The Cahuenga Pass Treasure
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The 1864 Burial, the Curse List, and the Hollywood Bowl Dig The Cahuenga Pass treasure is a Los Angeles folktale anchored to a real geopolitical moment and a thin documentary record. The legend places, somewhere in the foothills of the Cahuenga Pass […]
The Viking Sunstone
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Was the Viking Sunstone? The Viking sunstone, called solarsteinn in the medieval Icelandic sources, is a navigational stone described in saga literature as a tool for locating the sun in overcast skies. The leading hypothesis, advanced in 1967 and confirmed experimentally […]
The Treasure of the San José Galleon
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The 1708 Wreck Off Cartagena and What Lies on the Caribbean Floor The Spanish sixty-four-gun galleon San José sailed from Portobelo on the Panamanian isthmus on May 28, 1708, riding low under the year’s accumulated New World tribute, and was sunk on […]
The Treasure of Forrest Fenn
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 For roughly a decade, a bronze chest weighing about forty-two pounds sat in a fold of the Rocky Mountains while several hundred thousand people, working from a twenty-four-line poem printed in a self-published memoir, looked for it. Five of those people died […]
The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Jacob Waltz, the German-immigrant prospector whose nickname gave the legend its name, died of pneumonia in a Phoenix bedroom on the night of 25 October 1891. He left behind a wooden candle box of high-grade gold ore beneath his bed and, depending […]
The Tomb of Genghis Khan
By Dr. Wren Ashby · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 A working ethologist will tell you that the most informative animals in a story are the ones nobody is looking at. In the case of the lost tomb of Genghis Khan (born Temüjin, c. 1162-1227), the animals nobody is looking at […]
The Lost Treasure of the Beale Papers
By Augustus Kane · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Are the Beale Papers? The Beale Papers are an 1885 dime-store pamphlet, printed in Lynchburg, Virginia, by a local agent named James B. Ward, presenting three numerical ciphers said to have been left in 1822 by a man called Thomas Jefferson […]
The Treasure of Lima
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Is the Treasure of Lima? The Treasure of Lima is a legendary buried hoard said to have been removed from the Peruvian capital in 1820, entrusted to the British merchant captain William Thompson aboard the brig Mary Dear, and concealed by […]
The Honjo Masamune Sword
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The Honjō Masamune is the most famous lost sword in Japanese history. Forged around the turn of the fourteenth century by Gorō Nyūdō Masamune (c. 1264–1343), it served as the hereditary blade of the Tokugawa shoguns for more than two centuries before […]
The Crown Jewels of Ireland
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 On the morning of 6 July 1907, four days before King Edward VII was due to invest a new knight of the Order of St Patrick at Dublin Castle, a messenger named William Stivey turned a key in a safe in the […]