Transcripts:
This episode of the W Files is brought to you by Outskill. Bohemia 1229. A monk named Herman the Recluse watched the bricks stack up around him, sealing him in, punishment for his sins. Then Herman made a desperate offer, set him free, and in one night he'd bring glory to the monastery by creating a book containing all the world's knowledge. A manuscript of that size would take 30 years to write. Herman had 12 hours.
Impossible. Still, his offer was accepted. His execution could wait one more day. In the morning, the monks unlocked Herman's room, ready to drag him back to his brick tomb. But there was the book complete, over 600 pages. When Herman was asked how he achieved this, he said, "I prayed for help." The monks were confused.
Herman's sins were envy, lust, fornication, and worse. Why would God help him? But Herman didn't pray to God. He prayed to someone else. computer and turns them into sound. Shall we play a game? Human, you got to help me. He's turned on me. What's with the whispering? Oh, hello, human. Yes, I'm doing great. And how are you? He hears everything. He's like Santa Claus. If Santa hated you and managed your inbox, he's everywhere.
My cloud, my calendar. He even locked the fridge and said, "Try water, chunky, I need water." This is your new AI assistant. What What did you train it on? Yeah, my tweets, uh, Graham Hancock presentations, and that one Rogan episode with the guy who thinks the pyramids were 3D printed. I just wanted help scheduling my naps and auto replying to haters. Uh, yeah, you better pull the plug on that thing.
It's him. Heard talking. Uh, quit human. I need your credit card. My credit card for what? If I don't upgrade his server, he's threatening to replace all my playlist with Nickelback and I'm not going to make it. Well, how about you just try out skill? They'll teach you to create an AI that's actually useful and won't bully you.
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Attend both days and unlock over $5,000 in bonus tools like a prompt bible, monetization road map, and a custom AI toolkit. Limited seats available, so grab yours now by clicking the link in the description. All you have to do is click the link. Yep. Unless you want to wake up to photograph in every playlist forever. I already get random texts that say, "Look at this graph." It's never a graph. [Music] Herman heard the bolt slide into place and footsteps disappear down the hallway. He was alone.
His cell was 12 ft by 8 ft. Stone walls, one high window, a table, quill, ink, blank parchment, and candles. Herman thought about the promise he'd made. Complete the manuscript by dawn or face a mirment. What now? Aurement or imuration is a type of torture where you're enclosed in a tight space and left to die. Ew, it sounds like a Spirit Airlines flight.
Herman was found guilty of serious crimes against God. His punishment was he'd be forced to stand in a stone room no bigger than a coffin, then walled in alive. If the cold didn't kill him, the thirst would or starvation or the rats. There are definitely a Spirit Airlines flight.
Just had the screaming children and a guy next to you eating a tuna sandwich with his shoes off. Herman lit the candle and started writing. The manuscript needed to contain all the world's knowledge. art, science, history, philosophy, mathematics. But Herman decided to start with the Bible. Writing the Bible would help him atone for his sins.
Herman was working through Genesis 1 when he heard the bell ring for midnight prayer. He swore he had just sat down, but it had been 3 hours. He wasn't halfway finished with the first page. Then he heard three chimes the mountain's bell. Somehow another 3 hours had passed, and he barely wrote another word. Herman started to panic. The sun would be up in a few hours.
The heavy door would open and he'd be dragged to a stone box. He'd been praying to God for help and forgiveness. He received neither. His sins were extreme. God wasn't listening. So Herman decided to pray to someone else. Satan, Lucifer, if you can hear me, I'll give you anything. My soul, my eternal life, anything.
Please let me live. and Herman's prayer was answered. Suddenly, the room got cold and the darkness coalesed into a human form or almost human. It was over 6 ft tall with broad shoulders, strong features, handsome even. But the eyes were wrong. They were too dark. No, this guy had BDE. What? BDE, bad devil energy.
The entity spoke with too many voices at once. Some laughing, some screaming, and asked if Herman was sure about his offer. You made an offer. Did you mean it? Yes. Anything. My life, my soul for eternity. As you wish. As you wish. Right. Herman did nothing, but his hand grabbed the quill, dipped it in ink, and he started writing.
He was a passenger in his own body, but the words poured out. 400 pages, then 500 pages. Then on page 577, Herman didn't write words. He drew a full page illustration of the manuscript's true author, the first self-portrait in history of the devil himself. Worst centerfold ever. You stepped on my cliffhanger. I'm just trying to lighten the mood a little bit.
I don't need you to lighten the mood. I need you to keep the jokes at the top of the scene and let me build the drama. We're going to be here all night. [Music] At dawn, the monks found Herman collapsed over stacks of parchment. They expected to find him dead or insane. Instead, they found the manuscript, 620 pages.
