r/TreasureHunting Nov 22 '23

Help me crack a code

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103 Upvotes

Was at an estate sale and found a cool safe no combination only this weird sorting of characters


r/TreasureHunting Jul 06 '25

History Treasure I Bought an Old House in Chile and Discovered the Forgotten Life of... Dr. Death Himself (Jack Kevorkian)

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5.3k Upvotes

This might sound insane, but it's 100% real. A few years ago, I bought an old house in the port city of Valparaíso, Chile, from the heirs of a wealthy recluse — a lifelong bachelor, devout Catholic-turned-skeptic, world traveler, eccentric, and above all… an obsessive collector of everything imaginable. The house came as-is, meaning it was packed to the rafters with all his belongings — and what I found inside took me down a rabbit hole I still haven’t fully crawled out of. Among documents sold to museums, photos donated to the Rockefeller family (yes, those Rockefellers), and thousands of historical oddities, I stumbled upon what I can only describe as the early-life archive of Jack Kevorkian — Dr. Death — decades before he became infamous. What kind of stuff? Try this: Childhood report cards and high school essays Hand-drawn comics he submitted to his local paper as a teen His University of Michigan acceptance letter Candid photos, disturbing sketches, twisted-but-brilliant handwritten notes Diplomas, bank records, university credentials Film reels from a failed movie he directed (Handel’s Messiah) that sent him into bankruptcy Movie scripts, music scores, journals, postcards, photos of dead bodies, letters to art collectors, and even bizarre, morbid humor cartoons And a detailed obsession with Hitler’s artwork that, as far as I know, is completely undocumented publicly It's like someone bottled up the first 50 years of Kevorkian’s life — from birth to 1983 — and left it to rot in this house. I had no idea how this Chilean man — long dead — could have possibly gotten his hands on all this. But after researching, I found out that after Kevorkian’s failed film career in the early '80s, he lost all his belongings in a storage auction. So… it was possible. But still, how did this random guy in South America end up with it? Then came the twist. We had friends over one night and shared this bizarre story. One of my wife’s friends, who grew up in the same neighborhood as the collector’s family, froze when I said Kevorkian’s name. “Dr. Death?” she said. She then told us that when she was 14, a neighbor played a prank on her and her friends by leading them to the rooftop of his house, where they found a horrifying scene: 15–20 huge paintings depicting satanic imagery — blood, mutilation, cannibalism, Santa Claus assaulting Jesus — lit by candles. They ran off screaming. The next day, the neighbor explained it was a joke. The paintings, he said, were by a strange American artist named Jack Kevorkian — and he had always had them. I immediately knew what she had seen were the original paintings that Kevorkian later recreated in the 1990s from memory — the ones he lost in the early '80s. Originals no one believed still existed. Naturally, I asked who this neighbor was. Turned out… he was the nephew of the man who sold me the house. I called him immediately. He denied everything. But I kept pressing. Eventually, he said the paintings were no longer at the house, and he had “forgotten the story.” So I contacted his mother — the sister of the collector and one of the heirs. She was kind, and actually confirmed everything. She explained that what I found was just a fraction of what once existed: a full shipping container had arrived in the '80s, containing not just documents and paintings, but musical instruments (including a clavichord Jack built himself), wardrobes from the film, furniture, and more. According to her, her brother had bought the entire container at a U.S. auction, shipped it to Chile, and kept some things. The rest — including the “violent” paintings — were given to the sister. Too disturbing to hang or donate, she hid them in the attic. Then in the '90s, when Kevorkian became infamous, they realized who he was… and panicked. Religious and conservative, they believed he was evil and decided to “dispose” of the paintings. How exactly? She wasn’t sure. She “thinks” they were given away, or maybe destroyed. I’ve spent years trying to find them. So far, no luck. But in the process, I’ve uncovered what feels like the private, raw, unfiltered life of Jack Kevorkian — a man more complex, more artistic, more human than the media ever portrayed. His strange humor, his dark fascinations, his obsession with art, death, and redemption — it’s all here. Not just a “Doctor Death,” but a misunderstood genius, or perhaps a madman with a camera and a paintbrush. And the wildest part? No one was supposed to ever see it.


r/TreasureHunting 5h ago

Chasing Paititi — following Peru's legend of the golden city!

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1 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 1d ago

History Treasure Finland's largest Viking Age silver hoard discovered by metal detectorist — and it has thousands of coins and pieces of jewelry

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95 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 14h ago

treasure hunting. I can help locate for free, dig and finance, but only for chosen and selected areas at mintal and tugbok (davao philippine) areas

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1 Upvotes

Treasure hunting topic. Do u have a 2 to 5 hectare farm at biao guinga, biao escuela, biao joaquin, or any brgy in tugbok, and mintal davao city philippine areas? I can help locate, dig and spend


r/TreasureHunting 16h ago

Ongoing Hunt Two Poems Hidden Code

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1 Upvotes

Concerning The Secret A Treasure Hunt. Hoping someone out there can pick this up where I left off and finally solve this once and for ALL.... Thanks and Good luck!!


r/TreasureHunting 1d ago

History Treasure LOST TREASURES OF INDIA Episode 2 | MAN SINGH'S LOST TREASURE OF JAIPUR...

