Treasure hunter helps Massachusetts family find rumored stash of $46,000 hidden beneath attic floor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRO0_7L7raQ

Someone call Edgar Allen Poe.

A Connecticut man has helped a Western Massachusetts family find a lockbox under the floorboards of their attic. Its contents: $46,000 in cash dating as far back as the Great Depression.

Keith Wille, a Connecticut man who bills himself as a “metal detectorist/treasure hunter/you lost something I find it,” shared the hunt in a YouTube video last week. He described it as his “most exciting find to date.”

The unidentified family summoned Wille to the house because of a generational family rumor of a lockbox hidden “a long, long time ago.” They were planning on selling the family house, which was built in the ’50s, but didn’t want to abandon it without checking for the stash.

Calling the treasure hunter was a last resort. The empty attic held evidence of previous attempts from contractors and family members: floorboards that were once pulled up, mysterious chalk markings along the floor. The family’s best lead was a clue straight out of The Da Vinci Code — the lockbox was hidden where sunlight from two perpendicular windows intersects.

Wille scoured the attic with a metal detector and within an hour, he honed in on a section in the corner; it turned out the cryptic clue was totally bunk. He dropped a small camera through some cracks and spotted a blue lockbox through many spider webs.

The box was longer and heavier than expected, but he was eventually able to extract it by prying open two floorboards with conspicuous cuts in them and removing loose pieces of wood seemingly meant to disguise the lockbox’s presence. The key was long gone, but Wille was able to pry it open by lifting the hinge with a pair of pliers.

Inside were stacks of seemingly uncirculated silver certificates and regular banknotes, dating from the ’30s to the ’50s, with an estimated face value of $46,000. The cash, which appears to have been withdrawn from a bank in 1958, would have been about $421,000 by today’s standards when accounting for inflation.

“These [banknotes] were shortly after the Great Depression, so people were still holding onto cash, hiding it, clearly,” Wille said in the video. “There were still some trust issues with the banks.”

But pristine cash from the era is hard to come by, so the haul is probably worth even more.

“These are not worth face value,” Wille told the family. “Collectors are gonna want these.”

Wille began treasure hunting in his early teens when he discovered a cache of 19th-century silver dollars in the walls of his grandparent’s home, according to his website. Other exploits include finding plenty of lost jewelry, rare coins and weapons, and Pequot artifacts.

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