that if if you were to if you just say at the place where jewels abound and you know the first thing you would do if you were to pick up any city if you were to go into any city and be like how do i find anything the first thing you’re going to do is grab a map right and the first thing that i would notice is that going down this map when you’re going down a list of streets is suddenly you’ve got opal and amber and turquoise and amethyst and you’ve got like oh wait a minute there’s all the secrets from all the jewels from the secret are in this one place and when you go to look at that on a map it looks like the mask it’s it’s up there by um by lake pontchartrain and you’re like holy cow like all the all the places where the jewels are right here in this place it looks like a mask then if you count down 15 rows 15 streets it leads you to the street that cuts across city park right well one of the things whenever i was so my daughter we were going my uh my oldest daughter was getting married a couple years ago and so my youngest when we were going down there was like hey i was like you want to go take a look at this treasure hunt thing right and um and she was like oh my god yeah so she was like let me see the painting so she got the painting you know the time she was uh you know she was 10 and so i’m like what do you see what is what is it in here that didn’t make sense to you and she’s like oh well she’s like it looks like you’ve got like like fairy tale stuff going on here she says you’ve got the um you got like the three blind mice right because of the clock she says you have the cow jumped over the moon um because of the stars and i was like huh okay and i’m like yeah that makes sense and then she says um and then you’ve got uh you’ve got the little red riding hood right because you have the wolf with grandma’s dress on right and i was like all right so we started looking for more stuff and i was like well you know somebody mentioned that there’s a spoon in here right and i put the moon she goes yeah well that goes with the cow jumped over the moon and the you know the plate the spoon and whatnot so um we started looking and so part of the the verse that’s always gotten me was the part where it says faze admire gnomes delight right so like what do we know gnomes for you know like if you just mention gnome to any average person you know to me they say like gardens right so in new orleans you have two places right next to each other you have story land and you have uh you have the botanical gardens and they literally are like they share the property they’re part of the same thing you when you go into the like you can buy a ticket for story land or the botanical gardens at the same desk so you have phase delight gnomes admire right um so i was going through some photos um earlier um this week i was scanning a bunch of stuff and as i was scanning all my photos um

oh shoot i thought i drug some photos in here

i’m gonna be bummed out if i didn’t actually send these to george though um so one and i i know this has been posted before but these are my these are my personal photos from 1993 around the time my me and my wife got married so nice yeah like you can’t you can’t deny that i mean come on nice you can’t do it first of all like that’s at the top left-handed it like the the boy from lafayette park eh all right i could kind of see it but that’s perfect i mean that’s exactly it right and it fits the sounds of friends right because what that they’re like talking talking flowers you’re talking to one and your friend at the other end can hear your voice so the sounds of friends feel the afternoon hours like it makes perfect sense uh let’s see i mean me my wife loved this park we were there a lot so it’s hard to see let’s see there’s there’s another version of it well first of all here’s here’s this one too this one’s hard to this this one’s hard to see as well but there’s our wolf all right that’s it from little red riding hood god so that that exists in there or did i think it still i think that one still does um so i got this like i know they re they renovated the park in the early 80s the one was 81 82 somewhere around there and i’ve got the uh i’ve got the no it was like 83 maybe when they renovated the park but i’ve got the um the original diagram for for the way the park was in like 78.79 and i can’t remember i can’t remember off the top of my head while i was there there’s your cow jumped over the moon

i didn’t know that was on the ground and they’re like hanging up now i don’t know i tried to go there i had my dog with me last time they wouldn’t let her come in um and i i couldn’t i i couldn’t get in there to go check um there’s also like uh a place um

where you can do puppet shows which makes me think of the mask right or either the mask is part of like where a jewels abound um but there’s also like the they had like these sort of punch and judy shows that they would show in here i think that’s still there yeah and another important thing about storyline back then you’d have to pay to get in it was open there were no walls there weren’t fences or anything yeah the only thing i was that was part of the renovation was they added ticketing and prices and fences

peter pan

well i can’t do that so yeah peter pan so the other so there are several things like one the clock could be related to peter pan right because captain hook’s afraid of the the clock um or cinderella or right right or cinderella but i don’t know that cinderella exists in the park i’m trying to just stay within the things that i know exist but yeah you might be right um the the wolf obviously um the cow jumped over the moon um there was another one oh so the there was one for peter pan not peter pan um what i was thinking was pinocchio oh here it is um again sorry these aren’t turned already but uh so to me so again my daughter pointed this out and i you know who knows what’s true which not but this was just from her fifth grade perspective is that the um the handle looked like it could be pinocchio’s nose oh the handle of the mask that they’re holding um so those are things whenever you you think about like breaking down the the you know the picture where you go oh well there’s like you know cause some you know for the long time like people have been you know with both saint augustine and new orleans like well there’s nothing in the new orleans that can be you know you can’t look at that photo and say there’s all the stuff there like you you know it’s just there it must be something you know all in the verse and the the picture doesn’t really matter and you’re like well if you knew where you were and you’re in storyland and you start breaking it down to you know you start breaking it down to like peter pan and the clock for either three blind mice or or peter pan you break it down to pinocchio’s nose you break it down the cow jumps over the moon you break it down to a little red riding hood then the whole painting makes sense and it’s all right there yeah but how do you explain the vectors oh yeah well now you get all the wolves stephen what about the wolves man there’s a lot of wolves i’m not going to tell you i’m not going to tell you where this is because this is travis’s uh this is part of travis’s solve or one of his past solves but i will say that travis had the most perfect solve ever that where he there not only first of all there’s the wolf at storyland but the place where he was digging had a wolf there and it was like hidden off in a corner almost as if it was watching you you’ll go uh where you were digging and we i we literally bare when we when we covered it all back up we buried parts of the book in there because i was like if it’s not here i want something from the secret to be here because it was so it was so perfect yeah like to actually tore out like a page of the book and put it there yeah yeah so so part of the secret does exactly that place now that’s awesome yeah steven this was this is amazing man i really appreciate you going that’s some really really good stuff and now i’m scared of story land i’m afraid of wolves um and for a guy that you know for me i don’t know much about saint augustine or the st augustine puzzle very much and whenever i hear about it it’s fountain of youth um so this was really like not only interesting but enlightening and it’s nice to see uh that you’re in a different place and that that place is so compelling but not only that um that is a lot of interesting stuff and it looks like you’ve done a lot of work too so kudos to you i think that um that’s it’s it was fascinating appreciate it that’s it that’s the kind of stuff i like to see somebody have when they come come to me with information they’re like i have this really great idea and i want to share it with you and 90 of the time if not more it’s just some wild um this could relate to this because the third chapter of this book and the fifth cousin of this guy was named and your everything that you gave us for the most part is super conscious it’s simple too i mean it’s not i’m or super confirmation bias no i like it you could say that but i mean you know that’s just because you’re in the weeds with it but like for a lay person like me you know thinking about this i i followed you precisely through everything it all lines up and makes sense to me um and and it’s and like bradley said that’s pretty rare because i do get a lot of um you know uh solves that aren’t like that uh like he mentioned as all of us do so uh if i i thought i thought you did a good job that’s great yeah thank you for coming on

you