The Mystery of Earl and Brock Lee: The Brothers Who Built a Stairway to Heaven
In the dry heart of Utah, where the red rock cliffs rise like cathedrals and the wind hums through endless canyons, locals still whisper a strange name: the Lee Brothers’ Stairway. It’s a legend that mixes hard labor, ambition, faith and disappearance.
According to town records and fragments of oral tradition, two brothers Earl Lee and Brock Lee arrived in Jazz City, Utah, in the spring of 1915. They were miners by trade, sons of a stonemason from Tennessee, chasing work in the booming silver hills. No one could have guessed that within a year, they’d be gone leaving behind a half built stone stairway that seemed to climb straight into the sky.
⛏️ Beginnings in Jazz City
Back then, Jazz City wasn’t the musical oasis its name suggested. It was dust, tents, and the clatter of hammers. The brothers rented a cabin at the edge of town and joined a mining crew digging near Broken Mesa. Locals described them as “quiet but fierce workers” men who preferred stone to speech. Earl, the elder, kept notebooks filled with measurements and strange drawings. Brock was younger, stronger, more superstitious.
Old letters found decades later reveal hints of obsession. “The rock speaks to us,” Earl wrote in 1916. “We just need to follow its shape upward. It leads somewhere.”
🪨 The Stairway Project
Sometime that summer, the brothers stopped showing up at the mine. They purchased limestone blocks, chisels, and rope from local suppliers and began hauling materials into a nearby canyon known as Devil’s Backbend a place few dared to camp because of its eerie echo that repeated voices three times.
Weeks passed. Then someone spotted them stacking stones three steps high, then ten, then twenty. Each perfectly aligned, cut by hand. Witnesses said the stairway curved upward toward a sandstone arch that glowed silver under the moonlight.
“They said they were building something that would let them talk to heaven,” recalled miner Thomas Reid in a 1941 interview preserved in the Utah Folklore Archive.
⚡ Whispers of Strange Light
That autumn, ranchers riding through the canyon reported seeing lights blue orbs hovering over the archway. One prospector swore he heard low chanting carried on the wind. The local preacher dismissed it as “moonshine and madness,” but others whispered that the Lees had discovered something old—something buried beneath the rock.
Newspapers briefly mentioned “two missing laborers” in early 1917, but the war in Europe drowned the story. By spring, their cabin was empty. Only a torn note pinned to the wall remained: “Almost finished. The last step must be done together.”
🌄 The Discovery Decades Later
In 1954, hikers rediscovered the site. What they found defied logic: a staircase of 47 steps carved directly into the canyon wall, winding upward before ending abruptly in mid air. The top step was split cleanly down the middle, as though something heavy had once rested there and vanished.
Geologists confirmed the stone was quarried locally, but the precision baffled them. Every step was identical in size, and the cuts were smoother than hand tools of the 1910s should allow. There was no scaffolding nearby, no machinery marks, and strangest of all the stairway did not erode like the surrounding rock. Even after a century of storms, it remains almost untouched.
🕯️ Theories and Folklore
The legend has evolved through generations, each retelling stranger than the last:
- The Heaven’s Gate Theory: The brothers believed their staircase would “reach the divine frequency” when finished. On the night they completed it, lightning struck the canyon and they were never seen again.
- The Geological Anomaly Theory: Some scientists speculate the staircase aligns with a rare magnetic field pattern causing illusions and light anomalies, which could explain the mysterious glow reported by witnesses.
- The Disappearance Myth: Locals insist that at dawn on June 21 (when the solstice sun hits the arch), two faint silhouettes appear climbing the steps before fading into light.
📜 Modern Investigations
In the 1990s, a local historian named Marla Hensley organized an expedition with university archaeologists. Using laser-mapping, they confirmed that the stairway’s alignment points directly at the rising summer sun precisely 42 degrees east northeast. Hensley proposed that the Lees might have stumbled upon an ancient Native American ceremonial site and “continued the work” unknowingly.
Yet, even Hensley admitted one thing she couldn’t explain: the rock’s electromagnetic readings spiked wildly at the stairway’s midpoint, almost like a pulse. “It feels alive,” she wrote in her notes.
👣 Local Lore Today
Every October, Jazz City hosts the Stairway Festival. Hikers, artists, and believers gather at Devil’s Backbend, lighting lanterns along the path leading up to the first steps. They tell stories of the Lee brothers some claiming to hear hammering sounds in the canyon at midnight.
Tourists report phones glitching, compasses spinning, and radios picking up static whispers that form fragments of words. “Almost finished…” appears often enough that guides mention it jokingly on tours though few laugh when they hear it themselves.
⚖️ Skeptics vs. Believers
Skeptics argue the Lee story is a misremembered blend of mining lore and ghost stories, exaggerated by decades of retelling. To them, the staircase is simply an unfinished rock project eroded into strange shapes. But believers say otherwise that two ordinary men touched something extraordinary, something between faith and physics.
And perhaps that’s what makes the legend endure: it balances perfectly on the edge of the believable. The brothers were real, their work visible but their fate unknown.
🌠 The Disappearance
The most poetic version of the tale says the brothers completed the final step together at dawn on June 21, 1917. Thunder rolled through the canyon. Witnesses from the nearby ridge saw a bright column of light rise where the stairway stood like sunlight refracted through crystal. When the glow faded, the brothers were gone. Only the stone remained—silent, perfect, reaching nowhere.
A prospector found their tools stacked neatly at the base, as if waiting for them to return. Their cabin, when opened, held one final entry in Earl’s journal: “The way is open. We build not to reach heaven, but to remember how to look up.”
🔮 Legacy of the Lee Brothers
Over a century later, no one has solved the mystery. The Lee stairway stands as both monument and metaphor a reminder that human curiosity can border on madness, and that creation itself is a kind of prayer.
Today, drone footage shows moss creeping along the lower steps, but the upper levels gleam pale in moonlight. Some claim that if you climb to the 47th step at sunrise, you’ll hear a faint echo of chisels two brothers still working, finishing a project meant not for earth, but for eternity.
“They built something for God—or for themselves and maybe that’s the same thing,” said one local guide.
💬 Final Thoughts
Whether true or imagined, the legend of Earl and Brock Lee captures a timeless truth: the desire to reach higher, to touch the unknown. Their “stairway to heaven” may never have led anywhere physical but it continues to lift imaginations skyward.
As you stand beneath the red arches of Devil’s Backbend, it’s easy to believe the impossible. Maybe, somewhere beyond those 47 steps, two brothers finally found what they were building toward a way home.