persephone
Tenderfoot
- #1
Thread Owner
Hello, I am new here but I have read a number of the threads on this site and I would like to dive in and ask for some feedback. I am not a metal detecting hobbyist. I own a very old (early 1890s) home that has been in my family for a very long time. The original owner (my great, great uncle) was eccentric and there are stories about how he went through some conflicts that made him paranoid and he started hiding his valuables and no one ever found them. He died suddenly and had no kids. Anyway, the home has hardwood floors and the living room floor has an odd square cut out that I always thought was a repair. The floor had been covered for many years with carpet. I was thinking of having the floor redone and when I examined the "repair" I realized that it is in fact a hatch to a section of the crawl space that was otherwise blocked off and inaccessible. You can only get to this area by going through the hatch. Another odd thing is that it appears that a trench was dug in the crawl space and then filled with non-native soil -- a lot of loose sand.
I bought a Garrett 2500 and did a few runs through the crawl space -- I found a lot of very cool 1890s handmade nails and some very old ironstone (marked) pottery and also a small vial that I suspect was for opium or morphine. I suspect that there is something else buried more deeply down there - I tried using the all metal mode with a deep seeking coil and got a strong signal in the center of the crawl area. With the big coil though, you get no discrimination -- just a loud audio tone and a single cursor scale that maxed out in that area. It could be a box of interesting goodies or it could be a big can. The other problem is --- the sand. It is easy to dig of course but the space is so narrow that there is nowhere to pile it and so when I dig a hole it just rapidly refills with sand. I think the only way to dig down into the crawl space is to actually remove the sand from the crawl area-- and the only way to do that is through the hatch which would be very labor intensive. My back hurts just thinking about it. Should I give up? It has been fun discovering this weird old hiding place but I don't know how to get a lot of sand out through that hatch without ending up in traction. Thanks for reading this and for any advice!
I bought a Garrett 2500 and did a few runs through the crawl space -- I found a lot of very cool 1890s handmade nails and some very old ironstone (marked) pottery and also a small vial that I suspect was for opium or morphine. I suspect that there is something else buried more deeply down there - I tried using the all metal mode with a deep seeking coil and got a strong signal in the center of the crawl area. With the big coil though, you get no discrimination -- just a loud audio tone and a single cursor scale that maxed out in that area. It could be a box of interesting goodies or it could be a big can. The other problem is --- the sand. It is easy to dig of course but the space is so narrow that there is nowhere to pile it and so when I dig a hole it just rapidly refills with sand. I think the only way to dig down into the crawl space is to actually remove the sand from the crawl area-- and the only way to do that is through the hatch which would be very labor intensive. My back hurts just thinking about it. Should I give up? It has been fun discovering this weird old hiding place but I don't know how to get a lot of sand out through that hatch without ending up in traction. Thanks for reading this and for any advice!
