What's the Mystery Behind these Creepy Tiles?

Have you ever been wandering around somewhere new or even somewhere you’ve walked through a million times and suddenly noticed something a bit out of the ordinary? A cartoonish sticker on a road sign, a flash of spray paint on a wall or, as residents of the USA but mostly Philadelphia have been finding out over the past few decades, lettered tiles adhered to the roads with a cryptic message touting outer space and the promise of eternal life? Is it street art or conspiracy theory? What do these messages mean?

How have so many been laid without any witnesses? How are they stuck to the street? Who is behind them? This is a rare investigation where we will answer all these questions.

What is a Toynbee Tile?

Let’s start with a description of what we’re talking about. What are known as the Toynbee Idea Tiles, the Toynbee Plaques or just the Toynbee Tiles are rectangular pieces of one or more layers of different colour linoleum with lettering cut out to form a similar message each time. Hundreds of these tiles have been found embedded in asphalt all across the Eastern United States from Boston, Massachusetts to Kansas City, Missouri.

Tiles have been seen in pedestrian crosswalks, outside the Empire State Building, in the middle of busy highways, and in Times Square. One was even seen at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, a tunnel under the Hudson river connecting New Jersey’s Jersey City to New York’s Lower Manhattan. They have also been documented in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, always trying to spread the same message, but sometimes the wording is in Spanish.

While the sizes vary, they are usually quite small, around 30 by 15 cm or 12 by 6 inches.

So what is the message on these tiles? While it may vary slightly across different tiles, the base message is usually the same and is as follows:

Toynbee Idea In Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter

Sometimes the word “Kubrick” is replaced with the word “movie” but the main message is basically the same on each tile.

Most tiles also have smaller additional text either squashed into the main body of the tile itself or added on just below which add an even stranger flavour to the whole thing. These extra messages include things such as:

Please make and glue tiles as the American media is working with the Soviet Union and its thousands of fronts in USA

and

Under Freedom of Information Act, NBC journalists funneled FBI information on me to Soviets

also:

And if this idea survives after all, make those hellions pay for what they’ve done. I’m begging you.

And

Make and glue tile!! You! Only by destruction of media can this movement survive.

and, creepily,

Murder every journalist! I beg you

What can we make of these seemingly insane or at least paranoid ramblings? While seeing a tile or two in a lifetime might not make many people that interested in the whole thing, seeing or hearing reports of hundreds spread across a wide area over many years will make some people desperate to get to the bottom of the mystery. Justin Duerr is one such person. After noticing his first tile actually embedded into a crosswalk he was using in South Street, Philadelphia in 1994, he went on a very long and ultimately successful mission to find out all he could about the Toynbee Tiler. This was all recorded for a documentary called “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” which was filmed in 2006 and took a further 5 years for the director, Jon Foy, to release it. It was basically a labour of love for all concerned and it ended up winning the Directing Award for documentaries at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival as well as being nominated for the Grand Jury prize for documentaries. Most of the information you can find about the Toynbee Tiles has come from the documentary, or references it, and the film is as much about Justin Duerr as it is about the Toynbee Tiler so who better to lead us through this strange story?

Resurrect Dead

As previously mentioned, Justin noticed his first tile in 1994 and couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was around 18 at the time and had embraced Philadelphia’s underground punk scene and was living in a squat with many other people. After getting a job as a courier, he spotted more and more tiles all over the city and became somewhat obsessed in finding out what all the words on them meant. Who or what was Toynbee? What did that have to do with the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”? Did the tiler actually mean that dead people could be resurrected on the planet Jupiter?

Eventually his local library got internet access and Justin was so excited to be able to go and check into all this stuff that he took a day off work to investigate. “Toynbee Idea” was the first thing he ever typed into a search engine. Unfortunately for Justin, the strange combination of words he had ingrained in his brain brought back zero results which he thought was “kind of creepy”.

