Transcription
It's July of 2017, and an old, dusty series of books resurfaces on a Reddit forum that would unleash a fury of time travel speculation. It's a forgotten series of books from the 1800s, and it gave us a boy named Baron Trump. His home, called Castle Trump. His guide, a master called Don. That's just the tip of the iceberg, literally.
Somehow, a lonely, obscure author in 1889 describes details of the biggest political upset in the history of America. And believe it or not, that's not even the weird part of this story. What Reddit readers didn't know was that this 130-year-old rabbit hole had ties to Nikola Tesla, the FBI, the Titanic, a portal, and Abraham Lincoln. Now, if you don't already believe in time travel, you may want to buckle up for this story. This is one deep dive that you don't want to miss.
It's 1889, and a New York lawyer publishes a children's adventure novel. And yes, this man was very real. And he was somebody significant. You see, when he was 21 years old, Lockwood was appointed a United States Consul by President Abraham Lincoln. The youngest man in the entire consular force. That's the author that we're dealing with, and the book he published in 1889 is called *Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump*. That's the name printed on the cover, sitting in the Library of Congress, and you can read it right now for free.
Now, hold the press for a minute. Love him or hate him, this is not a political episode. This is not a political channel, and it never will be. But put your bias next to you on the table, because this is a story about other things, not politics. And the potential for time travel? There's no other explanation. Let's keep going.
Now, that was the name of the book printed on the cover, sitting in the Library of Congress right now, and you can read it for free. The hero of this series is described as a young aristocrat. He's described as brilliant, adventurous, supremely sure of himself, a boy with a swagger of someone twice his age, carrying himself far beyond his years. His family home is called Castle Trump.
The sequel was published in 1893, and that one was called *Baron Trump's Marvelous Underground Journey*. It's about a boy finding his destiny in the crumbling pages of a 500-year-old manuscript. That manuscript was written by a long-dead master, the book calls the master of all masters, a man named Don. And I want to pause on what the story's ancient manuscript says. It tells Baron Trump that there are portals, hidden doorways into a world inside our world. And that those portals are located in northern Russia. Now, I'm quoting the actual book here. Doorways whose entrance might be invisible to ordinary eyes, and the manuscript repeats one strange phrase over and over. On its mildewed pages, it says, "The people will tell thee."
Now, 7 years after that first book, Lockwood put down the children's stories and wrote something very different. He wrote a short novel called *1900 or The Last President*. The book opens on election night, Tuesday, November 3rd, 1896. An outsider candidate, a man the establishment mocked, a man the newspapers swore could never win, shocks the country and takes the presidency. New York City absolutely erupts. Mobs pour through the streets, the police lines break, and the book names the first target of the crowd's fury. And I quote, "The Fifth Avenue Hotel will be the first to feel the fury of the mob." Then the new president announces his cabinet, and sitting on that list in a book printed in 1896 is a man named Pence.
Now here's where I have to stop and correct the internet, because half the posts about this book will tell you that the fictional president is named Trump, but he's not. It's William Jennings Bryan, and he was a real candidate from the real election of 1896. So no, Lockwood did not write President Trump. What he did is actually stranger. He wrote the script. The outsider nobody saw coming, the shock victory, the streets of New York erupting, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a cabinet man named Pence, and history just waited a hundred and twenty years to recast that lead.
And while we're being honest, you may have seen posts claiming that that hotel stood exactly where a certain famous Trump Tower stands on Fifth Avenue today. Now that's false. The real Fifth Avenue Hotel stood on the same street, but 30 blocks south, and it was torn down in 1908.
And now we're going to go deeper in the rabbit hole. I'm going to read you the actual first sentence of *The Last President* describing the election results hitting New York. "The city staggered under the blow like a huge ocean liner which plunges full speed with terrific crash into a mighty iceberg." An ocean liner at full speed into an iceberg, printed in 1896. Now hold on to that sentence, because 16 years later, that exact disaster unfolded on a ship called the Titanic.
And here's where the story gets bigger than just one author, because the 1890s did not have a shortage of authors accidentally writing the future. Meet author number two. His name is Morgan Robertson, a former merchant sailor turned writer. In 1898, two years after Lockwood's iceberg sentence, Robertson published a novel called *Futility*. It's the story of a luxury liner, the largest moving object ever built by human hands, a ship the world would call unsinkable. She races across the North Atlantic on a freezing April night, carrying the wealthiest, most elite people of her age. And lifeboats? For less than half the souls on board. Why? Well, because the law said that was enough. And out of the darkness, an iceberg, and the unsinkable ship sinks. Almost everyone dies in the freezing water.
Now, I don't know about you, but doesn't that sound awfully similar to what would happen in April of 1912 to a ship called the Titanic? Robertson wrote it 14 years earlier. And the name he gave his fictional ship? The Titan. The Titan was 800 ft long. The Titanic? 882.
Now, Robertson never called himself a prophet. He said he simply knew ships, and he did. An experienced sailor could see that liners were getting too big, too fast, and that lifeboat laws hadn't caught up. Expertise can explain the disaster, but expertise does not explain the name and the details of its sinking. And here's the part that should raise the hair on your arms. Robertson himself believed something was writing through him. It's documented in a memorial book published by the people who knew him, that Robertson believed, quote, "some spirit entity had commandeered his body and brain to write the stories that made him famous." That is the author's own explanation.
