Guidesify Navigation Logo Transparent Final

The Escherian Stairwell Myth: Endless Staircase Well-Edited Video

The Escherian Stairwell Hoax Endless Staircase
Read time: 3 min.

Table of Contents

An old video was recently revived on Facebook. It went viral and garnered a total of 26.8 million views and 239 thousand shares as of 2 June 2017. Posted by Rebaz Hussein back on 16 Feb 2017, he captioned the video “crazy architecture !!!”. An image was also attached along with the post, supposedly explaining the Escherian Stairwell phenomenon. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t add up, and the very scientific looking photo was just a load of garbage.

Rebaz Hussein
Probably a stolen video. Facebook generates billions of views every day, and stolen content has been an increasingly difficult problem to deal with.

Follow us on Facebook!


What was it?

The video, dated back to 30 April 2013, features an endless staircase at Rochester Institute of Technology, where a male speaker and several other “students” test out the stairwell at building 7. Everyone appeared shocked and struck in awe by the strange phenomenon of the stairs and cameras “proved it” time after time at many different angles. Take a look at the video embedded below.


 The loophole that gave it all away.

If you are the kind of person who pays attention to detail, you would have noticed that something very odd at 03:47 minutes of the video. Pause the video, and you will see the boy in red missing his left arm. The arm then magically passes through the wall and appears again. Nevertheless, we can all agree that filmmaker Michael Lacanilao beautifully and carefully executed the hoax.

Loophole of The Escherian Stairwell

The only defect/loophole of this video was later corrected in the re-edited video.


“HELP US BUILD THE MYTH”

Michael Lacanilao admitted it in his unsuccessful Kickstarter Project where he sought a total funding of 12 000 USD to carry out the film production and other aspects to build the perfect myth. Though the final pledged amount was only 940 USD (You don’t get to keep the money the funding is unsuccessful), the video was a huge success despite abandoning many peripheral features of the project. 

The most powerful aspects of myths are their ability to incite wonder and excitement. We’re creating a myth that does these things while also challenging audiences to think.

The myth is that located in Rochester, NY, is the Escherian Stairwell, an architectural marvel that seems to violate the laws of physics and basic logic by looping back into itself. – Kickstarter Project Description

Read More: 4 Adult Sites Made it to Singapore’s Top 50 Most Visited Sites


The Reveal

Michael then released an FAQ video on 4 Sept 2013 and another on 30 April 2014 to address all the burning questions from everyone. He revealed that the goal of his video was to recreate realistic and believable film again, something that he claimed was no longer existent to him in modern movies and cinema. He also admitted that the people in the video were all actors and everyone gave in their all to achieve this result – “rehearsing like a plague”.

Some of you might be thinking now, where is Michael now as he hasn’t updated any of his public social accounts for the last two years. Rest assured he’s alive and is currently working on another film in Manila set to come out later this year. 

Where is Michael now

Michael did disclose to us that The Escherian Stairwell was built to be a myth. At the end of the day, Facebook “informative” videos can be deceiving at times, especially in this scenario where the video was stolen off YouTube. Since you are here, why not read our guide on 3 Type of Fake News We See Every day?

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

Explore GUIDESIFY