Incredible Metal Detecting Discoveries: True Stories of Amazing Treasures Found by Everyday People (9 page)

At
the time of this writing, the value was still being determined. Each
coin could fetch as much as £100 - £200 or $167 - $335.
That means the entire hoard would be worth more than £7,000,000
or $11,756,500.00. Holy great finds!

Where
Was the Hoard Discovered?

The parish of Grouville on the east side of Jersey in
the Channel Islands. No, this is not New Jersey in America.

Where
Is It Now?

The hoard is currently being valued and cleaned. It is
expected to be on display at the Jersey Museum sometime in the year
2014.

Never give up! Just imagine if these two had decided to
call it quits.

All of these hoards are incredible finds, and the ones I
have included account for a very small number of hoards that have
currently been found using nothing more than a metal detector. There
are plenty more out there waiting for you to dig them up.

With metal detector in
hand we busily comb through parks, lakes, rivers, oceans, fields,
woods or forests scanning for bits of history that we call treasure.
Those lost pieces of treasure could be anywhere, and every single
piece of treasure no matter how big or small comes with some sort of
history attached to it. It is only a matter of time until some poor
unfortunate soul manages to dig up some treasure that comes with a
darker history. A history that should have stayed buried.

I have recovered a few
somewhat “creepy” finds myself. A tooth here. An entire
set of teeth there and even human bones. Granted these finds were
nothing like the stories that follow. Although I will admit that each
one of them sent a chill down my spine. There is nothing quite like
seeing an entire set of teeth laying in the bottom of your beach
scoop as you stand neck deep in dark murky water. Once you realize
what it is, your mind starts to wander. It leaves you with an
unsettling feeling to say the least.

Let's take a trip to the
darker side of metal detecting and uncover some real life finds that
have made full grown men think twice about digging again. Some of
these stories are a little on the dark side. Consider this your
warning. If this sort of thing bothers you, then you may want to skip
over these true frightening metal detecting stories.

Let's start this section
off with a personal story of my own that left me feeling a little
uncomfortable.

One of my favorite places
to metal detect is the beach. When conditions are right, there is
nothing to complain about. You have the beauty of the ocean, the warm
sun, bikini clad beauties and miles of treasure producing sand. That
is not what the beach conditions were like on this day.

I was hunting a small
stretch of beach on the east coast of Florida. Even in the winter,
you could usually wear a pair of shorts and a t-shirt while hunting,
but this day would be a little different.

There was a cold front
that was supposed to move through the area in a few days. As usual,
the weatherman was a wee bit inaccurate. (no offense to any
meteorologists who may be reading this) The cold front made a
overnight surprise visit, and of course this caused the temperatures
to drop quite significantly. I would not be able to hunt in a pair of
shorts and a t-shirt. I would need shoes, long pants and a jacket if
I wanted to hunt comfortably in this cold weather.

I arrived at the beach two
hours before low tide. This should give me plenty of time to comb
through the wet sand. When I walked onto the beach, I could not
believe my eyes. There were dead fish everywhere. They were so thick
on the beach that it became difficult to walk. It was even more
difficult to swing a metal detector.

Apparently the cold front
caught all of the local fish by surprise as well. Normally these fish
would have migrated south to much warmer waters, but this freak cold
front caught them all off guard and killed them.

These were no baby fish
either. There were some that were as long as my leg and as big around
as my torso. Some of these dead fish would have been record breakers
had they been caught on a fishing pole.

Still to this day, I have
never seen anything quite like this. For miles down the beach, there
were thousands of dead fish. Did that stop me from metal detecting?
Of course not!

I meandered through the
beach of death swinging my metal detector in between all of the fish
carcasses. I noticed a few low spots on the beach and made my way
towards them.

I started getting signals
as soon as I got to the first low spot. I was happily digging up
modern coins among all the dead fish. If there was a dead fish in the
way, I would just move it with my scoop.

The next signal my metal
detector gave me put a huge smile on my face. It was a solid low
tone. On the particular machine I was using at the time, this solid
low tone was usually a piece of gold.

I moved a few fish
carcasses aside and put the point of my scoop into the beach sand. I
stood on the back of my scoop and watched it sink. I removed a giant
scoop of sand and scanned the hole with my metal detector. The target
was still in the hole.

A foul odor filled the
air. It was difficult to describe, but it made me feel uneasy. The
foul odor was coming from the hole I had just made. This didn't make
me feel any better. I contemplated covering the hole and moving on,
but the thought of a gold ring (my precious) kept me digging.

