Who is likely to stash a modern day cache?

[Frankn]

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The most likely is the TH that has just found more loot then he can spend without attracting to much attention. Paper money can be hidden in the ground in 3" or 4" pvc water or drain pipe which has both ends capped and chemically sealed.

 

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[Seajay]

Hey Bob,

Back to the original intent of your thread, here are five different scenarios/types of people who would hide money. One was the small businessman who began accumulating money (all coins, mostly silver) because silver was being removed from our coinage. He recognized the value of silver coinage and simply began removing it from his cash register as it he came across it. There was no particular end goal in sight. Speculation was that he might have saved it to augment his retirement, wanted to pass them on to his kids or grandkids, etc. This person eventually dies leaving behind a cache of coins that would probably be discovered by his wife and or children.
The small businessman who removed silver coins and silver certificates from the register and never reported that income. This becomes and accumulation in the millions over nearly 40 years of this type of activity. The money is then secured in individual containers and a safe to be located by his heirs/children after his death.
Number three. The owner of an immoral business (strip club) establishment stores paper currency in a safe kept inside his home. He accumulates hundreds of thousands of dollars that will one day be spent during his retirement years. That is if he is not suspected of, investigated by, and then busted by the IRS for income tax evasion.
Number 4. The blue collar guy who works hard all of his life, is very frugal, saves and invests wisely. He wants to give his wife a comfortable retirement after his death. He does not trust the government, so while he does have a savings account, he also maintains a lot of cash, silver coinage and bullion in his home. The wife is free to liquidate as needed after his death.
Number 5. Also a blue collar guy who worked hard over his lifetime and accumulated a lot of things. He liquidated these things and put the cash in the bank (?) to prepared for the eventual move into a nursing home.

It appears I have strayed away from the original intent here by relating circumstances with the in divduals, but I hope it has been helpful.

Seajay

 

[Scott (Mich)]

Hey Bob,

Back to the original intent of your thread, here are five different scenarios/types of people who would hide money. One was the small businessman who began accumulating money (all coins, mostly silver) because silver was being removed from our coinage. He recognized the value of silver coinage and simply began removing it from his cash register as it he came across it. There was no particular end goal in sight. Speculation was that he might have saved it to augment his retirement, wanted to pass them on to his kids or grandkids, etc. This person eventually dies leaving behind a cache of coins that would probably be discovered by his wife and or children.
The small businessman who removed silver coins and silver certificates from the register and never reported that income. This becomes and accumulation in the millions over nearly 40 years of this type of activity. The money is then secured in individual containers and a safe to be located by his heirs/children after his death.
Number three. The owner of an immoral business (strip club) establishment stores paper currency in a safe kept inside his home. He accumulates hundreds of thousands of dollars that will one day be spent during his retirement years. That is if he is not suspected of, investigated by, and then busted by the IRS for income tax evasion.
Number 4. The blue collar guy who works hard all of his life, is very frugal, saves and invests wisely. He wants to give his wife a comfortable retirement after his death. He does not trust the government, so while he does have a savings account, he also maintains a lot of cash, silver coinage and bullion in his home. The wife is free to liquidate as needed after his death.
Number 5. Also a blue collar guy who worked hard over his lifetime and accumulated a lot of things. He liquidated these things and put the cash in the bank (?) to prepared for the eventual move into a nursing home.

It appears I have strayed away from the original intent here by relating circumstances with the in divduals, but I hope it has been helpful.

Seajay

And another: A young kid who has a metal toolbox with about $400 in clad saved in it before he graduates high school. This kid keeps the toolbox well hidden and does not even tell his friends about it.The kid remembers stories his grandmother told him about a friend of hers that used to collect and brag about his coins and how one day he was robbed. The kid can trust his friends, but does not trust who they might have talked to.

The kid, now young man, doesn't drink and pretty much puts away an equal amount of money he sees his friends waste on booze. He starts to think of how to store coins to keep them safe from the elements. He keeps the glass coffee jars with plastic lids that his parents used as he realizes that metal would rust. He has plenty of penny jars. He can fill one with cents at about the time his parents empty one of coffee. About ten bucks each.

