I am a retired architectural drafter. I spent thirty years measuring buildings for a living. I know what a right angle looks like and I know what it looks like when something that should be a right angle isn't. I joined this webring because I have been documenting structures in Bloomington and the surrounding area for four years and several of the measurements I've taken cannot be accounted for by settling, construction error, or seismic activity.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying the buildings are supernatural. I am saying the measurements are wrong in a consistent way, and I would like to understand why.
I watch This Old House on Sunday afternoons. The measurements are always clean, always right. The carpenters check twice and the numbers hold. I find this very restful.
A residential structure, 1920s construction, near downtown Bloomington. The northwest corner of the main floor measures 89.4 degrees on the interior - close to square, but I have measured it twelve times with three separate instruments and it is consistently 89.4, not 90.0. This is within tolerance for construction error.
The exterior measurement of the same corner is 91.2 degrees.
A corner cannot be 89.4 degrees on one side and 91.2 degrees on the other. The angles must sum to 180 degrees for a flat wall. They sum to 180.6. The wall is not curved. I have verified this. The wall is flat.
A commercial building, 1950s. Standard straight staircase, 14 risers. When you measure the vertical rise of each riser and sum them, you get 112 inches - consistent with the floor height of 9 feet 4 inches. When you measure the total floor-to-floor height directly, you get 9 feet 5 inches. The discrepancy is one inch.
This discrepancy is present on the main staircase. It is not present on the fire escape staircase in the same building. Both staircases connect the same two floors.
An agricultural outbuilding, approximately 1890s, rural route east of Bloomington. I drove out to measure it for the first time on a warm afternoon in October 1996. I remember the drive clearly - I had the car radio on, an oldies station out of Bloomington, and a song was playing as I turned onto the rural route that I have not been able to identify since. Something slow. A woman's voice. I thought at the time that I knew the song and would remember it later. I never did. Rectangular structure, exterior dimensions: 24 feet by 16 feet. Interior dimensions: 24.3 feet by 15.7 feet. The walls appear to have standard thickness. When I measured the walls directly, they average 5 inches. Standard for the period and construction type.
Interior + two walls should equal exterior. 24.3 + (2 × 0.417 ft) = 25.13 feet. Exterior is 24.0 feet. The interior is larger than the exterior by 1.13 feet after accounting for walls.
I spent two hours in that granary. I took 47 measurements. The discrepancy is real. When I stood in the center of the building I had a strong sense that the building was not the same size on the outside as on the inside - not as a mathematical observation, but as a felt experience. Like the building was holding more space than it was allowed to hold.
This is a harder case to document because it involves observation rather than physical measurement. I include it because I believe in being complete.
In three separate structures that I have documented for interior/exterior discrepancies, I have noticed that shadows in certain corners behave contrary to expectation. Specifically: the shadow angle does not match the angle of the light source. This is only visible in natural light, and only in the anomalous corners.
A shadow is not an object. A shadow cannot be wrong. The shadow is doing what shadows do - casting from an occluding surface at an angle relative to the light. What I am saying is that the angle it casts at does not match the angle it should cast at given the geometry of the room. The room disagrees with itself.
I have not been documenting new cases since summer. I have been re-measuring the existing ones. The measurements are changing. Slowly, incrementally - nothing dramatic. But case BL-03's anomalous angle has increased by 0.1 degree since I first measured it. Case BL-12's interior-exterior discrepancy has increased by approximately 0.04 feet.
The buildings are not settling. I know what settling looks like. This is not random drift. The discrepancies are all moving in the same direction - the interior is always growing relative to the exterior, or the angle is always increasing in the same rotational direction. It is consistent. Something is consistently, slowly, making more space inside these buildings than should fit.
I have not told anyone locally. Who would I tell.
One more thing for the record: the car radio has been switching itself to a station I don't recognize, four times now since September. Always while I'm driving back from a site visit. I notice the music has changed - something unfamiliar - and by the time I look down the dial is on a frequency that doesn't correspond to anything I can find in the listings. I change it back. I am noting this because I believe in being complete, even about the things that seem like they might be nothing.