• Passover
• Armchair Treasure Hunt Club
• Kit Williams's Masquerade
• David Blaine

Club Treasure

Things just aren't the same when you grow up. Take, for instance, the fact that kids get to search for hidden matzo at Passover or for their friends during hide-and-seek. Adults? Well, we're too busy searching for parked cars and gray hairs.

"People are totally unaware of treasures literally underfoot."

Some grown-ups, however, have traded in their mundane everyday hunts in favor of looking for buried treasure. Because sometimes, not being able to find something can actually be a lot of fun.

"When you're a kid, you get to have Easter egg hunts, but when you're older, there's nothing that compares to that," says Shaun Whitehead, a member of the Armchair Treasure Hunt Club, a British club founded in 1992.

In clubs like these, finding buried treasures has become a game of high stakes and serious intellect, involving months - and often years - of research, planning, and travel to discover bona fide hidden treasures often worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The armchair treasure hunt craze first began with Kit Williams's 1979 children's book Masquerade, which included clues to find a hidden treasure. It took 3 years for someone to solve the hunt, locating the prize (a golden hare figurine) in a park in Bedforshire, England. The solution involved reading the first letter of the first word on every page. Magician David Blaine followed in Williams's footsteps, embedding an armchair hunt in his 2002 book Mysterious Stranger. It took over a year for someone to solve the hunt. The winner got $100,000.

So how can you go from searching for your glasses to searching for gold? First, you'll have to sign up to receive clues by mail or on the Internet. They can be anything from an intricate illustration to a letter to bizarrely scented envelopes. Players then spend months studying and researching the cryptic clues. A 2004 hunt written by two club members included a 3-page story from World War II and two envelopes with correspondence between a British military captain and his wife. Even with hundreds, if not thousands, of Armchair members at work on the hunt, it wasn't solved until last summer when two club members discovered a token in a World War II pill box in a forest in Wiltshire, England.

"People are walking around the UK totally unaware of all the treasures literally underfoot," says Whitehead. What would they do if they knew? They'd probably start digging. And they might just become addicts, says this veteran hunter. "There's nothing like figuring out the puzzle. It's worth all the effort."

Posted on March 06, 2006