It’s not really that strange though, given that he was a super early adopter of investigating these tiles online and didn’t have the luxury of almost everything in the world being available to search back then. A few months later he tried again and boom, other people had also been taking note and websites had started popping up about the mysterious tiles. Through his online research and talking with other people, Justin managed to find out the following:

• The “Toynbee” referenced was more than likely historian and philosopher Arnold J. Toynbee.
• “Movie 2001” or “Kubrick’s 2001” was clearly referring to “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick and released in 1968.
• “Resurrect dead on planet Jupiter” was a literal theory that dead people could be brought back to life on Jupiter.

So yeah, it doesn’t really make much sense when put together. Let’s explore the Toynbee part a little further. As well as many other publications, Arnold Joseph Toynbee published the seminal 12 volume “A Study of History” between 1934 and 1961. According to historian Michael Lang, during the 20th century: “Toynbee was perhaps the world’s most read, translated, and discussed living scholar. His output was enormous, hundreds of books, pamphlets, and articles.”

Due to the popularity of his work and more accessible abridgements being regularly found in even non-academic households, it’s clear that his books and ideas were easily accessible to the average person. The “Toynbee Idea” that crops up on every tile seems to be in reference to the 1969 book “Experiences” where Toynbee posits that if you believe a soul can exist without a body, then it might be scientifically possible to resurrect it in some way. There are only a few sentences about this, though, and the idea doesn’t seem to be a big part of the book at all.

The tiler linked this to the movie “2001” because this contains an expedition to Jupiter and has scenes that seem to hint at rebirth being possible in outer space. If this seems a tad tenuous, there is another link, maybe by way of “2001“‘s co-screenplay writer, Arthur C. Clarke. He had previously written a short story called “Jupiter 5” in which an advanced alien race leaves messages for humans on a satellite of the planet Jupiter.

These aliens correctly believe humans will eventually achieve long distance space travel. This bears some similarities with Kubrick’s “2001” and guess what the spacecraft is called in the Jupiter 5 story? Arnold Toynbee. You can see how some people’s minds might start making connections here.

At first glance these Toynbee tiles might just seem like a random assortment of words but the message the tiler appears to be trying to get across is that they believe Toynbee’s idea of souls, and therefore dead people, being resurrected is possible if we look to movies like “2001: A Space Odyssey” for ideas in which directions to go in our scientific advancement in order to make this a reality.

After not being able to make much headway with the main message, Justin started becoming more interested in what he calls the “sidebar texts” which were the extra little notes under or sometimes beside the main message. These were the ones saying things such as: “And if this idea survives after all, make those hellions pay for what they’ve done. I’m begging you.” These are clearly more personal and either hint at much larger organisations trying to shut this person down and stop them spreading this message, or they are the product of a paranoid mind.

Or they are just a hoax.

A much larger installation of 4 white tiles put together with the same familiar font also appeared on the streets of Philadelphia in 1997. Dubbed the “Manifesto Tile”, it namechecks newspaper owner John Knight and accuses him of sending the Mafia to kill our unknown tiler in 1991. There were various generations of people called “John Knight” who owned the Philadelphia Inquirer at some stage but none of them appeared to have been alive in 1991.

The tiler also called him a “hellion Jew” but none of the Knights were Jewish. There are a couple of other references to Jews on the tile which don’t do the tiler any favours and cast him in an even more paranoid light. He says that he had to secure his home with “blast doors” and ran away to Dover in England but was basically dragged back and now all these media companies are spying on him and trying to intimidate him.

The message ends on a total cliffhanger:

WHEN K.Y.W. AND N.B.C. EXECUTIVES TOLD JOHN KNIGHT THE WHOLE COVEN GLOATED ON HOW THEIR SOVIET PALS HAD FOUND A WAY TO TURN IT INTO A…..

And that’s it, there’s no more tile and no more message. This Manifesto Tile was paved over a few years later.

Let’s check back in on our Toynbee Tile fan, Justin. One day he was walking home around 4am and saw a black rectangular piece of what he called “tar paper” lying on the road. As it was a quiet time of day, nothing had driven over it yet so it was still shiny and fresh.

