The story behind this secret code spans nearly 200 years. Robert Morriss, the owner of the Washington Hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, vividly recalled the day he was visited by treasure hunter Thomas Jefferson Beale back in 1820. He described him as "tall, dark, and swarthy," "extremely popular, especially with the ladies," and "the handsomest man" he had ever seen.
Beale left as mysteriously as he'd arrived, which surely must have broken the heart of the clearly infatuated Morriss. Two years later, the beautiful man returned, left behind a mysterious locked box, and disappeared again, this time for good. Twenty-three years after that, assuming the gorgeous stranger was probably dead, Morriss opened the box and found a plain English letter and three encoded documents leading to a treasure now assumed to be worth around $65 million.
Morriss himself puzzled over the cryptic document for the remainder of his life, but ultimately failed to find answers. A friend, to whom Morriss had confided his story, published a pamphlet with the encoded documents in it, hoping someone could solve the riddle. This same friend also managed to decode one of the documents, realizing the substitution cipher worked with the Declaration of Independence. The pamphlet in question was published in 1885, but to this day, the other two documents and the location of the treasure remain unsolved. Why, you ask? It might all be one big joke, but all the very funny jokesters are dead now, so maybe we'll never know.
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