Later the kid gets married, about 15 years after high school, and ends up cashing in the stash as the money is needed to start a new family (it was only common clad, no silver). The kid realizes if something would have happened to him in his single years this would have just been a modern cache that someone in the future may have found. Later on he gets interested in metal detecting and finds these boards and realizes that there were many people just like him.

 

[BobInFla]

Here's one for you:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/1...-1-million-hidden-wall-house/?test=latestnews

 

[DirtDiggler]

I worked as a corrections officer for a few years and heard many stories from inmates of caches being hidden (in detail). One told me of a car he had covered up with a million dollars inside it so he could dig it up if he ever got out. Even had offers for 50 50 splits if I would recover a cache. I didn't think it would be wise to persue any because you never know what you might dig up or get yourself into once you did. Some may be true but who knows.

 

[calisdad]

Here's one for you:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/1...-1-million-hidden-wall-house/?test=latestnews

I would expect with the cartel situation in border towns today that there is more and more of that. Think about it. The cartel smuggles $20M in drugs into the US. Are they going to risk losing it by trying to smuggle it back? I doubt it. They need to launder it. Meanwhile it stay hidden somewhere.

If you really have the desire, and cajon'es, next time you see a bust on the 10 oclock news, show up at 10:30 and look around.

 

[maipenrai]

That dosent sound like such good advice. Not sure those type of people would appreciate someone looking for their stash, and they have been known to not worry much about blowing a few people away. I would guess that they have their stash protected, and if not, the police have already found it.

 

[qubits]

I have only recently begun to consider cache hunting and given thought to who might have been candidates for hiding them.

Can't speak to what types of modern people would keep caches (tho I've recently heard everyone from my coworkers to my physical therapist talk about the price of gold), but I do know of some nifty modern hiding spots... built by my father! You're all sworn to absolute secrecy on what I'm going to tell you...

My father is a very interesting man. He doesn't have "wealth" by most folks definition (tho his garden is some gem, let me tell you!), and he firmly believes that he will be financing his retirement split between his pension and his 401k, not some secret cache of hidden moneys. As far as I know, he's never had anything worth hiding from other people... I think my parents bought their wedding bands at a pawn shop. The only gold or heirloom jewelry in the family are my grandmother's emerald ring and gold locket, both of which are in my possession, and my grandfather sold his coin collection when he retired so I'm pretty sure there's no gold or silver hidden away. However, wealth or not, in the two homes that he has owned, I've seen my father build several "secret" spots into both of them.

Sealed Time Capsule

One was a time capsule placed behind a really spectacular inlaid wooden wall he built in a house in Mississippi. The room had a 24 foot vaulted ceiling and became one of the selling features of the home. I remember dictating a letter to my parents to put in the package (I think I was somewhere between 4 and 6 years - this was the early 80's), along with a newspaper of some recent important events (Challenger Explosion?), some small denominational bills (and coins) from that year, and some pictures of the family, and I don't know what else. You couldn't tell that anything was behind the wall by looking - and my parents swore me to secrecy about it. Really interesting fact - that house was one of the few left standing on that street (and in that entire neighborhood) after Hurricane Katrina. As long as the wall hasn't been torn down, we know it is still there.

Secret Compartment #1

The house that my father lives in now has 2 secret compartments that I know of. One is at the bottom of a custom made shelving unit set within the wall. The stairwell is L shaped, and bends around a brick fireplace. In the long part of the L, there is a gap of about 3 feet where there is a section of wall before the brick. My father cut a hole in the wall and build a very pretty (and functional) wooden shelving unit with adjustable shelves to store linens. He painted the interior a solid color, but he also raised the "floor" of the unit several inches, and cut into the "ceiling" above the woodstove below to create a space large enough to store 2 small firesafes... Or something else of similar size. Not quite long enough for a longarm. And it does get warm, but not hot. The "floor" of the safe sits very solidly against the supporting brackets of the bottom storage space, and in order to lift the "floor", you have to lift the board from the opening using a crack that's about a centimeter wide.... And I think there is a wedge 1 cm or so wedge of wood slid in the crack to keep it the floor from moving. This means you have to basically remove all the other shelves, then lean into the unit and push the board "back", then pry the board up to get into the space.