I pushed my scoop down
into the hole and retrieved yet another pile of beach sand. I scanned
the hole again. There was no signal from the hole. I had my target in
my scoop.

I dumped the sand and
lightly kicked it across the beach. I ran my detector over the sand
and pinpointed the signal. It was still buried under a few inches of
sand. I lightly spread the sand across the beach with my foot. In the
middle of the sand was a small black disc about the size of an
American quarter.

This was no gold. It did
not look familiar at all. I reached down and picked it up. It was
still covered in sand. With a quick puff, I blew the sand away. It
was at that precise moment that I realized exactly what I held in my
hand. It was a crematory tag. A chill went down my spine. These are
the tags that are used to identify human ashes when a person is
cremated. It had been tossed into the ocean along with a person's
ashes.

Here I was standing on the
beach surrounded by thousands of dead fish holding a crematory tag in
my hand. I reached back and threw the crematory tag as far as I could
into the ocean. It skipped across the ocean like a rock until it
finally sank back to the bottom. At this point, I decided to call it
quits and head back home.

On the way back to my car,
I came across this weird dead fish. It is a Mora Mora or a sunfish.
What a perfect ending for such an odd day of detecting on the beach.

On June 25
^th
and 26
^th
close to the Little Bighorn River in Montana, a
brutal battle took place. This battle would be known as “Custer's
Last Stand,” and it went down in the history books as the
single most devastating conflict of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

George Armstrong Custer
would lead over 700 men into a battlefield that was massively
underestimated. Over 260 of his men were killed and Custer himself
would succumb to this horrible error in judgment.

An artists
rendition of the horrific battlefield

A lot has been written
about this conflict, and a lot of people believe the truth has been
covered up by the American government. Since there were so many high
ranking casualties, much of the battle remains a mystery.

After the battle ended,
army officials tried to examine the battle site. What they found
baffled them. There were no dead Indians to be found anywhere, but
there were plenty of American soldier bodies to be found.

Dead horses were piled
high in makeshift walls. This was a last ditch effort to offer
protection from the Indian tribes. Many of the American soldier's
bodies could not be identified. Their bodies were stripped of all
their clothing and ritually mutilated. The army scouts were forced to
bury the bodies where they were found.

Custer's body was
recovered with two gunshot wounds. One shot wound was in his left
chest and the other was in his left temple. Some sources say he died
as a direct result of the chest wound, while others say he shot
himself to prevent capture.

The entire battle was said
to only last 30 minutes to an hour. Native Indian accounts of the
battle state that the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors simply overwhelmed
the troops in one huge charge.

Today, the entire site of
the battlefield is a National Monument. It is protected and of course
metal detecting the battlefield is out of the question, but in May of
1984 an archaeological group armed with metal detectors set out to
discover what really happened during this bloody battle. I don't know
about you, but I don't know if I would want to dig up anything at a
site like this.

Image
courtesy of 1025wil

Here is
what Last Stand Hill looks like today

The dig proved to be very
helpful. Over 600 artifacts were discovered during the initial
searches. Most of the artifacts were bullets, shells and slugs, but
one woman found something a little on the creepy side.

Her metal detector made a
promising signal. The signal meant there was a piece of gold directly
under her coil. She quickly recovered the object. It was a ring, but
there was something inside the ring. In the middle of the ring was a
finger bone that belonged to the ring's owner.

Once the bloody battle was
over, squaws from the main Indian camp were sent to the battlefield
where they hunted down the mortally wounded soldiers. The remaining
soldiers suffered greatly at the hands of the squaws. The Indian
squaws were known to slowly torture the survivors. One of their
preferred methods of torture was cutting off a soldier's fingers one
at a time.

Yes, I can easily say that
I would not want to be the person who recovered that ring with the
finger bone still attached!

I could not obtain rights
to a picture of this horrid find, but it can be found on the Internet
if you want to do a little searching yourself.

In the early 1700s, piracy
was in full swing. Ships sailing with any sort of wealth were fair
game, and many a ship was destroyed in the name of greed and gold.
There are plenty of pirate legends out there, but one pirate by the
name of Captain Edward Low just might be one of the craziest pirates
that ever lived. Sociopath and psycho might as well have been this
guy's middle names. He was nuts, and he liked to brutally murder
anyone in his path.