Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles Page #2

sidebar text pieces

on tiles, and after a while,

those started to become

more interesting to me

than the main message 'cause

I had seen the main message

hundreds of times,

but these little

sidebar texts started to

get really exciting because

I'd be like--

sometimes they would say

stuff that was unprecedented.

Sometimes there would be

tantalizing clues

where one would say:

People had always speculated,

"Well, do you think it's more

than one person

making the tiles?"

And I always said

no way.

I always

thought it was one person

'cause they all look so similar,

et cetera, et cetera,

but it was always

open to conjecture.

We see this claim on this tile,

"I am only one man,"

so, all of a sudden,

we know more information

than we knew before,

that it's one man.

There'd be this other

sidebar text that said:

That's when I begged them not to

destroy it.

Thank you and goodbye.

I always pictured him

on his hands and knees

in front of the table

at the board room,

you know, where the Cult of

the Hellion is gathered,

begging them not to

destroy it, with tears,

of course, streaming down

his face, you know?

"Please, I beg you,

don't destroy this movement."

They're cackling and they're not

taking him seriously.

And then he says,

"Thank you and goodbye."

It's sort of sad, you know?

It's sort of like a--

I don't know.

That was a heavy

extra message, that one.

The Manifesto Tile was a tile

that was on 16th and Chestnut

in Philadelphia,

with just hundreds of words

inscribed on it.

It has this very long,

paranoid, rambling message.

It was pretty wild.

I mean, it was probably

in the top five

most intense things

I've ever seen in my life.

It's not an art project

put together by some

art students or something.

It's like something

that's insane.

You know, it's, like,

something that's real.

The Toynbee Idea tiles

were something that

had this quality to it

that was very, sort of,

frightening and disturbing

and strange.

And yet, at the same time,

because it was occupying space

in this very public sphere,

people just kind of tended

to pass it by and ignore it.

When you start to realize that

it's unusual and strange

and unexplainable,

it's like waking up

from this dream

where you're like,

"Wait a minute.

"This thing

that's been here all along

doesn't make sense."

Well, this is Daisy.

And, well, Daisy got hit by

a car or a bike or something.

Maybe he'll be able to use his

legs again, but maybe not.

So I'm kind of

trying to get him to do these

balancing exercises

where I just kind of push him

off his feet

and let him try to

stand on his own a little bit.

But he's really a handsome dude.

Me and Justin's grandfather

raised pigeons.

Fancy pigeons, he had.

We grew up in a barn

and half of it was our house

that our parents built.

I got a-- went up in the rafters

and got a baby pigeon

and...

me and Justin used to feed that

pigeon popcorn.

We built a pigeon coop

out in the barn.

So we had, like...

the biggest amalgamation

of different pigeons you could

possibly imagine.

Like, we had-- it was like

the Noah's Ark of pigeons,

we had two or three of

everything.

And then they all

started interbreeding

'cause...

well, we just had no idea.

I went to get a snack.

This must have been now around,

like, 4:
00 a.m. or so.

On my way home

I see this mound.

Just this black, shiny mound.

It was tar paper

imbued with tar.

I pull up the edge of the tar

paper and, sure enough,

there's the edge of

a Toynbee Idea tile.

I just...

It was fresh,

as in a-car-had-not-hit-it-yet

fresh.

I'm sure that

there was no fresh tile

there when I went to the deli.

I thought, "Man, you know,

this person could be, like,

on the block or something,"

you know, so I leaped to my feet.

I jogged down

the block to the north

and I start shouting out,

"Toynbee Idea!

"Toynbee Idea,

I believe it!

I believe the Toynbee Idea!"

I jogged down the other way,

"Toynbee Idea!"

Nobody ever answers me

and there's nobody to hear me

except a Sleeping pigeon up

there somewhere or something.

Yes, I came within minutes

of solving

the Toynbee Idea mystery

for all time with

my own two eyes

because I missed the person

putting down the tile

within minutes.

Then I went back and I just

hung out with the tile

until 7:
00 in the morning

and, uh, watched

the first sunrise

on a new tile or something.

I've been interested in

the tiles for years,

since middle school,

in the early

Every few years I'd, like,

sort of get into it

and see what more

had been found out.

No one had solved it.

It had been years,

so I was like,

"All right, screw this."

The aspect of the Toynbee tiles

that really spoke to me

was just the impossibility

of the mystery.

I was probably the most

skeptical person

involved in the detective work.

I really thought

we were just gonna say,

"This is a black hole.

"Here, look at this crazy

phenomenon

"that has absolutely

no possible explanation

that we could ever come to."

I remember my very first

e-mail to Justin.

He was another person

who genuinely wanted to

solve the mystery.

As a team, we could

really pool our resources,

come together,

and figure it out.

So when we started

researching the tiles,

we really only had a very small

number of clues to go on.

We had an address to

a South Philadelphia home.

We had an article from

the "Philadelphia inquirer."

And then

there was a play

by playwright/fiirn director

David Mamet.

And these

three sources were basically

where we began our quest

to discover the identity

of the tiler.

There was a tile

discovered in Santiago, Chile,

and it gives

a specific street address

of a row home in

South Philadelphia.

Let's really

investigate this address

because it's one of

the very few--

it's one of just

one or two, really,

actual concrete leads

that we have.

"You may have information to

help solve

"a 20-plus-year-old mystery.

Do you know anything about

the below pictured message?"

We went to Kinko's

and made these fliers

and decided that we would give

them to everybody on the block.

Resurrect the Dead

on the Planet Jupiter?

Yeah.

I don't know about it.

One fellow named Frannie

talked to us a lot

and he filled us in as to

who had been living

in that specific house

that was on the address

on the tile.

He drives

a bike with no tires--

with no-- rims with no tires.

I don't know,

I don't f***ing know.

He lives over there, got all

birds in his house.

Goats, geese,

things all over his house.

The fellow living there now

they call,

"Sevy the Birdman."

My first impression,

the very first thing

that I thought was:

That must be the person

who made all the Toynbee tiles.

For sure.

And equally exciting was they

told us about

the fellow

who had lived there before.

The guy that lived in there,

we only can account

for, like, 30 years.

Because he lived

in a green thing--

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