John288717
Jr. Member
- Nov 18, 2014
- 37
- 8
- Primary Interest:
- All Treasure Hunting
Hello. My name is John. I live in Warrington, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. We are on the order of 20 miles outside Philadelphia. What I am about to describe is going to sound very strange. I ask that you please bear with me. In the end this may be more of a question about burying treasure than digging it up. To begin with, we moved out of the city when I retired. My son would say I am a romantic because I chose a home on Phillips Avenue near the lake and my wife enjoys watching the water birds. What a thing for a grown man to say about his mother! We met at the Bird Lake at the Philadelphia Zoo but she cannot walk anymore. Thank the Good Lord the lake is close by. In the winter you can see all the way to the water through the trees. There are Canada geese, snow geese, cormorants, mallard ducks, black scoters, blue and green herons, snowy egrets, and sometimes even a bald eagle. You get the picture. The little lady trained me well. I tell my son that if not for water birds and the Bird Lake he would not have been born. We even read him The Trumpet of the Swan and it was his favorite book. Now he just rolls his eyes. Oh well, youth is wasted on the young.
To go on, when we moved in we heard the absolute strangest stories from the neighbors. I have lived in the city most of my life but my grandfather Hiram was from upstate New York and told the best campfire stories so I am familiar with small town legends. Warrington had it all. A UFO crash, knights jousting in the woods, secret societies, even a hunter damned by The Almighty to ride until Judgment Day, and of course the gold standard of buried treasure. Pun very much intended! It was different living in that kind of place instead of doing no more than listening to Hiram's stories and there were always things happening in the woods that gave the stories life. Two years ago in the summer of 2012 that would have been an understatement. Someone passed around the buried treasure story of a fellow who had just moved away to Colorado. I would say this story was different from the others only because there was a chance to make some quick money off of it. A good many people must have thought it was likely because they came to our town in droves and spent a lot of their time in the woods around the lake. Good God they were there every day and all hours of the night with metal detectors and even the same kind of ground penetrating radar our outfit used in the city for locating utilities. It was a real honest mess. The worst of it was the people who came knocking with their questions. There was an undercurrent of belief with some of them that the treasure hunters were going to expose some kind of secret. I cannot really put my finger on what they meant. The woods were full of all kinds of strange lights and sounds but you could not swing a dead cat without hitting a treasure hunter day or night. They must have been bumping into each other and tripping over each other out there. People were even burning torches during the drought. I would say they confused one another into believing what they wanted to believe.
That was the year I signed up for a water aerobics class and was spending less time at home in the evening. Our neighbors used to laugh off all the crap we heard but it seemed like every month someone else was suckered into it. I would say they were sure there was something going on in the woods but it was not related to the treasure hunters, or the treasure hunters stirred up something that was already there. That old sinner Hiram must have been laughing from Purgatory if he was not somewhere worse! But let us save the judgment for the Judge. At that point yours truly was the odd man out for not believing. My father used to say the blind are more circumspect and I would say that was the case. Let us just say I did not feel inclined to set wolf traps in the woods as one of our neighbors did. Things became even more unhinged in the next year if that is at all possible. Sometimes the police were involved. Park rangers were poking around the lake more than once. I would say all of that probably had something to do with the buried treasure story in one way or another. Some of the nonsense I heard does not deserve to be reprinted because it defies all logic. Then again some percentage of the truth defies logic.
It got worse as the fall wore on but everything just suddenly stopped around November. Not the treasure hunters mind you, they were still here. It was the other half, the weird half. No one was talking about it anymore. Or should I say everyone was talking about how it had stopped. Our neighbors said that the treasure hunters had finally chased them out. Those were their exact words. They are the worst gossips and my family was just thankful for some peace and quiet for a change. My personal involvement in this matter began on January the sixth. Before that day this business was all rumor outside arm's reach. As my father was accustomed to saying a story worthy of your Knickerbocker pappy after a pull of Drambuie. Nowadays you might expect two or three pulls for a good tale what with MacKinnon caving to Will Grant but maybe low quality spirits from Grant is my uninformed opinion and things will turn out well in the end. Ah but that is an argument for another day.