He peeled a corner up and lo and behold, the familiar text was revealed underneath. He had stumbled upon the creation of a Toynbee tile and he had missed the tiler by minutes. This answers part of the question that a lot of people had about these tiles—how are they embedded into the asphalt and how come no-one has ever seen one being laid?

It seems that the tiler placed them down with this tar paper on the top. Pressure from passing cars would flatten the layers down and eventually wear away the top surface, revealing the coloured tile underneath which was now firmly stuck down to the road. Pretty smart.

Why nobody has ever seen anyone putting these things down though, remained a mystery.

As the years go by, the Toynbee tiles become perfect fodder for burgeoning forums and message boards around the internet. Interest really picks up between 2000 and 2005 with people questioning if it’s part of a conspiracy theory or if secret societies are involved. People also report having seen Toynbee tiles as far back as the 1980s, but decades after the first tiles were noticed, nobody had got any closer to solving the mystery of who was placing them and exactly how it was done.

After posting many times on forums and discussion groups, Justin ends up teaming up with fellow tile enthusiasts, photographer Steve Weinik and a Toynbee tiles website board moderator called Colin Smith. Together, they really wanted to crack the secret of who was behind the maddening tiles. As Justin says later in the film: “We’re not dealing with the supernatural. The tiles are being cut out by some kind of blade.

A hand is holding the blade. It’s totally real, it’s physical, it’s tangible. It’s not a shadow, it’s not a phantom, it’s not a ghost. Somewhere there’s a human being who’s behind all of this.”

As he also says, slightly more succinctly: “Agh, it’s a person. It’s someone, somewhere!”

Thanks to the reach of the online forums and all the chatter about the tiles, the group had several clues to go on, however, they seemed a pretty random bunch of things, namely: a mailing address in South Philadelphia, a 1983 article from the Philadelphia Inquirer and a one-act play by David Mamet called “4am”.

Following the Clues

As previously mentioned, loads of tiles were also found across South America and on at least one, found in Santiago, Chile, was an address on South 7th Street in Philadelphia. An actual house number might have been given but this and the zip code are blurred out by the filmmaker.

Thinking it unlikely that the actual Toynbee Tiler still or ever lived at that address, the team set to work making flyers asking if anyone recognized the work and if so, they could help them solve a mystery that has been going on for over 20 years. They post them all over the area and try to deliver them to all the townhomes on the block. One local resident says that the person currently living at the address given on the Santiago tile is a recluse known as “Sevy the Birdman” as he looks after injured birds and drives a car with rims but no tires. His full name is Severino Verna and obviously he jumps straight to the top of the suspect list, which is expected as there’s nobody else on the list at the moment.

The local man also knew that the previous tenant of that same house was called “Railroad Joe”. The team finds out this man’s real name was Julius Piroli and he becomes suspect number 2. Knocking on the actual door of the address in question produces no response so the team can’t really investigate much further. They do find what Steve calls “test tiles or proto tiles” all around the neighborhood, though, with little scraps, familiar lettering and whole words, sometimes in Spanish, that are obviously related to the lettering on Toynbee tiles so they are definitely in the right area.

Moving on to the next clue, the newspaper article. Someone online gave the team a lead on an article from the Philadelphia Inquirer from March 13th 1983. It was by Clark DeLeon and was titled: “Theories: Wanna run that one by me again?”

It starts by saying “call me skeptical but I had a hard time buying James Morasco’s concept that the Planet Jupiter would be colonized by bringing all the people on Earth who had ever died back to life. Morasco says he is a social worker in Philadelphia and came across this idea while reading a book by historian Arnold Toynbee, whose theories on bringing dead molecules back to life was depicted in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

It also went on to say that Morasco had been sending his theory to press and media outlets and had founded something called “The Minority Association” to try and get his message across. Apparently, according to his conversation with DeLeon, this association consisted of: “Me, Eric, Eric’s sister who does the typing, Frank…” Clark DeLeon was not a believer. Anyway, we have documented proof from 1983 of all the ideas on the Toynbee Tiles in one place. James Morasco, consider yourself added to the list.