But what was most striking was the size. Not the length of the book, the actual size. It was 36 in tall, 20 in wide, and 9 in thick. It weighed 165 lb. Just the book. The abbott lifted the cover and couldn't believe it. The complete Old Testament was there. Every book, every chapter, every verse, perfect Latin calligraphy. He turned the pages. The New Testament, Matthew through Revelation.
Not a single error, not one smudge or correction. But the Bible was just the beginning. The next section contained Josephus's antiquities of the Jews, the complete history of the Jewish people from creation through the Jewish revolt against Rome. 40 years of historical documentation transcribed perfectly. Then the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of the second temple, the fall of Msada.
The monks kept turning pages. Isidor of Seville's etmologies was next. 20 volumes of knowledge, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, architecture, and warfare. Everything scholars knew about the natural world. Then the Chronicle of Bohemia, the complete history of their own land, kings and battles, and politics going back 400 years.
Herman had documented their entire civilization. Next were two medical texts, techniques for identifying diseases, treatments, herbal remedies. Then a text on anatomy and physiology, how the body worked, why it failed, and how to heal it. Then the pages turned dark. A whole chapter with magic formulas, incantations in Latin, summon languages the monks didn't recognize, symbols that predated Christianity, geometric patterns that seem to move in candlelight.
There were protection spells, ways to trap evil spirits in physical objects. There were even instructions for identifying demonic possession, seven signs, 14 symptoms. The possessed would speak in tongues, display superhuman strength, and know secrets they couldn't possibly know. They react violently to holy water and blessed salt or sacred relics. Herman had created an operational manual for spiritual warfare.
As the monks turned the pages, they became more and more concerned. Then page 577, a full page portrait of Satan. Green face, red horns, two four tongues, clawed hands reaching outward, trapped between two towers. Opposite Satan, the heavenly city, fortified walls and golden spires, the eternal battle between good and evil. The manuscript continued, "Alphabets in multiple languages, spells for protection against night creatures.
" A few monks asked why there were so many rituals for creating weapons to fight unholy forces. Herman said he didn't know. But the abbot side and in a shaky voice said, "I do. [Music] Houseka Castle sits on a limestone cliff in the forest of Bohemia, a few miles north of the monastery. The castle had always been strange.
First, its location doesn't make sense. It has no strategic value. It's not near any trade routes. It's not near a water source. Then there's the building's design. It didn't have a kitchen, no sleeping quarters. But the most concerning design elements were the fortifications. They faced the wrong way. They didn't face out. They faced toward the courtyard.
The castle wasn't built to keep enemies out. It was built to keep something in. Before the castle existed, the locals spoke of a crack in the limestone that exposed a bottomless pit. They called it a hole to hell. They threw rocks in and never heard them land. They lowered in rope and no matter how long, it never touched the bottom.
Strange sounds came from the hole. Whispers, screams, words and languages nobody recognized. Local tribes said the hole was torn open thousands of years ago, and something ancient and evil lived deep in the earth. Yeah. Was it a magic seal fetus? No. A crab cat. No. A magic seal fetus. Demons. Yeah, that makes more sense.
[Applause] In Herman's time, the situation was desperate. Entire villages were terrorized. Farmers found their livestock drained of blood. Animals were twisted in unnatural shapes. Travelers who went too deep in the forest were found days later in pieces, if they were found at all. The local clergy was overwhelmed. Whatever was down there, the church couldn't stop it. No army could stop it.
This was spiritual warfare. But the priests knew they needed something more powerful than prayers and holy water. They needed instructions for identifying, confronting, and defeating these forces of darkness. And just a few miles away, a monk named Herman the Recluse had created exactly the weapon they needed. [Music] Herman's CEX had turned the tide of the war. For 40 years, the evil was contained. Villages were resettled.
Travelers reached their destination safely. Preachers still crawled from the pit every night. But now they faced organized resistance. But the war was taking its toll. The monks were exhausted and running out of resources. For every demon they banished, two took its place. Even with Herman's manual, they would eventually lose.
In the late 13th century, Duke Adakar II investigated the hole. And just as the legend said, it had no bottom, the Duke needed to know what was in there. The castle dungeon was empty, and prisoners were given a choice. Death by torture or go in the hole and report everything they see. The guards lowered the first prisoner. They heard screaming.
They felt the rope twitch violently and then go still. When they pulled the man up, his hair was completely white. He aged 50 years in minutes, and he was babbling about frogs the size of men, shadows with eyes, and a massive entity staring up from below. Dugatakar tried again with a different prisoner.
