The Beale Ciphers: Three Pages of Numbers, One Buried Fortune — or One Brilliant Hoax
In 1885, a slim pamphlet went on sale in Lynchburg, Virginia, for fifty cents. Titled The Beale Papers, it told a story that has consumed treasure hunters ever since: somewhere in nearby Bedford County, it claimed, lay a buried fortune in gold, silver, and jewels — and the only directions to it were locked inside three pages of numbers.
According to the pamphlet, a man named Thomas J. Beale arrived at Robert Morriss's Lynchburg hotel in 1820, wintered there, and returned two years later to leave behind a locked iron box. A letter that followed explained its contents: three ciphertexts describing a treasure that Beale and a company of adventurers had mined in the American West and buried in Bedford County in 1819 and 1821. Beale rode off and was never heard from again. Morriss waited decades before opening the box, and late in life passed the papers to an unnamed friend — the pamphlet's anonymous author.
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