READING · 4 MIN
A FORTUNE BURIED.
TWO CODES LEFT UNBROKEN.
One cipher, cracked with a copy of the Declaration of Independence, describes a buried fortune in gold and silver. The other two - the location, and the names of who it belongs to - have never been solved, if they were ever real at all.
An innkeeper, a stranger, and three sealed papers â—¢
The story comes from an 1885 pamphlet called The Beale Papers, published in Lynchburg, Virginia by a local named James B. Ward. According to the pamphlet, a Virginia gentleman named Thomas J. Beale buried a large cache of gold, silver and jewels in Bedford County sometime in the 1820s, after expeditions out west, then left an iron box with a local innkeeper, Robert Morriss, containing three sheets of ciphertext - and never returned to collect either the box or, apparently, his treasure.
One key: the Declaration of Independence â—¢
Morriss held the papers for decades before an unnamed friend - believed to be Ward himself - spent years trying to break them. That friend eventually solved Cipher No. 2 using a book cipher: each number in the ciphertext refers to a numbered word in a specific copy of the Declaration of Independence, and the first letter of that word spells out the plaintext - the same underlying trick as reading numbers standing in for letters, just keyed to a whole document instead of a fixed alphabet. It described a large buried cache of gold, silver and jewels, and referred to the other two papers as containing the treasure's exact location and the names of the people entitled to a share.
Ciphers No. 1 and No. 3: still nothing â—¢
Despite well over a century of attempts - from amateur treasure hunters to, reportedly, professional cryptanalysts using modern computer analysis - no one has found a consistent key that decodes either of the remaining two ciphers. No treasure matching the description has ever been recovered from Bedford County, despite extensive digging over the decades, both sanctioned and not.
A real code, or an elaborate hoax? â—¢
The Beale story carries real scholarly doubt. Statistical studies of the pamphlet's English - including computer analysis by cryptanalyst Jim Gillogly in the 1980s - have flagged unusual word patterns some researchers read as evidence the whole account, and possibly Cipher No. 2 itself, was fabricated by Ward to sell pamphlets, rather than transcribed from a real 1820s original. Others maintain the story could be genuine. Either way, nobody has produced the treasure, and nobody has broken the other two ciphers.
Play the ciphers in this story