To go on, all the dogs were barking that night and pulling against their leads. This is nothing new. Something in the woods is always driving them mad. I chalked it up to coons or coyotes though my neighbors had more outlandish explanations. Rauber. Brand. And the others for those in the area. You have heard it all before I am certain. I would put it around 10 Pm when I walked my own dog, called Baron, a Corgi Husky mix who is too small to be bold and spent the jaunt whining and wetting. After kenneling him I went in the direction that frightened him with intentions to finally give these nuisance treasure hunters a piece of my mind. And I would hope they came with a good appetite! Still there would be plenty and to spare. Now I have a disability that keeps me from moving at more than a walking pace and spent more than my fair share of time blundering through the pines. Not to mention something that could have been an orchard way back when. Tall tales flow like wine around here but Joe Friday's just the facts are harder to come by. No one talks about the orchard. To go on, it was cold and my hands were cracking. For the little lady's sake I decided I would keep the lights of our neighborhood visible and not out walk them but broke that promise when I saw stranger lights ahead. They were red and reminded me of the discharges or ball plasmas I had seen on the ocean during my navy days. What they call Saint Elmo's fire and all that.
I would like to warn everyone reading to prepare themselves and I apologize for any confusion in what I am about to describe. I have no experience with treasure hunting and metal detecting and do not know how common this practice is. These lights were one through fifteen all in a line moving and the people carrying them, boy howdy! A good friend of mine volunteers for Washington's crossing demonstration every year on the Delaware when the weather is right for it so I know demonstrators when I see them. I would say they need upper stratum jobs to afford their fancy clothes unlike my friend who is mostly broke from expensive costumes. What still confuses me is how none of the costumes agreed with each other. Please allow me to explain. There was one monk or something looking like a monk because he was wearing a white cloak and hood. This man was walking far ahead of the others with a white light that could have been a single candle, it was so dim if not for the color. More like a glow than anything. The next three were dressed like Bedouins. I could see them very well because they were carrying brilliant, and I mean absolutely brilliant red fires. What reminded me of the ball plasmas. Either the lights were on their heads or it was the angle of my viewing but they also were carrying something else similar to sparkler type fireworks. Possibly magnesium, something that dripped an ignited substance. It looked every bit like molten steel. Finally the rear guard if you will was eleven men in tunics with ordinary torches, dressed vaguely European I would warrant. Maybe post Roman or from an age before the Renaissance. Clothing you might see in a Robin Hood picture. Errol Flynn, 1938. I will never forget! I do not claim to be an expert on costume so I could in no way shape or form say for sure. They carried swords as well. Some of them had burning spears or staffs. My eyes are certainly not what they used to be make no mistake but I am confident they did not deceive me. Now if you follow still we have a monk, three Bedouins, and eleven what I would guess were dark age warriors or soldiers all together and that does not agree! Washington's crossing has only Continentals and that is the end of that. There is an internal consistency there that was missing here. Again if you follow.
I would say that had I not been prepared by years of unbelievable stories from the neighbors I would have stared with a slack jaw until I froze in the January night air. As it happened my train of thought was more like oh or aha this is what they have been droning on about since I moved here. In retrospect I was embarrassed I did not at least once rub my eyes but it is one thing to laugh at stories such as old Hiram's and another thing entirely to walk right into the middle of one of them. To go on, despite my misgivings my son had given me a new phone for Christmas not two weeks before. I would by no means call myself an old timer, though he and many many others would most assuredly do so. My point is that I hope some people here can sympathize that folks of a certain age do not react well to new technology. I fall squarely into that age bracket. This phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 according to the packaging and does everything. Text. Picture. Video. Internets. Everything but get a decent signal. Quite fancy but par for the course so I am told. I find myself using the additional features to communicate for this reason in that I can rarely if ever place a phone call that does not get dropped at some point. My son also gave one to his mother. Goodness I am jealous of how quickly she was able to learn it! Making the young man's mother the hep cat and his father the ornery fuddy duddy. Of course we made a point to ask that we not receive such extravagant gadgets. To put it mildly a good portion of what my wife and I say to our son falls on deaf ears. I am comforted to know that I am not alone in this regard!
