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Our discovery made in this building
at 3436 Lebanon Pike of an old attraction from the 1897 Tennessee
Centennial Exposition was odd enough, but now the real strangeness
begins. This almost completely unknown artifact from the late
19th century had been stored here sometime in the 1990’s
and its owner had passed away before completing his work of
rebuilding it. We’ve pried the doors open for you to
glimpse a bygone era.
Henry J. Worth II, referred to as “The Caretaker,”
was the son of an apprentice of the great Nikola Tesla. This
wealthy, faceless character had made it his hobby to amass
items professed to be endowed with or inhibit supernatural
energies in the hopes of unlocking their powers. Attempting
to decode their secrets one by one, Mr. Worth’s calculated
journeys into the inexplicable ended each time with only mild
success, yielding nothing more than what one may consider
to be curious parlor
tricks, but true metaphysical powers escaped his ability.
Becoming chief among Worth’s collection was the House
of Distortion, a forgotten amusement designed by his father
for the Tennessee Centennial Exhibition of 1897 that housed
wondrous devices of Tesla’s design. Obscure to history,
the attraction was described in one of Henry Worth Sr.'s old
journals as a direct countermeasure to Thomas Edison’s
smear campaigns against AC
power and a method of gaining public approval and investors
for Tesla’s new invention: Radio. Intended as an invigorating
spectacle, House of Distortion crossed Radio-Controlled electric
ride vehicles with panoramic scenes and automatons, a precursor
to the modern “dark ride” which audiences wouldn’t
come to know regularly until the 1930s.
Quite capable, but lacking the prowess of his mentor, the
elder Worth had supervised the exhibit in Tesla’s absence,
doing whatever he could to bring potential financiers to the
show, including unauthorized experimentation. An unlucky mix
of Worth Sr’s improvisation with external acts of a saboteur
unleashed lethal supernatural powers on the final day of the
Exposition, October 31, 1897.
Under telegraphed orders from a furious Tesla to destroy the
various exhibit devices, the surviving Worth Sr. instead disassembled
and buried them underground and stored the House of Distortion
structure in a local warehouse, in hopes to one day recover
it. Passed down from his father, Henry Worth II started the
task decades later of refurbishing the old exhibit and piecing
together the lost Tesla inventions in an attempt to wield
this awesome power, which is rumored to include a link to
another dimension. |
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