A set of 200-year-old ciphers may reveal the location of millions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver, and jewels buried in rural Virginia. For the past century, the quest to break these codes has attracted the military, computer scientists, and conspiracy theorists. All have failed. Which raises the question: Are the ciphers and the treasure even real?
The medium gazed into the crystal ball and looked deeply into the past. The year was 1898, and the room in which he sat was dimly lit. But inside the mysterious orb, the year was 1819, and the scene was about to become blindingly bright.
The medium claimed he could see into the upper bedroom of Paschal Buford’s tavern, an old watering hole below the Blue Ridge Mountains near modern Montvale, Virginia. The room was dark. Shades blanketed the windows and a wad of paper was plugged into the door’s keyhole. Inside, a lone frontiersman named Thomas J. Beale eyed a pair of saddlebags resting on the bed.
Gently, he opened them. Light burst through the room. The medium shielded his eyes and shrieked.
“Jewels, by gosh! Diamonds! Rubies! Pearls! Emeralds!!”
Inside the crystal ball, Beale stared at the gems, smiled, and gingerly tucked the saddlebags under a pillow. The light receded.
Back in 1898, Clayton Hart watched the medium with jittery anticipation. Clayton’s brother George, a skeptic, stood nearby in silence. The two were trying to gather potentially life-changing information: Seventy-nine years earlier, Thomas Beale had reportedly buried millions of dollars of riches in the foothills near Montvale. The readings were the Hart brothers’ last-ditch effort to divine its location.
The Peaks of Otter tower over the purported location of Beale’s treasure. / iStock
Lucky for them, the medium claimed to see the pioneer’s every move: Beale had arrived at Buford’s tavern on horseback with a rifle resting on his lap, a pair of pistols on each hip, and two jewel-filled bags slung from his saddle. Five covered wagons followed him, some hauling iron pots of gold and silver. After resting at Buford’s, Beale and his men buried that gold, silver, and jewels deep in the Virginia woods, approximately four miles from the tavern.
As the medium described its location, Clayton clung to every syllable.
Months later, under the cover of nightfall, Clayton and George steered a buggy full of shovels, ropes, and lanterns into Montvale. Joining them—reluctantly—was their trusty medium. Clayton hypnotized the mystic, who led the brothers up Goose Creek, over a fence, and across a burbling stream to a slumped depression in the earth.
The medium pointed to the dirt. “There’s the treasure!” he said. “Can’t you see it?”
Guided by lanterns and moonbeams, the Hart brothers dug. Hours passed. The hole deepened and the sky reddened. As daybreak loomed, tendrils of morning fog began to roll between the ridges. Clayton Hart thrust his pick into the red, iron-rich dirt and heard a hollow thud.
The brothers exchanged glances. Clayton dug frantically. When a large rock emerged, the brothers excitedly flipped it over. Nothing was below it.
The medium (who had refused to help all night, opting instead to lounge on a bed of dead leaves) was re-hypnotized and told to explain himself. He pointed to the roots of an oak tree just feet away and exclaimed: “There it is! You got over too far! Can’t you see it?”
The Hart brothers, exhausted and annoyed, left.
One week later, Clayton returned to that same spot with dynamite. The sky rained dirt, pebbles, and the splintered remains of that old oak tree—but no gold.
These events, described in a pamphlet written by George in 1964 [PDF], convinced the Hart brothers that mesmerism was not the path to fortune. If they wanted to discover Thomas J. Beale’s buried treasure, they’d have to search like everybody else: By solving a puzzle.