To go on, this phone has an impressive camera with which I managed to take several not so impressive pictures of what I was seeing. Rather than blame myself I choose to blame the touch screen. Arthritis does not agree with that kind of interface. I did not ask for it so I will continue to blame the gadgetry. As my father would say, blame the archer not the bow, but I am no archer if you get my meaning! I am no photographer. Now allow me to end this long ramble. The men with the lights went toward the lake out of the woods. Making every effort to not throw out my back I caught up to them outside of the tree line where I very distinctly saw them bury something in the fields. Hence this post here. A long roundabout explanation for which I apologize. Then they disappeared or put out their lights maybe somewhere near the edge of the lake. That is my guess because there was a commotion on the water. The geese were shrieking. When I got back to my house which took some time because the fields are at a much lower elevation than the neighborhood I was nearly frozen and my wife practically dead from fright. She was worried something fierce but after a talk and some fumbling with my phone I was able to show her what I had seen. And would you know it! She was not surprised in the least because she had seen something like that too a while back when I was at water aerobics. I would say I felt like the last person who has been let in on a joke or a secret. So at that point I had come full circle with all of my neighbors. It was a, I told you so moment, for sure.
But I would like to think that I took more than a cursory interest in what I had witnessed. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Mysteries do not sit well with me. As a boy I would read the final pages of Sherlock Holmes stories. I have never handled suspense with reason. Or measure. My neighbors were the obvious place to start but they were just as clueless as I was. They knew about the original buried treasure story but had no inkling of anything contemporary. That is to say they had no explanation. Whereas I had seen for lack of a better term new treasure going into the ground, and I was able to confirm my suspicions about what was put in the ground by digging it up! If that is not treasure then nothing is. Now imagine the earful I got when I took my phone to my son and showed him the pictures. Suddenly his gift had become useful and to this day I still do not hear the end of it. Another, I told you so, moment. My son, God bless him, has served and been deployed in many places around the world. Unfortunately he has spent a good deal of time in the Middle East. Such is the terrible state of things. I described to him the Bedouins carrying the red lights which are difficult to make out in the pictures. I asked him if he had seen anything in the Middle East like that before. He said no nothing akin whatsoever. My line of reasoning was on Muslim Islamic religious ceremonies of one kind or another but my son said there was not anything close to it represented there. He had more than his fair share of stories about mosques, temples, even pre Islam pagan religious sites that were bombed by extremist groups and governments as memories of blasphemy but out of all that there was nothing comparable. My own service was all on the open sea so there was nothing in my experience either. After enough time one port looks just like the rest. So that was the second dead end. The Bedouins got me nowhere. On to the next in line! I asked an old acquaintance of mine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a researcher and anthropologist. Maybe it was serendipity that we met when my old outfit was hunting for utilities near and on the campus with ground penetrating radar. In retrospect it is a kind of treasure hunting for sure. I was confident. Maybe more than I should have been given these coincidences that his study would lead somewhere. To this day I still get the answer, I am looking into it. A black stroke for academia. Then again I did just fine without a college degree. It did not stop me from insisting my son improve upon his knowledge and his character with university study though. There is the rub I suppose. Neither of them had an answer for me! And the self taught live on for another day.
To go on, I went to the local library in Doylestown and learned everything I could about any and every subject I suspected could be potentially related to what I had seen. Close to home were the stories of treasure at Bowman's Hill and Doan Cave. Both are on the order of 40 minutes from where I live. Somewhere I read that there are supposedly cannons full of gold and silver sunken in the Delaware River right here in Bucks County. This material is probably old hat to a lot of people here but it was news to me. Fascinating but ultimately unrelated. I could find nothing about Warrington though except for a handful of vague references to the tall tales floating around the lake area. My grasp on the available literature was as follows. There was plenty of information about searching for and digging up buried treasure but next to nothing about burying it. Another strike out. But indicative of shrewd financing on the part of the authors! It is time to face the music and admit that I am indeed an old timer as my son would say. Youth is wasted on the young. I write this because what I did next I considered to be biting the bullet. Having used the internets on my phone for weather only up to that point I swallowed whatever pride folks from our generation set against technology and sat at a computer terminal in the library. With a heavy sigh I can tell you!