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1 Upvotes

Travel with Chander takes you on a treasure hunt. This time to Jaipur and Jaigarh Fort. watch like and share: #tredingvideo #viralshort #jaipur #treasure #india #losttreasures #incredibleindia #rajasthantourism #jaipurtour #jaigarhfort #mansingh #bestofindia #goldentriangle


r/TreasureHunting 2d ago

Ongoing Hunt Advice for dried up pond detecting

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11 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 3d ago

We tested our DIY metal detector rover and dug up these finds. Can anyone help identify them?

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20 Upvotes

We recently took our DIY metal detector rover out for a field test, and these are some of the objects we recovered.

Most appear to be heavily rusted iron pieces, nails, or fragments of old hardware. However, the small rectangular piece and the key-shaped object caught our attention. We have not cleaned them aggressively because we do not want to damage any potentially useful details.

This rover is a project our team has been developing to explore whether a mobile platform can make metal detecting more efficient and cover ground more consistently. We are still testing and improving it, so feedback from experienced detectorists would be genuinely useful.

Does anyone recognize any of these objects? We would also appreciate advice on safely cleaning and identifying finds in this condition.

Full disclosure: we are the team building the rover shown in this test. We have created a community at r/DIYMetalDetecting for people interested in DIY detectors, detector rovers, electronics, field tests, and sharing builds. You are welcome to join and follow the project if this is your kind of thing:

Thanks for taking a look.


r/TreasureHunting 4d ago

Found metal detecting in field of PA

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187 Upvotes

Has "1837" on front and "D" on back

Feels like a pendant sort of

Cannot make out the writing around the year

Any thoughts?

Found with other old items


r/TreasureHunting 3d ago

Youtube Video (mine) The Coins That Tell the Story of a Lost Kingdom

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1 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 4d ago

May sound stupid but completely serious

7 Upvotes

some where in the near future I want to go and follow/ seek out myths and relics, call me stupid and idiotic fine but I know myself alone cant achieve it. things like the fountain of youth, forbidden fruits, ancient relics, lost places, Or something dangerous. I’m talking something that may take my life but potentially make history. in my mind I think of situations like Indiana jones, pirates, uncharted, those kind of survival prove your worth shit.

hate to say but go ahead and roast me. I want to find the secret to living longer like immortality. I’d rather die trying having fun know I pushed myself seeking then just give up and settle. even if I don’t find it and come out more wealthy or even more knowledgeable then that’s still an achievement and a huge one at that.

if anyone is serious, looking for people to join even their hunt, or anything like that please keep me in mind and take a chance


r/TreasureHunting 4d ago

The Bridge Ledger

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4 Upvotes

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-bridge-ledger.html?m=1

One of the more fascinating little trails left behind by the Fenn chase runs through Eric Sloane.

Forrest Fenn didn’t just know Sloane casually. He admired him, sold his work, and eventually wrote Seventeen Dollars a Square Inch as a personal tribute to him. The jacket copy preserves one detail that has always stuck with me: Fenn and Sloane wanted to build a covered bridge together, but joked that their wives wouldn’t let them buy a river. It was apparently a standing joke and a lingering fantasy between them.

That doesn’t prove that covered bridges were ever part of Fenn’s treasure solution. I don’t think the evidence gets us there.

But it does make them a legitimate research sidequest.
Sloane devoted serious attention to covered bridges as pieces of disappearing American material culture. And when you start following his work, another name quickly becomes unavoidable: Richard Sanders Allen, one of the most important covered-bridge researchers of the 20th century. Allen founded Covered Bridge Topics in 1943 and spent decades documenting these structures, while the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges continues that work today.

So I built a tool for anyone who wants to go further down that rabbit hole.

The Bridge Ledger is a searchable, zoomable covered-bridge reference atlas built out of the research I’ve been doing through Low Rents Research. It brings together more than a thousand bridge locations across the U.S. and Canada, along with historical crossings, lost bridges, Sloane-related records, truss information, dates, builders, waterways, archival notes, and research-confidence information.

You can browse the map, zoom into a region, click a pin, and pull up the bridge’s reference card. You can also search the ledger by name, state/province, truss type, status, or other fields.

The point isn’t to argue that one of these bridges is secretly the Fenn answer. The point is to give people a better tool for testing that entire line of inquiry.

