The FBI was excited. That much seemed evident from the affidavit the agency lodged on March 9, 2018, asking a court for permission to dig up a Pennsylvania hillside in search of Civil War gold.
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. 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. 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. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.
The affidavit also laid out how this story had come to the FBI’s attention. 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. 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. 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.”
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.
Dennis and Kem Parada had been connected with the FBI several weeks earlier by a middleman. One day in November 2017, Warren Getler, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, was browsing TreasureNet.com, where people interested in buried treasure gather to share theories and discoveries, and to subject themselves to one another’s enthusiasm and scorn. 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. Getler was convinced that they needed to talk.
Getler wasn’t interested in just any treasure. His focus was on a Confederate-aligned organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle, or KGC. 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. Getler believes that the KGC hid hundreds of caches of gold from the South up to Canada, and that a significant number remain undiscovered. 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. 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.
Dennis says that he was skeptical when Getler approached him. He’d never heard of the KGC. “We’re thinking this guy was a nut job,” he told me. “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.