![]() But DCNR and the Paradas had a long, complicated history and were currently at loggerheads. The gold they believed they had located was on state land, so they needed the cooperation of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) to act further. “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about … I don’t believe in this shit.” Still, the men kept speaking and soon found common ground.ĭennis explained to Getler the impasse that Finders Keepers had reached. “We’re thinking this guy was a nut job,” he told me. Since then, he has continued to look for evidence, and in the Dents Run story he thought he could spot clues and symbols that, to those who knew how to read them, were telltale signs of KGC involvement.ĭennis says that he was skeptical when Getler approached him. He co-wrote a book on this subject, published by Simon & Schuster: Rebel Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy. Getler believes that the KGC hid hundreds of caches of gold from the South up to Canada, and that a significant number remain undiscovered. The existence of the KGC is an established part of Civil War history, but the depth of influence Getler believes it had, and its continued secret operation, is not. His focus was on a Confederate-aligned organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle, or KGC. Getler wasn’t interested in just any treasure. Getler was convinced that they needed to talk. That day something caught Getler’s eye: a post by Parada, who identified himself as the head of a small Pennsylvania-based treasure-hunting group called Finders Keepers. One day in November 2017, Warren Getler, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was browsing, where people interested in buried treasure gather to share theories and discoveries, and to subject themselves to one another’s enthusiasm and scorn. In other words, the FBI believed it knew where an enormous hoard of gold was, and as soon as they could get their hands on a warrant, federal agents were coming to get it.ĭennis and Kem Parada had been connected with the FBI several weeks earlier by a middleman. FBI agents had visited the site twice and ordered geophysical surveys that had detected something underground-something “with a density of 19.5g/cm³ (the density of gold) and consistent with a mass having a weight of approximately 8½ to 9 tons.” Now he and a team including his son, Kem, believed they had finally located it, in the inaccessible recesses of a “turtle-shaped cave” near the community of Dents Run. A treasure hunter named Dennis Parada had heard folklore alluding to the lost gold “since he was a child,” and had spent “over forty years” searching for it. The affidavit also laid out how this story had come to the FBI’s attention. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group’s abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. ![]() ![]() The affidavit related a story from a document titled “The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure,” which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. ![]() Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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