Again I was proven wrong to avoid it and within a few minutes of searching and the assistance of a cordial young lady I found this website and references to a massive discussion not only about buried treasure right here in Warrington and all the rumors and gossip of years past but what I think was exactly what I saw on January the sixth people dressed as classic Arabs or Middle Easterners, the Bedouins of my estimation, conducting an annual ceremony by the lake in which they burn torches and bury three treasures as some kind of offering. Three! One of which I recovered. Pardon the long sentence. Not only that but the discussion claimed this had been going on for decades! It was absolutely thrilling to find this information. The other side of the coin is the torture of realizing it had been there on the internets this whole time while I went casting around for answers without thought for online resources. Old timer indeed. I read what I could. I was amazed and then some. It was like pouring over a journal of local events starting in the summer of 2012 . Like reading a story and discovering you and the people you know are characters within it. If you follow me. With references to incidents that were alleged to have taken place years ago, I recognized them as subjects of folktales with which the neighbors had acquainted me when I moved here. Not only that but I read plenty of contemporary accounts that I recall hearing news of at the time of their occurrence. It was an eye opener make no mistake. Almost what amounted to a window onto the whole affair. An outside perspective.
My problem is that I was unable to read the original discussion on this site. I found snippets on Google but when I clicked on the links this website would not permit me to access their source. Other snippets I found on pages called caches which I learned were copies preserved elsewhere. But again when clicking on the source TreasureNet indicated that the discussion apparently did not exist. Or was removed, I am not sure. Please excuse my awkward language. I am by no means well versed in online specifics. At least the terminology which to me is just gobbledygook. Popular but still gobbledygook. To continue, I read everything I could but it was all reproductions of the discussion in bits and pieces. Sadly I have wasted almost a year nursing my pride instead of my curiosity. Please forgive an old man! Had I turned here first I might have met with more success. The cached references to Bedouins have gradually disappeared since I first located them but I was prudent enough to copy and paste what I could. A foremost internets skill if there ever was one. My son was right, bless his soul. Though it was too late when I realized it. Not much was left in the way of information. Hence this post. Another roundabout explanation for my presence here. The ramble has ended.
So I have two questions for the experts. One, what happened to the discussion about the treasure hunt in Warrington? Two, what if anything can you tell me about treasure burying ceremonies involving three men dressed as Arabs putting three treasures into the ground? Why is it done annually on January the sixth? Is this common elsewhere? By extension did the missing discussion that is or is not here contain details about it? I apologize if this inquiry should be taken somewhere else. I wrote in the beginning that this might be more about burying treasure than digging it up. And my apologies for expanding this essay, but a further issue. When word spread of the happening they all started to laugh and say "now old John's a believer too" and it hurt more than lightly I can tell you. I can handle an, I told you so, from my son, and I sure did but the neighbors are not family. If you follow me. To go on, one day not too long after the bell rings and there's a young man at the door. Notes. Sketches. Photos. All bursting out of a shoulder bag and the air of an unemployed college student with too much time on his hands. Bouncing around since 2012 collecting every scrap of information about the goings on by the lake. His own admission. A confessed goose chaser with conclusions far removed from reason but a list going back decades to many January the sixths and many Bedouin sightings. If I am to believe what he said I was not the only witness this year or others. Allow me to spare you from another ramble. Something he showed me was a computer rendered illustration of the lights I saw. Identical lights. How did he know? This was described to him by a neighbor who enjoyed a view of the same spectacle in 2013. It was already a year old, the drawing. Again if I am to believe. Meaning I am just one of perhaps many who saw the Bedouins. He knew he had me then. I saw the grin on his face. Kids and academics, what an arrogant mix. I saw it years ago in my own son by thunder. It was my doing to send him for a higher education so I cannot complain. Maybe about the price!