Now what about this play? In the early 1980s, at around the same time the Toynbee idea was starting to try and make its mark, David Mamet published a one act play titled “4 AM” which was about a radio host taking a call from someone who believed dead people could be resurrected on Jupiter, thanks to ideas taken from Arnold Toynbee and the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Sound familiar? Mamet has gone on the record saying he made this conversation up, however, the Toynbee tiler was known to have made multiple calls to radio stations, including the Larry King show, to try and spread word of his idea. As the tiler used the same language and phrases in many of his communications, we can further insinuate that Mamet did hear this call because he mentions molecules in his play which we know, thanks to Clark DeLeon’s article, the tiler also did. There is no mention of the word “molecule” in the whole of Toynbee’s “Experiences” book and people don’t usually refer to themselves as being made of “molecules”. An early leaflet from the tiler states:

Public Notice: Toynbee’s idea in movie ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ - to bring every dead molecule of every human body in history to life on Planet Jupiter”.

Mamet’s play has the caller referring to humans being made out of molecules twice in a very short work.

Mamet calls his play “a homage to Larry King” as it’s a conversation between a radio host and a caller so he’s not denying he listened to the show. He must have heard the tiler call in at some point, forgotten about it and then used it later for his play. Or he’s written the conversation basically verbatim and is just lying about where he got his ideas and now it’s too late to backtrack. Either way, this does not seem like a coincidence.

These clues have given our tile sleuths some more information on the timeline of the Toynbee tiles, and, more importantly, three people to start investigating.

The Suspects

Severino “Sevy” Verna

Consensus around the south Philly neighborhood is that Sevy is very quiet, very intelligent but all he cares about is his birds. He’s also described as reclusive and timid so not likely to be driving all over the country putting weird tiles down in busy areas. After knocking on his door again yields no results, the team try calling him but his phone’s been disconnected so they end up ringing his mum! According to Mrs.

Verna, her son has never been to South America and can’t travel anyway because of a lung condition. He’s also not interested in history at all so she doesn’t see how he can be connected to this whole situation. She also says that the team aren’t even the first people who have tried to contact Sevy about this but that he apparently had no idea what the previous person was on about either and didn’t wish to engage with strangers anyway. This seems to be a dead end.

Railroad Joe or Julius Piroli

Team member Steve was pretty convinced that Railroad Joe was their man. They found out that Piroli had worked for Conrail and when looking at a map of the Conrail railroad network, it matched the tile distribution area to a T, going out as far as, but never past, the limit of the Conrail area in any direction. This was limited to the United States, however and didn’t extend down into South America.

But wait, an observatory in Chile was building a big new telescope, the world’s largest at the time, and big pieces of this telescope were travelling through Piroli’s train yard. He’s even mentioned in a piece about it, where it says: “Julius Piroli, track foreman, had both ends of the track spiked so no other cars could run on it. The switch at the head of the track was blocked with a wooden wedge.”

Maybe he sent a load of tiles down on those trains for someone else to place. There’s also a connection to Jupiter here, what with this being a ginormous telescope and all.

And there’s more. Steve tried doing some research on the Piroli name and found “The Piroli Brothers Monuments”. This was a family that had a history of carving tombstones, not a great leap to then creating cut-out letters in the linoleum tiles. On the surface, Railroad Joe seems like a great suspect—he lived at the address on the Santiago tile, he had the opportunity and time to place the tiles all over the area covered by the Conrail network, he might have been working strange hours in a somewhat lonely profession meaning that no one would have seen him doing it.

There is one problem, though. Julius Piroli died in 1987, before the majority of the tiles were created. Unless he resurrected himself as an adult on Jupiter, of course.

James Morasco

The team contacted Clark DeLeon, the columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer who had spoken to James Morasco on the phone and written the short piece about him. Morasco had said he was a social worker and DeLeon remembered him as being intelligent but not confident, and quietly spoken with a working class accent.

