An 1885 pamphlet says a buried treasure in Virginia belongs to 30 men and their heirs, named in a cipher nobody has solved

The Beale treasure is an unproven tale, and several researchers call it a hoax. It comes from a pamphlet, The Beale Papers, published by James B. Ward in Lynchburg in 1885. The pamphlet says Thomas J. Beale and about 30 companions buried gold, silver and jewels in Bedford County in 1819 and 1821. In 1822 Beale left a locked box with the innkeeper Robert Morriss and wrote that it could be opened if he did not return within ten years. Morriss opened it in 1845 and found three number ciphers. A 1972 study in the files of the National Security Agency summarises what the pamphlet says each one holds. The second, decoded using the Declaration of Independence, lists the treasure. The first gives the location. The third lists the party members and the relatives who were their heirs. The first and third have never been solved, so no heir has ever been named. Morriss gave the papers to Ward in 1862 and died in 1863. Joe Nickell argued in 1982 that Ward wrote the story, citing words such as "stampeding" that appear in print later than 1822. Records also put Morriss at his hotel around 1823, not 1820. Digs on Porter's Mountain in the late 1980s found Civil War objects. The cipher researcher Nick Pelling thinks the first cipher may be real.