To go on, I could not help but show this upstart the shot I took with my phone. We held them side by side and whistled. I let him download the photos in exchange for a picture of his rendering. I wanted to show everyone else the side by side although it didn't help me figure it out in the end. As if the happening was not already above my pay grade before this fellow appeared on my doorstep! He told his fair share of tall tales make no mistake. I was surprised to hear that more than a few people saw the ship building and the burning ships which is the buzz around here lately. As an old sailor that would make my day. It makes you wonder where the line between fact and fiction is drawn and who is drawing it. Old Hiram is loving every minute! Wherever he is. Again we leave the judgment to the Judge. Let me bring this to a close. What am I looking at, what did I see?
To go on, when we moved in we heard the absolute strangest stories from the neighbors. I have lived in the city most of my life but my grandfather Hiram was from upstate New York and told the best campfire stories so I am familiar with small town legends. Warrington had it all. A UFO crash, knights jousting in the woods, secret societies, even a hunter damned by The Almighty to ride until Judgment Day, and of course the gold standard of buried treasure. Pun very much intended! It was different living in that kind of place instead of doing no more than listening to Hiram's stories and there were always things happening in the woods that gave the stories life. Two years ago in the summer of 2012 that would have been an understatement. Someone passed around the buried treasure story of a fellow who had just moved away to Colorado. I would say this story was different from the others only because there was a chance to make some quick money off of it. A good many people must have thought it was likely because they came to our town in droves and spent a lot of their time in the woods around the lake. Good God they were there every day and all hours of the night with metal detectors and even the same kind of ground penetrating radar our outfit used in the city for locating utilities. It was a real honest mess. The worst of it was the people who came knocking with their questions. There was an undercurrent of belief with some of them that the treasure hunters were going to expose some kind of secret. I cannot really put my finger on what they meant. The woods were full of all kinds of strange lights and sounds but you could not swing a dead cat without hitting a treasure hunter day or night. They must have been bumping into each other and tripping over each other out there. People were even burning torches during the drought. I would say they confused one another into believing what they wanted to believe.
That was the year I signed up for a water aerobics class and was spending less time at home in the evening. Our neighbors used to laugh off all the crap we heard but it seemed like every month someone else was suckered into it. I would say they were sure there was something going on in the woods but it was not related to the treasure hunters, or the treasure hunters stirred up something that was already there. That old sinner Hiram must have been laughing from Purgatory if he was not somewhere worse! But let us save the judgment for the Judge. At that point yours truly was the odd man out for not believing. My father used to say the blind are more circumspect and I would say that was the case. Let us just say I did not feel inclined to set wolf traps in the woods as one of our neighbors did. Things became even more unhinged in the next year if that is at all possible. Sometimes the police were involved. Park rangers were poking around the lake more than once. I would say all of that probably had something to do with the buried treasure story in one way or another. Some of the nonsense I heard does not deserve to be reprinted because it defies all logic. Then again some percentage of the truth defies logic.
It got worse as the fall wore on but everything just suddenly stopped around November. Not the treasure hunters mind you, they were still here. It was the other half, the weird half. No one was talking about it anymore. Or should I say everyone was talking about how it had stopped. Our neighbors said that the treasure hunters had finally chased them out. Those were their exact words. They are the worst gossips and my family was just thankful for some peace and quiet for a change. My personal involvement in this matter began on January the sixth. Before that day this business was all rumor outside arm's reach. As my father was accustomed to saying a story worthy of your Knickerbocker pappy after a pull of Drambuie. Nowadays you might expect two or three pulls for a good tale what with MacKinnon caving to Will Grant but maybe low quality spirits from Grant is my uninformed opinion and things will turn out well in the end. Ah but that is an argument for another day.
To go on, all the dogs were barking that night and pulling against their leads. This is nothing new. Something in the woods is always driving them mad. I chalked it up to coons or coyotes though my neighbors had more outlandish explanations. Rauber. Brand. And the others for those in the area. You have heard it all before I am certain. I would put it around 10 Pm when I walked my own dog, called Baron, a Corgi Husky mix who is too small to be bold and spent the jaunt whining and wetting. After kenneling him I went in the direction that frightened him with intentions to finally give these nuisance treasure hunters a piece of my mind. And I would hope they came with a good appetite! Still there would be plenty and to spare. Now I have a disability that keeps me from moving at more than a walking pace and spent more than my fair share of time blundering through the pines. Not to mention something that could have been an orchard way back when. Tall tales flow like wine around here but Joe Friday's just the facts are harder to come by. No one talks about the orchard. To go on, it was cold and my hands were cracking. For the little lady's sake I decided I would keep the lights of our neighborhood visible and not out walk them but broke that promise when I saw stranger lights ahead. They were red and reminded me of the discharges or ball plasmas I had seen on the ocean during my navy days. What they call Saint Elmo's fire and all that.