When he made the second one, I was probably about... 12? I remember him calling my little brother and I to come see the finished product. We didn't know what he had been planning, and when he showed us how to open it, he reminded us about the time capsule in Mississippi and told us that this was kindof like that... Only we weren't going to "lock" anything into it because it wasn't going to be permanently sealed. He closed it up, and loaded linens into the shelves, and I don't think either my brother or myself have looked at it since. I do know that my brother and I both knew it was a neat secret (like where my parents stored our firearms and ammunition) that we weren't supposed to tell anyone else about.

Come to think of it, my little brother started collecting Civil War memorabilia and coins after that. Never linked the two together in my mind before...

Secret Compartment #2

The 3rd "secret" place that my father has built is in the floor of a closet that made in a subdivided room. He made this one after I left for college. He took the master bedroom and split it into a bedroom and a study. You walk through the study to reach the bedroom. There is a closet in the "hallway" between the two, and the new wall that runs the length of the room is also a closet (the closet and hallway are the buffer between the office and the bedroom).

Both closets (last time I saw them) are "open" and don't have doors. But they do have wood trim along the bases. Similar to the way he "hollowed out" the downstairs ceiling of the second hiding spot to make a hollow in the floor, my dad cut out the wooden floorboards underneath where he was putting the closet walls. He removed a good... 1-2 inches of the board, then built the wall supports with the floorboard slid under the wall. To access the hidden space, you have to slide the wooden board to the side, under the wooden and 2x4 the drywall is attached to, to get to the hidden space. This space is about the width of 2 or 3 telephone books, and is about 2-3 feet wide. When you look at the floor of the closet, it is the exact shape, color and "length" as all the other surrounding boards. It has simply been modified to make the hole for a cache.

I distinctly remember that my father was dissatisfied with how easily the board moved into the slide, and how he was thinking about ways to make the wooden trim removable so that he could place a wedge in the spot where you slide the floorboards so that it doesn't move if you step on it. I don't know if he has done anything since he showed me the last spot, or his dissatisfaction with what he had done, but I think it's really neat to have grown up in houses that I KNEW had secret compartments in it. There are a couple of other places he's made renovations also, and I can't help but wonder if he has hidden things in there too!

Underground Railroad #1

I've also seen two amazing hiding spaces in houses used for the Underground Railroad. One was a very well-to-do house in Massachusetts, built into the brick fireplaces of the house. The house was just outside Boston and was built around a large central fireplace that was used for heating and cooking. There were several places for rising bread, baking bread and cooking in a kettle or two. If you were to enter the house from the front, there was a large foyer area with a wooden floor. The brick of the fireplace could be seen from the front door, and could be seen from basically every room in the house. There was a small basement/root cellar off the kitchen that wasn't connected to anything, and house rested on a low stone foundation with no basement.

If you entered the foyer, and lifted the floorboards near the brick, there was a tiny entrance to a rather large space build between the two fireplaces. The bricks or stones were extended down well below the bottom of the house, and the space within the hearth was *very* dry and warm. It was a small but super comfortable seeming hiding hole. MUCH larger than would be expected for the enormous size of the fireplaces built just above them. I found it fascinating that the hiding place would be right underneath the feet of any important parties who might come visiting - and equally interesting that the hidden parties would be able to hear when they entered, hear what was said to the visiting parties, and know for a certainty when they were leaving.

I don't think the house is open for public viewing. I saw it because a friend's brother knew the folks who live in the house now, and they gave us permission to poke around in the neat little space.

Underground Railroad #2

The last hiding spot was above a back stairwell in a house in my town (New England). The pitch of the roof is very steep, and the stairwell ceiling was pitched at the correct angle... It was just inset 2.5 feet or so from the actual pitch of the roof. The stairwell led to a hallway that had 2 rooms come off of it. Take an L and turn it on its side. The short part of the L is the stairwell and hallway and the long part has the 2 small rooms off of it. There was a closet built into the wall near the stairwell. If you pushed into the closet, you could pull aside a board and squeeze into the slanted space above the stairwell. There was a small shelf to placing items, and small seat like place to sit, and alot of headspace. I seem to remember that the "ceiling" of the stairwell was also heavily padded so that anyone knocking on it wouldn't know that it was hollow. And the turn in the hallway made it more difficult to see that the stairwell wasn't as long as the room, because you couldn't look down both at the same time and see the difference.

