[ArkansasSlim]

Originally Posted by AWC

Ahh, the greatest lost treasure in Arkansas...hmmm. I hear stories that the Ark of the Covenant is in the Blue Mountain Range, in a cave on Mount Nebo.
An interesting book on it is here: The Jeremiah Journey pt.1thru6.PDF
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9lv...t?pli=1&hl=en#

The Jeremiah Journey pt.7thru12.PDF
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9lv...hi/edit?hl=en#

Wouldn't that be a treasure to behold? If you find it, I'll buy you a steak dinner if you open it

Thanks, but I'll pass. My time on this great earth is limited already, and I sure don't choose shorten it any. I'm having too much fun.

[ArkansasSlim]

Have you heard about "The Great Arkansas Treasure Hunt"? Each year the State Auditor publishes the names of people who have unclaimed property which has been turned over to the state by companies that cannot locate the owners. It can be cash, hard goods, stock certificates, uncashed checks, etc. This year the value is around $178 million. To see if your name is on the list and you haven't seen the list published in most Arkansas newspapers, you may call 1-800-252-4648 to check it out. In the past the Auditor has said the amount can be from a few dollars to thousands. Good luck.

[ArkansasSlim]

I'm sorry but I neglected to post a Web Link to the Unclaimed Property Site. It is; www.auditor.ar.gov

[ArkansasSlim]

In July Skeeter95 wrote of a story about a gold Civil War cannon, or a cannon filled with gold, lost in his area, but never found. In just about every Civil War battle field I've read about, folklore has it that there have been lost, or buried, cannon left behind. Same thing in the Grant County Jenkins Ferry battlefield. There was supposed to have been a buried cannon near where the present battle monument is located and I have had men tell me that when they were kids they used one, which was sticking out of the river bank, as a diving board. One time when I was there I found where someone had used a back-hoe and dug a hole in the picnic area, and on top of the back-dirt was the steel rim of a farm wagon wheel. Lots of people metal detected in that location and I suspect someone got a deep reading and brought in a back-hoe to dig up the cannon and got a big surprise . A couple of problems here; 1. The route of march on the military road was about a quarter mile north of this spot. 2. The battle field was about half a mile northwest of this spot.

Also, several people who found the actual battle field, and buckets of Mini' Balls and Enfield bullets, would go to the above location and scatter the bullets like chicken feed so people would spend all their time metal detecting there and never get to the road and battle field.

[ArkansasSlim]

I had forgotten about this until I read in the current SMITHSONIAN about Preston Tucker and his Tucker Torpedo automobile. In the early 1970s, my work had me traveling all over Arkansas and after a while the repeated trips became boring so I started taking back roads from Point A to Point B.

One day I saw, out in the middle of a cotton field near Forest City, a large 2 1/2 story house with several outbuildings around it. It appeared empty. Later back home I was telling some friends about it and the husband started asking detail questions and making detail statements. It turned out that he had grown up in that house! He said the house had been empty for several years, the property was still in his family, and gave me permission to look the place over. He said the house was pre-Civil War but he wasn't sure when it was built, but family oral history states that cypress lumber to build the house was hauled on ox drawn wagons from near present day Forest City. So the next time I was in the area I made a point to add a stop to my schedule. It was a beautiful well preserved house with worn out farm equipment scattered around the place.

But the point of this story is that behind one of the out buildings was a Tucker Torpedo! I looked it over and left. Our teenage daughter had always been interested in old houses so a few months later I decided to take the family to explore this house. The car was gone.

So how and why did this auto end up in this cotton field? We will never know. There were only 51 of them built (by hand, not assembly line) and 47 are known to be in the hands of collectors throughout the world. When one went up for sale this year it was purchased for $2.9 million.

[ArkansasSlim]

The "Gurdon Ghost Light" probably will never be seen again, and the lost treasure here is the railroad. See my last entry on "Exploring Arkansas". So, with no railroad, there can be no "Ghost Light". The adventure of looking for the Light was always exciting even if you didn't believe in it or never saw it.

[btoverdrive]

How about the Fouke monster??? Legend of Boggy Creek???

[btoverdrive]

Originally Posted by ArkansasSlim

The "Gurdon Ghost Light" probably will never be seen again, and the lost treasure here is the railroad. See my last entry on "Exploring Arkansas". So, with no railroad, there can be no "Ghost Light". The adventure of looking for the Light was always exciting even if you didn't believe in it or never saw it.

I worked on the railroad between El Dorado and Gurdon during my early years. Heard about the "light" but never saw it. Just because the railroad is not there anymore does not mean it is still not there............

[ArkansasSlim]

I had forgotten about this until I saw an NCIS re-run on the Idiot Box the other night.

During WWII there were several military bases in AR and after the war and the bases were being vacated, lots of stuff was hauled out into the boonies and buried with a bulldozer. The base involved in this story shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

The father of a friend worked on one of he bases and helped close it down. The friend, who knew I did searches using metal detectors, told me that his dad told him, when my friend was a child, that they had taken a case of 45 cal pistols and buried it with some other stuff and told him the general area where it happened, and my friend remembered the location and would take me there and we would search.

With the depth involved I knew it would take a "deep seeker" detector to find them and that was before metal detectors became so sophisticated and deep seekers were hard to obtain. While I was trying to obtain the detector, my friend had a "nervous breakdown" (went nuts) and ended up in the hospital. When he got out of the hospital and got back to work I went to see him to continue our quest and he didn't know what I was talking about and didn't remember his dad's story.

The way those 45s were packed in cosmoline and waxed paper, even after all these years, would be in pristine condition and worth $$$$$$$$$$$$. Why didn't I go anyway? The boonies of that base covers several thousand acres. Ain't no way!

[ArkansasSlim]

Treasure found but not retained. A metal detecting friend and I had been searching an old WWII army base for lost coins and personal items (i.e. dog tags). My friend had a great fear of snakes, and it didn't make any difference if it had diamond skin or green. We searched along the old walks and old building sites and did find some good stuff. He told me the following story; One day I was not available so he decided to go out into a wooded area where the troops had their field training. He got a good reading and when he dug down he scraped something that at first glance looked like gold, but on closer inspection saw it was brass. He thought maybe he had found a dump site like I wrote about in the previous post and visualized a bunch of bass he could sell. So he kicked his shovel under the brass, gave it a good heave, and out popped a live, fired, 105 projectile! He said he took off running for his truck and if there had been a rattlesnake den between the two he would have run right through them, and it took him a couple of days to get enough nerve to go back for his detector and shovel. After he recovered his equipment he called the authorities who's EOD people took care of the round.

There are two possibilities of why the round was in that place; 1. The gunner up and set a wrong elevation, or, 2. It had a defective powder charge which caused it to fall short.