The team scoured the Philadelphia telephone directories of the early 80s to find any reference to a James Morasco and they did find one, but he lived in Chestnut Hill which was an upper-class area of the city, not the more southern area they thought he might have been based. Other people had also followed this lead in the past, leading to Chestnut Hill Morasco’s wife publicly denying his involvement in the Toynbee tile mystery. Morasco literally couldn’t speak for himself as he’d had his voice box removed for some reason.

Also, he was a very old man by this point and would have to have been laying these tiles while in his 70s and even into his 80s which seemed to rule him out. After exhausting all other avenues of enquiry, the team came to the conclusion that the James Morasco who called Clark DeLeon in 1983 didn’t appear to exist.

The Search Continues

In 2006, Bill O’Neill, who had hosted the website Toynbee.net just grew tired of the whole thing and gave all his information over to the team to go through. This included thousands of emails with people’s own theories, ranging from wild bible conspiracies, to links with Pink Floyd to that the tiler is just an art dealer trying to get some street cred. They also found out that they are far from the only people to have investigated this, or even made a documentary about it. Some people had reported seeing the tiles in the 1980s and had been looking for more information ever since.

They did manage to eke out a few more clues from the backlog of information on the website, however. There was one man who recalled watching late night tv sometime in 1985 when a pirate tv signal crashed the news he was watching. This ghostly broadcast quickly gave out the now-familiar Toynbee Idea, 2001 Jupiter message before disappearing again. This kind of thing was very rare in the 80s so the man had always remembered it happening.

He had even phoned the tv station to see if they could give him any more information about it but they couldn’t and said other people had also called in about it.

Another piece of the puzzle was an email from someone who remembered seeing the Toynbee message pasted up around Philadelphia on flyers. He also mentioned the tv hack but referred to it as “short wave”, leading the team to realise that the tiler or someone involved with the tiler had knowledge of shortwave radios. The team went to a local 2006 Shortwave Listening convention to see if anyone could help them find out more.

No-one seems to have a clue what they’re talking about when Justin mentions Toynbee, Jupiter and resurrecting dead people and he even raises it as a question after a lecture to be met with dead silence but eventually they do strike it lucky. First, Justin has an interview with a shortwave broadcaster, spreading his plea to the wider community and asking anyone who knows anything about the Toynbee message or who might have sent it to get in touch.

Secondly, they meet a man who has a direct link to the story. The strange wording of the message made him remember that back in the early 80s he had met someone who had asked him for help setting up a PO box, which was something he did back then. The man had never received any mail but did send out a lot. He didn’t have much interaction with this man but did say that the name “Minority Association” rang a definite bell.

He couldn’t think of much more information but said if the team wanted to throw some names at him, he might be able to see if he remembered any of them. They start off with “Sevy” and then try “Severino” to which the man instantly replies: “Verna?”

With the confirmation that Verna had set up a PO Box for the Minority Association and had contacted media companies and the press with the PO Box as the return address, the team are happy that this is proof enough that their original number one suspect, Severino Verna is indeed, the Toynbee Tiler.

The Investigation Wraps Up

Taking a trip back to Verna’s neighbourhood, they find out more and more evidence that the reclusive man is indeed the mystery tiler. Some neighbours report that he boarded up all his windows and only goes out to get groceries at 2 or 3 in the morning. Another neighbour says how his car has the passenger seat taken out and was also missing the floorboard on that side.

This is a massive break in the case and confirms how the tiles have been laid this whole time. Verna drives around with his tile or tiles and just drops them through the hole in his car’s floor directly onto the street. No-one would see it being done and he could do it in an instant.

This also explains how tiles have popped up in extremely busy places such as outside the Empire State Building and at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. He just drives past and plops out a tile. Following traffic does the rest, helping to embed the message into the asphalt and nobody is any the wiser.