: )

Hope that wasn't boring or tedious to anyone! I'm not too worried about telling my Dad's secrets 'cause I'm pretty sure he's just collecting dust bunnies
(or time capsules) in his hiding places - but they are modern hiding places done by a non-professional home carpenter! And the Underground Railroad stuff is just plain neat.

And after living in a house with secrets hidden in it - I haven't lived in a single place since without checking every possible nook and cranny looking for hiding spaces. Behind radiators, in crawlspaces, in air vents and up chimneys. It's great fun to try to figure out where you could hide things, or find things, as you all well know!

And here's my favorite company that specialize in making modern "hidden" spaces. Their up/down wall safes are neat, as are their swinging bookshelves. I think they have a couple of videos too...

http://hiddenpassageway.com/

 

[Richard Ray]

Speaking as one who has found a number of caches, I'll put in my two cents. I know for a fact that people still have caches hidden. During the 1970's many "survivorist" hid a great deal of wealth in the ground, The last big cache I located in 1992 was buried by a well known Houstonian before he suddenly passed away. This cache was buried in cloth bank bags and weighed over 80 pounds, all silver, mostly dollar and half dollars... Before that we located a cache for a DPS officer, who's father had hid his cache in a 5 gallon bucket back of the house near Victoria Texas. Another was a drug dealer who had "served his time" and couldn't remember exactly where in the yard he'd buried a jar of Kurerands. He had the whole back yard dug up but missed it. Some of you may remember the cache we located in Alvin, TX, that was on the cover of a treasure magazine. That one was $18,000 in $100 paper bills, buried in a small pressure cooker in the overgrown garden of a lady who had sold some property and the family had spent over a year looking for the cash.. Another was $24,000 hidden in a casino box inside of a heating duct of an abandoned casino, all silver certificates. The casino had closed down in 1947 when gambling was declared illegal in Texas. Unfortunely that money was counterfit so we had to burn it.. What better way to pass counterfit money than in a casino? I still have the box.
Not all caches are so big. Many family members had their own personal cache. About 5 or 6 years ago my grandson and I found a Alka Selser jar full of over 70 silver quarters, hidden under the porch of a abandoned house and the last one was a tiny jar of silver dimes. I think I still have pictures of those... Will try to attach.
And here is my part of a suvivorist cache that I recovered, silver bars and gold coins.
Richard Byrd Ray

 

[TheRandyMan]

Good work and nice pics, Richard, and thanks for posting them. It always helps bolster belief when people can see the pictures.

 

[Frankn]

Very interesting, great pictures. Maybe some of the nay sayers will see the light.

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[calisdad]

Nice find!

When you said 'survivorist' I thought you were going to tell us about all the freeze dried food you found.

 

[hugepossum]

Very excellent post, Mr. Richard Ray.

 

[BobW59]

For some reason I have not thought of this in years, but back in the 90's, my Mom's first husband told her he buried alot of Kugerands in PVC Pipe in his backyard down in Fla. I will have to ask her about that. Hmmmm

 

[goverton]

For some reason I have not thought of this in years, but back in the 90's, my Mom's first husband told her he buried alot of Kugerands in PVC Pipe in his backyard down in Fla. I will have to ask her about that. Hmmmm

Hmmm. He may did this and spaced them out in long plastic pipe to simulate a Metal Pipe, like gas or water line to keep someone from digging it up after metal detecting yard.
I have heard of people burying a Rifle that way and put it under a real metal pipe so no one would suspect a hidden gun.

 

[bevo]

my grandpa found at least one cache in a grain silo

 

[themarkd]

Many of us are actively searching this...
Margie Goldsmith: Well Over $1 Million in Buried Treasure: Find it!

 

[themarkd]

It isn't buried, tho.

 

[foolsgoldtx]

great posts..
i was just talking with someone about a month or so ago, and come to find out he has a friend that told him about hiding a total of $50k in cash.
this is a guy that is just worried about the banking system, and he buried them around town in public parks

please dont pm me for more info! wont give any!
legit story from a legit person

just another example of a modern day cache...i imagine that there is plenty of that going on all over with all the "fear factor" we have today, feels like we are getting back to the whole doomsday mentalities