The Cahuenga Pass Treasure
The 1865 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 on a hillside of the Cahuenga Pass north of Los Angeles, six buckskin packages of gold doubloons, watches, and jewelry […]
The Treasure of the San José Galleon
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 evening of June 8, 1708, in a running fight off the Baru […]
The Treasure of Forrest Fenn
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 trying. The chest was finally lifted out of a stand of cottonwoods in […]
The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
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 on which witness one believes, either a deathbed map or a deathbed silence. […]
The Tomb of Genghis Khan
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 are the horses. A thousand of them, by tradition. Driven across the burial pit […]
The Lost Treasure of the Beale Papers
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 Beale with the Lynchburg innkeeper Robert Morriss. The second of the three ciphers […]
The Treasure of Lima
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 his mutinous crew on Cocos Island, a small volcanic landmass roughly 550 kilometres […]
The Honjo Masamune Sword
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 disappearing in January 1946, days after the family surrendered it to a Tokyo […]
The Crown Jewels of Ireland
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 Bedford Tower and found it empty. The diamond star, the diamond badge, and […]
The Imperial Regalia of Japan
What Are the Imperial Regalia of Japan? The Imperial Regalia of Japan, known in Japanese as Sanshu no Jingi, are three sacred objects: the sword Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the mirror Yata no Kagami, and the jewel Yasakani no Magatama. They are first attested in the Kojiki of 712 CE and the Nihon Shoki of 720 CE, and […]