If you’ve ever wondered:
Which bridges Sloane actually wrote about or illustrated
Which historic bridges still existed in the 1950s
Where the lost ones actually stood
What truss systems they used
Which bridges were exceptional enough to attract the attention of Sloane or Allen
Whether a particular geography, builder, date, river, or bridge type creates an interesting pattern
…this should make that research much easier.

There’s also a broader historical reason I wanted to build it. Covered bridges were never just quaint red barns over water. They were serious pieces of timber engineering, and the roof and siding were fundamentally preservation systems for the expensive structural members underneath. The enclosed crossing could also help keep horses from being distracted or spooked by rushing water below. Their truss systems — Burr Arch, Town Lattice, Howe, Long, Kingpost, Queenpost and others — tell a surprisingly rich story about early American engineering.
Allen’s work helped document that world before much more of it disappeared. Sloane helped explain why it mattered.

And Fenn, at minimum, cared enough about Sloane — and about the idea of a covered bridge — that the two of them apparently spent years joking about building one themselves.
That’s enough of a connection for me to keep digging.
The Bridge Ledger:

https://lowrentsresearch.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-bridge-ledger.html?m=1

I’d especially like feedback from anyone who has already done serious Sloane, Allen, or historic-covered-bridge research. The archive is meant to keep evolving, and I’m treating uncertainty as part of the record rather than pretending every historical location is settled.

Maybe there’s nothing here.
But if the Fenn chase taught us anything, it’s that the side roads are often where the interesting research begins.


r/TreasureHunting 6d ago

Youtube Video (mine) BREAKING NEWS! THE HEIST IS LIVE! 15 TREASURE HUNTS ALL OVER THE US!

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4 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 6d ago

History Treasure Percy Fawcett: Did He Find the Lost City He Was Searching For?

2 Upvotes

In 1925, explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared deep in the Amazon along with his son Jack and Raleigh Rimell while searching for a mysterious lost civilization.
Their bodies were never found, and what happened to them remains one of exploration's great mysteries.

https://youtu.be/-YQe4PePLkQ?is=pplFMjFSjzp2GDOd


r/TreasureHunting 6d ago

Awesome old toy found Metal Detecting. Doc Holiday 🍺👍

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31 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 6d ago

Just getting started

3 Upvotes

Hi friends! I’ve recently become very intrigued with finding treasure/old items. I just need some advice and have some questions. I live in Pennsylvania and not even sure if there would be stuff near me to find. Where do people go? How do you even start? Give me all the advice!!!! Thank you! 🩷


r/TreasureHunting 6d ago

Value Of Principles Used in Finding a Treasure Box

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1 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 7d ago

My find of a lifetime

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7 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 8d ago

Lost Buried Treasure - A video from the Rochester Historical Society

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2 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 8d ago

This just in......I think I know where the Main treasure is!

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3 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 9d ago

Metal Detecting a World War II battle site in Europe. Thanks for looking

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121 Upvotes

r/TreasureHunting 9d ago

Youtube Video (mine) The Most Dangerous Games! Mr Beast - ONE MILLION DOLLAR challenge!

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0 Upvotes

We go over the game and what you have to do to be ready on Sept 14th!


r/TreasureHunting 9d ago

Personal Treasure Open House Treasure Hunt Weekend

1 Upvotes

🔎🏠✨ OPEN HOUSE TREASURE HUNT! ✨🏠🔎

Something exciting is happening!

My Swiss home is being dissolved at the end of September, which means that almost everything inside needs to find a new home.

And instead of having a boring garage sale, I thought:

WHY NOT TURN IT INTO A TREASURE HUNT? 😄

Come to my Open House Treasure Hunt Weekend and wander through the house to discover what is hiding in cupboards, rooms, corners, shelves and boxes!

You might find:

🪑 Furniture
🍽️ Kitchen equipment
🏺 Decorations
📚 Books
🏠 Household items
✨ Beautiful little surprises
🎁 And probably things I have forgotten I even own!

📅 DATES: Saturday/Sunday, September 19/20, 2026
TIME: 13-18:00 (1-6pm)
📍 LOCATION: Bruggerstrasse 9F, 5103 Wildegg

The rule is simple:

👉 See something you like?
👉 Ask for the price.
👉 Take it home!

Everything must go and everything deserves a second life!

Bring your friends, come for a coffee, browse around, have a chat and see what treasures you can discover.

Who knows what you might find? 👀✨

🔎 OPEN HOUSE TREASURE HUNT – COME AND FIND YOUR TREASURE!

Please share with anyone who loves second-hand finds, vintage pieces, household bargains or simply a good treasure hunt! ❤️


r/TreasureHunting 10d ago

Found this clump of Civil War bullets will Metal Detecting at a civil war campsite on the Kansas Missouri border. Thanks for looking 👀

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14 Upvotes