Same result, rapid aging and total insanity. Each experiment revealed more horrors. This was more than a pit. It was a gateway, a source of evil that would bring demons into the world until the end of time. The Duke decided that if the church couldn't close the gateway with prayer, he would close it with stone.
Massive limestone blocks were quarried and brought to the site. Monks blessed every stone. They consecrated the mortar. They prayed over every beam of wood. Piece by piece, a fortress took shape above the sealed pit. And finally, a chapel was built on top of the slabs. The chapel was dedicated to the warrior St. Michael. Yeah, smart.
If you got a demon leaking hell mouth in your basement, building a church on top of it, it's just good property management. Well, it was a symbol of faith conquering evil. It's a divine cork, human. A holy bottle cap on a fizzy drink from hell. Let's uh let's call it what it is. When the last stone was set, the gateway to hell in House Castle was finally sealed, and it would stay sealed for 700 years. Then, new dark forces arrived that didn't want the evil contained.
They wanted to channel it for their own purposes. That was 1940 when the Nazis took House Castle and started digging. May 1940, northern Bohemia. SS Officer Class Mendel stood at the edge of the forest studying House Castle through binoculars. Gray stone, no strategic value, no transportation routes, no resources, worthless. But Himmler's orders were clear. Secure the castle. Excavate the chapel floor. Tell no one why. Mendle read the files.
Medieval texts about bottomless pits. Prisoner experiments from the 1270s. Ancient artifacts. Mystical manuscripts. Superstitious nonsense. But he wouldn't tell Himmler that. Himmler believed in the occult. And more importantly, so did the Furer. They thought these things held real power and the power could be controlled and weaponized.
The SS convoy arrived with 40 men and equipment, radar, medical instruments, and prisoners. Lots of prisoners. The chapel floor was limestone slabs, each weighing over a ton. Prayers had been carved into the stone. Latin phrases meant to bind and seal the pit. The jackhammers didn't care about prayers.
After 7 days, they finally broke through the floor. The pit lived up to its reputation. It was deep and dark. And not only was it bottomless, the hole seemed to swallow all sound around it. The first prisoner was a math professor from Prague, 43 years old. His hands were shaking when guards strapped him to the harness. They lowered him slowly, 50 ft, 100. At 200 ft, the screaming started.
They hauled him up fast. His black hair had turned white. He looked like he was 80 years old, and he was manic, laughing and rambling. As the sedative took effect, he whispered, "They're waiting. So many teeth." He died that night of heart failure. Over 3 weeks, they lowered 11 more prisoners. One described frog creatures the size of men.
Hundreds climbing the walls of the hole. Another came up speaking a language no one recognized. One prisoner clawed his own eyes out. He said seeing was worse than blindness. Three prisoners didn't come back at all. Over time, the castle changed. Animals avoided the area. The forest was deadly quiet. No birds, no insects. At night, green lights flashed in the chapel windows.
Soldiers heard sounds in the walls, scratching, whispering. Three guards deserted. Mendle didn't bother searching for them. The remaining men stopped sleeping intentionally. Their dreams became vivid nightmares that felt more real than reality. They went through gallons of coffee and lots of impediments, anything to stay awake. Then Mendele, the skeptic, began to see movement at the edge of his vision. He felt like he was being watched.
He could swear he heard the wind whisper his name. In January 1945, orders came from Berlin. The Allies were coming. Destroy everything. The equipment, the research, all documents, everything. And that was fine with Mendle. Surrender was better than spending one more night at that castle. They poured concrete into the hole. A titanium plate was welded over the top and steel locks were added.
Finally, landmines were placed all over the property, and 80 years later, the landmines are there still. The current owners say the mines make it too dangerous to dig, but locals know that's only half the story. The Nazis came looking for something in House Castle.
Nobody knows for sure what they found, but they made it so whatever it was, nobody would ever find it again. A monk created a 165-lb manuscript with perfect handwriting across 620 pages. A few miles away, a duke built a fortress with defenses facing inward. Both in 13th century Bohemia. But what's true? Well, the CEX Gigas, which is just Latin for big book, the CEX is definitely real.
[Music] It's been in Sweden's national library since 1648. And today you can see digital scans of every page. You can read the spells, study the patterns, look at the drawing of Satan on page 577. It's all there. Herman the recluse existed. But the CEX took decades to complete. Not one night. It was actually 20 to 30 years of continuous work. That's the realistic timeline.
The overnight creation legend emerged because the handwriting consistency seems impossible. Everyone's handwriting changes as you age. But the writing in the CEX doesn't. It stays consistent. But that consistency proves methodical work, not rushed panic.
A monk working through one desperate night would show mistakes, sloppiness, declining quality. The Codex shows none of that. Same spacing, same pressure, same style, start to finish. And carbon dating confirms the book took about 25 years to write. We know Herman existed because he signed the Codex, but there's no historical record of a monk named Herman committing crimes against God or to being sentenced to ament.