And yet another huge confirming piece of evidence comes to light when another neighbour remembers that Verna used to drive around with a huge antenna on the top of his car. When he drove past the building, everyone’s tv shows would be interrupted with a brief pirate signal banging on about resurrecting people. If these neighbours had only remembered these two hugely important things a bit earlier, they would have saved our team a lot of time!

Even more backstory is revealed that links Verna with the known Toynbee timeline. He apparently used to play the accordion at 3am which eventually led to some people breaking into his house and threatening him with a knife. This tied into the time period of messages talking about the Mafia coming to kill him and also links in to the mention of “blast doors” on the Manifesto tile as Verna reinforced his front door with all kinds of barriers after the break-in.

The team try knocking on the door again and while it’s clear that he is actually inside, he doesn’t come to the door. They then feel bad about how scared he must be feeling and don’t want to hound him. It’s clear that he doesn’t want any attention on himself so they leave with the knowledge that while they have worked out the mystery, they’ll probably never get to talk with the Toynbee Tiler.

A few other interesting tidbits also popped up. Remember that shortwave interview Justin gave after the convention? Someone called Ulis Fleming heard it and emailed in. He remembered that back in the 80s, he had heard the pirate Toynbee broadcast while on a long trip in the car and had written to the PO Box address to ask for more information about this Jupiter idea. Fleming’s email also states that he has a handwritten letter from James Morasco as well as a packet of documents from the Minority Association.

So why is this Morasco guy still in the picture? Haven’t we already figured out that Severino Verna is the Toynbee Tiler? Is he an associate of Verna’s?

Morasco was listed in the documents as the publicity director for the Minority Association and appeared to be the one writing all the documents. According to the documentary, Colin says: “The name Julius Piroli never came up. The author of the documents refers to himself repeatedly as James Morasco, except for one time when he refers to himself as Severino Verna.”

They are using the same PO Box, they have the same phone number and Morasco has the same handwriting as Verna. The description Clark DeLeon gave of his phone call with James Morasco matches exactly with how Sevy Verna’s neighbours describe him. The team posit that as Sevy is very quiet and timid, he invented this other personality to get a bit of distance from himself and help get his message out.

Here’s Justin’s theorised timeline of the whole saga:

In around 1979 Sevy reads Arnold J. Toynbee’s work which sparks a memory of the movie “2001” which came out several years before. In Arnold Toynbee’s autobiography “Experiences”, he writes:

However, the dust of which a human body is composed, quantitatively trivial though it is, is an integral part of the inconceivably vast physical universe; and, when, after death, the body dissolves into its physical elements, these elements themselves are not annihilated. Death has destroyed the organism, that, for a brief time, had succeeded in maintaining itself as a puny counter-universe; but the physical materials of which the dissolved human body was composed at the moment of death have not been destroyed through ceasing to be incorporated temporarily in an organic physical structure. They are continuing to exist as parts of the physical universe, though this no longer in an organic form.

Verna took this idea and tied it in with “2001” and its crew’s mission to Jupiter and the potential rebirth or afterlife in space that it shows. The team theorises that Verna believes that we have the key to heaven and resurrection but we need to harness and improve our scientific know-how to get there. He thought he had found a way to overcome death and got fixated on this idea.

He calls Larry King Live in February 1980 to try and spread his theory and his call is heard by one David Mamet who apparently subconsciously files it away for future reference. In 1983 Verna tries contacting other media outlets and press offices. Clark DeLeon speaks to him on the phone as James Morasco and writes his small article on it but nothing much else happens. Verna also starts plastering his leaflets around the city and starts using shortwave radio broadcasts from his car. He’s nothing if not persistent.

Sometime between 1983 and 1987 the first tiles start appearing on the streets. Verna then drove his car all over the US and also visited South America, probably laying hundreds of his tiles in the process. His mother was presumably just lying to protect him or had no idea what he’d been up to. Verna is Morasco, Morasco is Verna and the whole Conrail area connection of Julius “Railroad Joe” Piroli just appears to have been a total coincidence.

