8 Legendary Bags of Money Still Out There for You to Find

So you’ve found a long-lost treasure. Congratulations! This is huge for you. You’re now flush with all sorts of gems, necklaces and extremely shiny chalices. All of a sudden, though, instead of leaving you well enough alone to enjoy your newfound riches, people are telling you, “Those things should be in a museum,” and you’re involved in long, complicated auctions that “respect the history of the items.”

What a nightmare! If you knew finding buried treasure was going to involve this much paperwork, you never would have picked up the shovel in the first place! Well, here’s your solution: Aim for a treasure that’s already in the form of cold, hard cash, or the equivalent in precious metals. At most, you’ll have one stop at a pawn shop and boom — set for life.

All-cash lost treasures like…

8 Beale’ s Treasure

If you’re a massive nerd, this might be the hunt for you. That’s because the man whose treasure we’re talking about, Thomas Jefferson Beale, had a love for two things: money and cryptology. So when he died with a stash of $93 million in gold and silver still buried somewhere in the Virginia ground, those who survived him discovered that he’d written instructions on how to find it… in code. We’re talking about pulling out what you think is a straightforward letter, and instead getting sheets full of numbers. No one yet has broken the cipher, or uncovered the stash.

7 Dillinger’ s Suitcase of Spoils

If you’re being chased by the law, as alluring as your recent score might be, it’s best to ditch it and hopefully come back for it later. The results of a bank robbery that John Dillinger buried in Ohio, however, never had a chance to be retrieved. The members of the gang that might have known where exactly it was buried were all in jail or dead in short time. It’s thought that somewhere out in the farmland there is still a suitcase filled with small bills.

6 Marsh’ s Gold

According to tales, the steamboat Far West, piloted by Captain Grant Marsh, was happily trucking its way up the Bighorn River, full to the gills with gold meant to fund the war effort, when some distressing news arrived. The Battle of Little Bighorn had just occurred, and the Far West's new job, effective immediately, was to transport the wounded soldiers from the battle to Fort Lincoln, North Dakota. In the name of speed and space, they ditched the gold, burying it on shore, and changed course into becoming a water-bound battle ambulance. Gold that was never recovered, in case you want to take a backhoe to the coast of the Bighorn.

5 Lost Confederate Gold

In April 1865, during the Civil War, the Union took control of Richmond, Virginia. This was highly inconvenient for the Confederacy, not only because it was their capital, but because, being the capital, it was the home of their cash reserves. Jefferson Davis got a warning from Robert E. Lee to get the heck out of Richmond, and he didn’t waste any time, fleeing and taking the gold and silver reserves of the Confederate coffers with him. However, when Davis was finally caught a month later, he was dead broke. Unless he hit a riverboat casino and had a bad losing streak on the way, all that gold and silver is likely stashed somewhere along his escape route.

4 D.B. Cooper’ s Famous Suitcase

D.B. Cooper, known only from a police sketch, is the perpetrator of the only unsolved plane hijacking in history. He boarded a plane in November 1971, blasted a couple cigs, and calmly informed the flight attendant that he had a bomb. From there, he successfully managed to get $200,000 in cash and a working parachute from the FBI, both of which he jumped out of the plane with somewhere over southwest Washington. It would very much seem like a tall tale, if all the details weren’t easily verifiable and if a small portion of the money hadn't eventually washed up along the Columbia River. The bulk of his score, however, remains undiscovered.

3 Trabuco’ s Treasure

Leon Trabuco was a Mexican millionaire who, as the story goes, made an incredible investment that suddenly turned sour. He and some associates, in the midst of the Great Depression, were stockpiling Mexican gold and smuggling it into the U.S. The gold was buried after being smuggled in, and then the group sat back and waited for the price to skyrocket, which it did in 1934, with the Gold Reserve Act. But it included a provision they most definitely hadn’t prepared for: It made private ownership of gold in the U.S. illegal. Meaning that they’d put a whole lot of time and money into smuggling something into a country where no one could buy it. Trabuco and the other three men involved all died before being able to sell or relocate the gold they'd so carefully hidden, and it’s never been found.

2 The Picket Coral Gang’ s Big Score

In 1865, the Picket Coral Gang out of Boise, Idaho, committed a particularly profitable stage-coach robbery. When all was said, done and shot, they got away with an estimated 800 pounds of gold. A search began, and all three men involved were eventually tracked down. Two were already dead, and all three were pretty much penniless, no sign of the gold in sight. The authorities asked the single living member, Big Dave Updyke, what happened to the gold, and given that he didn’t have much to lose at this point, he simply told them to go to hell.

1 Schultz’ Stash

Dutch Schultz was a New York mobster and bootlegger during Prohibition. There are a lot of downsides to crime as a chosen occupation, but the money isn’t one of them. So it was fair to assume, when Schultz was suddenly shot in October 1935, that he’d have plenty of ill-gotten gains hidden away somewhere. Unfortunately, over the next day, as he succumbed to his wounds, he wasn’t the most coherent man. He talked all sorts of nonsense, but said at least one thing that rang true: That he’d hidden a stash of money in Phoenicia. It’s estimated to contain $50-100 million in modern dollars, wherever it is.