Eager to settle a decades-old rumor before selling their home, a West Massachusetts family hired a professional treasure hunter to find a stash of cash, hidden by their late grandfather.
Finally, the treasure was found—beneath the attic floorboards, “packed to the lid” in a metal lockbox where it had stayed undisturbed since the 1950s.
In mid-April, a Groton, Connecticut-based treasure hunter, Keith Wille, was called to scour the attic with his metal detector. The family had already searched the attic themselves and then hired carpenters to sleuth the floorboards but to no avail.
Wille learned that the house had been occupied by the same family since it was built in the 1950s. The rumored lockbox had been hidden by the original owners of the home.
After clocking failed attempts and exhausting clues, they saw light shining through the floorboards.
Assuming that light could be reflecting off the treasure box and after logging a couple of positive signals from his XP Deus metal detector, Wille bored holes and used an endoscope camera to peek beneath the boards.
“When I dropped it into the second or third hole, I saw something weird,” he said in the video.
Wille soon realized the slot was the keyhole of a gray metal lockbox, concealed beneath false flooring.
After removing a couple of fragile pine tongue-and-groove floorboards, Wille brought the long metal box into the light of day and prized it open.
The family gathered around.
“I see twenties, I see tens,” Wille said, eventually counting $46,000 in $5,000 bundles comprising notes from 1934, 1935, and 1950, bound in original bank straps.
“The date ‘December 19, 1958,’ along with the teller number, was stamped on each currency strap,” Wille said in his blog post.
“Silver certificates were visible in three of the bundles ... The purchasing power of $46,000 in 1958 was equivalent to $421,603 in 2021.”
A family member said in the video, “All these guys lived in the Depression, that’s why they did stuff like this.”
The gripping footage has already amassed 125,000 views and counting.
Wille reflected that it’s the first time a family treasure hunt that he’s assisted with has reaped such massive rewards, but it’s not the first time he has unearthed lost treasure.
