The Thomas Beale Ciphers
Somewhere in Virginia’s Bedford County is a cache of riches which have been estimated to be worth more than $40 million dollars in today’s currency. Remaining hidden since the 1820s, the riches are described in a ciphered document which was decoded in the late 1870s. Two other ciphered documents are said to describe the location of the treasure and the heirs of the man who buried it in the 1820s. There have been those who describe the entire story as an elaborate hoax perpetrated in the 1880s, but others insist that the treasure exists and deciphering the first of the three documents will lead to its discovery.
According to the story, several Virginia adventurers journeyed to the Spanish provinces of the west and discovered gold and other valuables in a mine in what is now the state of Colorado. After eighteen months of work they sent the gold and silver back to Virginia in the hands of Thomas J. Beale, who hid the fortune somewhere in Bedford County near Montvale, an area dotted with caverns and underground springs. Beale encrypted the location in one document, a description of the treasure in a second, and the list of the owners and their heirs in the third. He left the documents in a locked box with the key with a Lynchburg innkeeper named Robert Moriss.
When Beale never returned Morriss, as instructed, opened the box and discovered the ciphers. Unable to solve them he gave the box to a friend who more than twenty years later was able to decode the second of the three documents, describing the treasure and from whence it came, but not the location where Beale had hidden the wealth. After failing to decipher the documents another friend published them and the story of the deciphered document, under the title The Beale Papers in 1885. This deciphered copy describes the wealth in terms of weight.
In the description of the fortune, it is established to consist of 2,921 pounds of gold and 5,100 pounds of silver, along with jewels which are not described in detail. The treasure was secured in “iron pots with iron covers” and buried in a vault six feet below the surface. Beale described the vault as being lined with stones, with a stone floor, with the iron pots were resting on the floor. The remainder of the document, which was deciphered using the text of the Declaration of Independence as the key, tells of the contents of the other two documents, including, “…the exact locality of the vault, so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.”
Since then the ciphered documents have been analyzed by cryptographers using supercomputers and other deciphering techniques, but to no avail. Neither the list of owners nor the cipher describing the location has been cracked. This has fed speculation that the entire story was a hoax generated to sell pamphlets in the 1880s, but there remains widespread interest in the Bedford Gold Vault. Skeptics argue that certain words used in other documents included with the ciphers were not in common use in English at the time they were allegedly written, they overlook that those same words were in use in the Spanish territories where the Virginians had mined the gold.