Man wants to dig for Byron Preiss’ secret treasure in New York

lifestyle

From Michael Kaplan

David Hager, 58, is on the hunt.

Next Friday, he, his wife and two sons, ages 16 and 21, will travel from their home near Denver, Colorado, to New York to search for loot hidden decades ago.

“There’s a treasure somewhere in New York City,” Hager told the Post. “There’s a ceramic helmet about the size of a volleyball. Inside of it is a ceramic key.”

In the early 1980s, Brooklyn-born author and editor Byron Preiss buried ceramic helmets and keys in 12 cities across the United States and possibly Canada. He then published detailed clues — pictures paired with esoteric verses — about their whereabouts in his 1982 book, The Secret: A Treasure Hunt.

Each key can be exchanged for a valuable gem at Preiss’s estate.

Fans of The Secret are widely convinced that one of the clues – an image of a woman in a white dress floating above topaz gemstones – leads readers to a treasure hidden in New York City.

Hager and others noticed that the woman’s face bore a strong resemblance to that of the Statue of Liberty.

But Hager, a former science teacher who now owns a college planning service, believes he has figured out the exact whereabouts and knows things others don’t.

“Everyone thinks it’s in Brooklyn because the author grew up there,” he said.

He noticed that the third-to-last line of the clue is “In rhapsodic man’s soil.” This seems to refer to Gershwin, but Hager thinks it’s a red herring.

“It’s there to distract people,” he said.

While he is hesitant to reveal the exact location where he thinks the treasure is, he says he thinks it is “south of Liberty Island,” since one line of the clue reads, “Or look north / Toward Island B.”

Liberty Island, Hager explained, was formerly called Bedloe Island.

Of the twelve treasures that Preiss allegedly hid, only three were found. The author died in a car accident on Long Island in 2005 and took the secret of his buried loot with him to the grave.

“His wife and two daughters are still involved in the treasure hunt. They are the people to whom you give the key in exchange for the gem,” Hager said. But: “I don’t think they know where anything is.”

Hager is far from the only one obsessed with digging up the lost goods.

Thousands of people are speculating about the whereabouts of the treasures in online forums and on social media. In 2018, the Discovery Channel dedicated an episode of its television show “Expedition Unknown” to the search.

This series inspired a Boston family to search for and eventually find the helmet in their city, and their journey was featured on the show in 2019.

“People go crazy for it because it’s so adventurous and you’re trying to solve a 40-year-old mystery,” Hager says. “When you start doing it, you quickly get lost in rabbit holes trying to decipher the clues.”

The cable TV show also prompted him to begin his search.

“I liked the idea that there might be buried treasure out there,” Hager said.

The Boston helmet is the most recent to be unearthed. Chicago youths found the first one in 1983 in the city’s Grant Park. The second helmet was discovered in 2004 when two savvy lawyers found it in a Cleveland garden.

Hager doesn’t pack lightly for his adventures in the Big Apple. He brings along tiny metal cameras attached to coils that reach deep into the ground and send images to an iPhone, as well as “really good” hand spades.

“I had shoulder surgery in February, so my sons have to take over some of the work,” he said.

He has received a permit from the city to do metal detecting, but has not yet received a response regarding the actual excavation permits he applied for.

According to the NYC Parks website, the fine for illegal excavation is “up to $1,500..”

In addition, a NYC Parks spokesperson warned of problems related to “underlying infrastructure networks – such as gas lines, sewer lines, etc.”

But Hager will most likely not be deterred.

“Between us, we will probably dig [whether or not we get them],” he told the Post. “If I get a fine, I’ll live with it.”

His treasure-hunting obsession coincided with the death of his father from heart failure in 2020.

His father, a former college professor of international studies, enjoyed taking the family on annual trips from their home in Virginia Beach to New York.

“The whole thing is a little bit dedicated to him,” he said.

It is also for his sons.

“The challenge of proving to myself that I’m right is important,” he said. “My 16-year-old said, ‘Dad, I believe you completely, 100%, but I want to see it come out of the ground.’ I plan to do that.”