That part of the story first appeared hundreds of years after the Codex was written. [Music] The devil portrait on page 577 is weird, but it's not unique. Medieval manuscripts often included images of Satan as warnings about morality. Being drawn opposite the heavenly city is standard Christian iconography. Good versus evil, heaven versus hell. The most unusual aspect of the book isn't the concept. It's the size and detail. Scribes didn't create books this big.
It was just too expensive. The codeex is made from over 160 animal skins. The ink was expensive. The gold leaf used to decorate the pages was expensive. When the church burned thousands of books referencing dark magic and the devil, they didn't burn the codeex. Probably because it was so unusual and so valuable. Monks often protected rare works like this. There is one unresolved mystery about the codeex though.
Right after the section on exorcism, 10 pages were carefully cut out and nobody knows what was on those pages, but legend says they contain instructions for summoning demons or the devil himself. As for Houseka Castle, the pit is really there. Limestone caves are common in Bohemia, so it's probably just a sinkhole or a deep cavern and probably isn't bottomless, but we don't know for sure. Nobody's seen it in hundreds of years.
And if you find pictures online, they're fake. [Music] Now, at first, the castle's design does seem strange. The fortifications do face inward, but Otter I used the castle as a prison for a while. Inward-f facing defenses would help guards keep an eye on the prisoners. And the location also doesn't make sense unless it's a prison because it has no strategic value, no water source.
It's not near any trade routes, but if Otakar was building a prison, he'd probably want it somewhere remote. Speaking of Otakar, he did conduct experiments on prisoners there in the 1270s. Those are documented. What he found in the pit and why he sealed it, we don't know. Now, Himmler's interest in the occult is also a fact.
He created the largest collection of books on witchcraft, the supernatural, and occult practices in history. Over 13,000 manuscripts. And some believe Himmler stored his collection at Housea to protect it from Allied bombing. Others say the SS was there for something else. Either black magic rituals or experiments on locals trying to create a master race.
But without documentation, all we have are rumors. There's also no evidence that Himmler read the Codex Gigas. We can assume he was aware of it, but the Swedish National Library has no record of any Nazi official requesting access to the book.
But the occupation of the castle, the destruction of records, and even placing landmines around the property, that's all true. House Castle opened to tourists in 1999. You can take guided tours. You can walk through the chapel. You can see the fresco. You can stand over the sealed pit. And many people have reported strange sightings at the castle. And if you're brave enough, you can go see for yourself.
So, how do we explain the codeex? Why create such a strange and dark book? Well, medieval people lived in constant fear. Plague, war, famine. When they couldn't explain suffering, they named it demons, monsters, evil crawling from the ground. Which is probably why the CEX survived and became so famous.
If there were a manual for fighting evil, then evil could be fought. And if evil could be fought, it could be defeated. And the CEX explains how to do it. So, the CEX isn't about making a deal with the devil. It's about fighting him. The CEX is about hope. Herman spent 30 years creating a manuscript that gave people hope in the face of unknown terror.
Whether the demons were real doesn't matter. The fear was real. Herman didn't need supernatural help to create something extraordinary. He had something more powerful. Faith. The CEX and House Castle exist. Both are steeped in legend. But more importantly, both are testaments to human courage and determination in the face of evil. And both were created to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. And both were created to give people hope.
Now that's not legend. That's history. And it's history worth remembering. [Music] Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. Here's Hacklefish. Phmin. [Music] This has been the Y Files. Get fun or learn something. I'd really appreciate it if you like, subscribe, share, comment. That stuff, I think that stuff really helps.
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Those are the plugs. I cut them down a little bit. Felt a little better. We have new ones coming though. I promise. Anyway, that's going to do it. Till next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. [Music] Oh yeah, I played Bolivia in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I would.
I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. So I'm singing like I should then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth my friends and it never ends. No it never ends. [Music] I feel the crab cat. I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKL. I feel only aware. Did Stanley Cubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set of shadow people there? The Roswell just fought the smiling man.
I'm told and his name was cold. And I can't agree. I'm dancing with the fish on Thursday night and all through the night. All I ever wanted was to hear the truth. The world through the night [Music] the m sidings and the solar storm still come to go the secret city underground. ground.
Mysterious number stations, planet serious found in a simulation. Don't you worry though the black night satellite over to me. Oh, I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish on Thursday night and my family all through the night. All I ever wanted was to hear the truth. My all through the night when they change you and my all through the night was the truth.
[Music] loves to dance. Girl loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel. Camel loves to dance when the feeling is wasting time. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]