So, you tell me, is something reaching backward through time planting these stories ahead of schedule? Or, is something or someone using storytellers to prepare us? There's even more. And it keeps happening.
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published his only novel. In it, four shipwrecked and starving survivors adrift at sea draw lots. Probably the worst drawing in the history of novels to lose. And the young man who loses is a cabin boy named Richard Parker. He does not survive what happens next. Now, that's all part of the novel. But, 46 years later, a real ship went down. The four real survivors faced the same terrible choice in a case still taught in law schools to this day. And the real cabin boy's name who died was Richard Parker. Multiple authors, one area, writing about disasters at sea decades before they existed, right down to the names.
So, let's end back where we started, because I had to know who was Ingersoll Lockwood. Are there any other explanations for his writing of the future? So, in summary, he was born in 1841 in New York. His father ran Sing Sing prison. At 21, he was handpicked by Abraham Lincoln to be the youngest diplomat in American service. He went on to become a lawyer in New York City. In 1892, his marriage ends in divorce. And it's in the years right after, the loneliest stretch of his life, that the strange books pour out of him. The underground journey, the portals, *The Last President*, and here's what the record does not show. No seances, no spirit circles, no occult societies, no interviews where he explains himself. There's literally nothing. History barely bothered to remember this man at all. And that absence is the strangest part.
Because think about what Lockwood actually wrote in one of his books. A story about a forgotten manuscript written by a long-dead author, sitting ignored for centuries until someone finally reads it. And then discovers that it holds knowledge of a hidden world. Now think about what happened to Lockwood. His book sat forgotten for 120 years until the internet found them and discovered that they seemed to hold knowledge of our world. He wrote the story of his own rediscovery.
In 1893, this man was already writing about hidden worlds that choose to bury what they know. Which brings us to how the story ends and the biggest tie to time travel begins. In 1912, by now he's an old man. Lockwood publishes his final book, and on its opening pages, he places two photographs side by side. Himself at 35 and himself at 70. Two versions of the same man from two different times, staring at each other across the page. And in the preface, he wrote that his end was near, and that he was, in his words, "only waiting for the signal to begin his voyage to another world." He died in 1918, and that is only where the author's story ends.
Because history has one more Trump family entry waiting, and it's the strangest one of them all. Fast forward to 1943. The New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, room 3327. A maid is sent to clean the room and arrives to knock on the door and announce housekeeping. Pauses, but gets no reply. Because there is a do not disturb sign on the door. Instead of entering, she knocks again and repeats, "Housekeeping here to clean." Dead silence on the other side of the door. So, she pauses, then decides to ignore the do not disturb sign and opens the door. She takes several steps inside to find an old man dead in his bed. His name is Nikola Tesla. The most mysterious inventor who ever lived.
And what was Tesla's great obsession? The dream he chased harder than any other? Free energy. He built a tower on Long Island designed to pour wireless electricity into every home on Earth. Until the money vanished and the tower came down. And if you watched my last video, you already know what tends to happen to the people who chase that dream of free energy. In his final years, Tesla claimed to have designed inventions decades ahead of anything on the planet, including a weapon so far beyond its time that governments took notice. And in the world of time travel, Tesla is a legend all his own. Because the story goes that back in 1895, after a massive electrical accident in his laboratory, Tesla told a reporter that he had nearly been killed that day. And the legend says he claimed something even more. That in that instant, caught inside that field, he could see the past, the present, and the future all at once.
Now, within days of Tesla's death, the United States government sweeps in and seizes dozens of trunks of his papers and belongings. And then, they need someone brilliant enough to judge what's inside. The man that they bring in is a respected MIT professor of electrical engineering. His report still exists in Tesla's declassified FBI file, which you can read today. And the professor's name? It was John G. Trump, Donald Trump's uncle. That professor's official conclusion, still sitting in that declassified file, was that Tesla's papers were primarily, in quote, "speculative and philosophical. Nothing of significant value." Think about that. The government seized everything the original free energy dreamer ever wrote, and later returned his belongings to a family member. I can't leave out the fact that 80 trunks were seized and 60 were returned. 20 were missing and considered lost. You decide what that one means.
Fiction put the name Trump next to the hidden worlds and a shocking presidency in the 1890s. And 50 years later, actual history put the same family name inside the sealed files of the most mysterious inventor who ever lived. And on the report that closed them. Nobody planned that. Nobody could have. And yet, there it sits in the public record, waiting for anyone who bothers to look.
So, what is this? Door number one, it's a coincidence. Names repeat. Patterns are cheap. The human brain tries to find faces in clouds. Or, door number two, somewhere in the pages of a forgotten lawyer from the 1890s is a suggestion that time does not work the way that we think it does. The same door the Titanic keeps pointing at, and poor shipwrecked Richard Parker, and a sailor who swore something else was holding the pen as he wrote. Time travel seems to be the only explanation.
So, here's your assignment. Every book I named tonight is real. It's public domain and free. The Library of Congress has them. You could be reading the Baron Trump books 5 minutes from now. And when you do, you'll find out something that I deliberately left out of this video. Why the last novel is called *The Last President*. I left it out because, well, it hasn't happened and I don't think it will. I'll let you discover that one for yourself.
Now, hit to the comments and tell me which door you walked through, because I genuinely want to know. I think this world is not what we think it is, and if you like exploring the unexplainable, be sure to come back. Hit the subscribe, and if you give this video a like, it will help about the channel. I will see you in the next one.