The Claim
There’s over $50 million in buried gold and silver somewhere in Bedford county, Virginia.
If anyone has ever heard of the Beale ciphers, then this is the treasure that they are referring to. If you are unfamiliar with this particular treasure, the Beale ciphers are a set of 3 cipher texts that include the contents and where abouts of $50 plus million worth in gold and silver buried in Bedford County.
The story goes that a man named Thomas J Beale buried a huge amount of treasure in a secret location in Bedford County some time during the late 1820’s. He apparently gave a locked box containing 3 encrypted messages to one of his friends, a local Inn keeper named Robert Morris.
It seems that Beale’s plan was to come back later for the treasure and only gave the ciphers to the inn keeper just in case he had to send anyone else to retrieve the treasure, who would turn up for the box after being given the means to decode it by Beale.
It seems that for whatever reason Beale just vanished and was never heard of again. The Innkeeper had put the box in a store room and forgot about it until 23 years later when he found and opened it. Several decades after that he told a friend about the messages and passed them on to him just before he died.
This unnamed friend then supposedly spent the next 20 years tying to decode the ciphers, but only managed to decode cipher number 2, which includes information on what the treasure contains. This unknown individual then published the ciphers in a pamphlet which went up for sale in the 1880’s.
The unknown “friend” who solved the 2nd cipher apparently did so using an early edition of the United States Declaration of Independence as a key, though it seems it does not apply to the first and third ciphers.
Cryptogram 1
This is the one that contains the exact location of the treasure, giving it’s location down to a precise point, though no one has had any look in cracking it yet.
Cryptogram 2
This one was decoded reasonably easily using an early edition of the United States Declaration of Independence and turns out to include the following message:
I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford’s, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles, belonging jointly to the parties whose names are given in number three, herewith:
The first deposit consisted of ten hundred and fourteen pounds of gold, and thirty-eight hundred and twelve pounds of silver, deposited Nov. eighteen nineteen. The second was made Dec. eighteen twenty-one, and consisted of nineteen hundred and seven pounds of gold, and twelve hundred and eighty-eight of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange to save transportation, and valued at thirteen thousand dollars.
The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others. Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.
Cryptogram 3
This one includes the details of the next of kin of Beale and supposedly a few other people the treasure was intended to be left to, but as with clue numer 1 no one has had any luck in solving it yet.
There are those who seriously doubt the treasure exists, and with no records being found of this “Beale” or any of the other people who got hold of the original ciphers, it looks like it very well could be made up. Another point about the stories authenticity is the amount of treasure it claims to contain, with slightly more than 3 tons in total weight.
However the clues are yet to be solved, and do seem to include some kind of actual message due to the layout instead of just random numbers, but until someone solves them and goes to the location described in clue number 1, no ones going to find out.
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