Verna continued to place his tiles up to and past the time of the documentary which was filmed in 2006. Justin writes a letter to Verna but never gets a reply. A few months later, he believes he randomly saw Verna on a bus but just didn’t think approaching him was the right thing to do. He had his own epiphany about his place in the Toynbee Tile story and decided that he should leave the tiler in peace and he would also go his own way, in peace, having solved it.

According to a postscript in the documentary “Resurrect Dead”, a couple of years later, in 2008, people reported a resurgence in Toynbee shortwave broadcasts and even more tiles started popping up, with more of a variety of design, leading our crew to suspect that more people than just Verna are making these now.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we know who is making them, the original ones at least, we know how he’s placing them and we sort of know why he’s doing it. It’s probably quite frustrating for Verna to be trying to impart this important information and everyone’s just taken it as some form of guerrilla art project or mystery to be solved when everything he was saying was in complete earnest. It would be cool to spot some of these tiles in the wild and it’s easy to find maps and locations of existing or surviving tiles online should you be in the vicinity or fancy a bit of a road trip.

As for believing in Verna’s theory though? I’m sorry, Sev, I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Toynbee Tiles?

Toynbee Tiles are rectangular pieces of linoleum with lettering cut out to form a message. They are embedded in asphalt across the Eastern United States and have also been documented in South America. The tiles typically measure around 30 by 15 cm and carry a cryptic message related to outer space and eternal life.

What is the main message on the Toynbee Tiles?

The main message on the Toynbee Tiles is: ‘Toynbee Idea In Kubrick’s 2001 Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter.’ Sometimes ‘Kubrick’ is replaced with ‘movie,’ but the core message remains the same.

Who is Arnold J. Toynbee and how is he connected to the Toynbee Tiles?

Arnold J. Toynbee was a historian and philosopher known for his work ‘A Study of History.’ The Toynbee Tiles reference his idea from the book ‘Experiences,’ where he suggests that if souls can exist without bodies, it might be possible to resurrect them scientifically.

What is the significance of the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in the Toynbee Tiles?

The movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is referenced because it contains an expedition to Jupiter and scenes hinting at rebirth in outer space. The tiler linked this to Toynbee’s ideas about resurrection, suggesting that scientific advancement could make this a reality.

How are the Toynbee Tiles embedded in the asphalt?

The Toynbee Tiles are embedded in the asphalt using a method where the tiler places them down with a layer of tar paper on top. Pressure from passing cars flattens the layers and wears away the top surface, revealing the colored tile underneath, which is now firmly stuck to the road.

Who is Severino Verna and how is he connected to the Toynbee Tiles?

Severino Verna, also known as ‘Sevy the Birdman,’ is identified as the Toynbee Tiler. He is a reclusive individual who lived in South Philadelphia. Evidence suggests he used his car to place the tiles, dropping them through a hole in the floorboard.

What is the Minority Association and how is it related to the Toynbee Tiles?

The Minority Association is an organization founded by Severino Verna (using the alias James Morasco) to spread his ideas about resurrection on Jupiter. Verna used this association to contact media outlets and send out documents promoting his theory.

How did Justin Duerr become involved in the mystery of the Toynbee Tiles?

Justin Duerr noticed his first Toynbee Tile in 1994 and became obsessed with solving the mystery. He conducted extensive research, both online and offline, and eventually teamed up with others to document his findings in the film ‘Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.‘

What is the significance of the Manifesto Tile?

The Manifesto Tile is a larger installation that appeared in Philadelphia in 1997. It contains additional text accusing newspaper owner John Knight of sending the Mafia to kill the tiler and mentions the tiler’s paranoia about media companies spying on him. It was paved over a few years later.

How did the Tile Team confirm Severino Verna as the Toynbee Tiler?

The Tile Team confirmed Severino Verna as the Toynbee Tiler through various pieces of evidence, including his use of a PO Box for the Minority Association, his car with a hole in the floorboard, and his shortwave radio broadcasts. They also found that Verna and James Morasco were the same person.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: What’s the Mystery Behind these Creepy Tiles?
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.