I would like to warn everyone reading to prepare themselves and I apologize for any confusion in what I am about to describe. I have no experience with treasure hunting and metal detecting and do not know how common this practice is. These lights were one through fifteen all in a line moving and the people carrying them, boy howdy! A good friend of mine volunteers for Washington's crossing demonstration every year on the Delaware when the weather is right for it so I know demonstrators when I see them. I would say they need upper stratum jobs to afford their fancy clothes unlike my friend who is mostly broke from expensive costumes. What still confuses me is how none of the costumes agreed with each other. Please allow me to explain. There was one monk or something looking like a monk because he was wearing a white cloak and hood. This man was walking far ahead of the others with a white light that could have been a single candle, it was so dim if not for the color. More like a glow than anything. The next three were dressed like Bedouins. I could see them very well because they were carrying brilliant, and I mean absolutely brilliant red fires. What reminded me of the ball plasmas. Either the lights were on their heads or it was the angle of my viewing but they also were carrying something else similar to sparkler type fireworks. Possibly magnesium, something that dripped an ignited substance. It looked every bit like molten steel. Finally the rear guard if you will was eleven men in tunics with ordinary torches, dressed vaguely European I would warrant. Maybe post Roman or from an age before the Renaissance. Clothing you might see in a Robin Hood picture. Errol Flynn, 1938. I will never forget! I do not claim to be an expert on costume so I could in no way shape or form say for sure. They carried swords as well. Some of them had burning spears or staffs. My eyes are certainly not what they used to be make no mistake but I am confident they did not deceive me. Now if you follow still we have a monk, three Bedouins, and eleven what I would guess were dark age warriors or soldiers all together and that does not agree! Washington's crossing has only Continentals and that is the end of that. There is an internal consistency there that was missing here. Again if you follow.
I would say that had I not been prepared by years of unbelievable stories from the neighbors I would have stared with a slack jaw until I froze in the January night air. As it happened my train of thought was more like oh or aha this is what they have been droning on about since I moved here. In retrospect I was embarrassed I did not at least once rub my eyes but it is one thing to laugh at stories such as old Hiram's and another thing entirely to walk right into the middle of one of them. To go on, despite my misgivings my son had given me a new phone for Christmas not two weeks before. I would by no means call myself an old timer, though he and many many others would most assuredly do so. My point is that I hope some people here can sympathize that folks of a certain age do not react well to new technology. I fall squarely into that age bracket. This phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 according to the packaging and does everything. Text. Picture. Video. Internets. Everything but get a decent signal. Quite fancy but par for the course so I am told. I find myself using the additional features to communicate for this reason in that I can rarely if ever place a phone call that does not get dropped at some point. My son also gave one to his mother. Goodness I am jealous of how quickly she was able to learn it! Making the young man's mother the hep cat and his father the ornery fuddy duddy. Of course we made a point to ask that we not receive such extravagant gadgets. To put it mildly a good portion of what my wife and I say to our son falls on deaf ears. I am comforted to know that I am not alone in this regard!
To go on, this phone has an impressive camera with which I managed to take several not so impressive pictures of what I was seeing. Rather than blame myself I choose to blame the touch screen. Arthritis does not agree with that kind of interface. I did not ask for it so I will continue to blame the gadgetry. As my father would say, blame the archer not the bow, but I am no archer if you get my meaning! I am no photographer. Now allow me to end this long ramble. The men with the lights went toward the lake out of the woods. Making every effort to not throw out my back I caught up to them outside of the tree line where I very distinctly saw them bury something in the fields. Hence this post here. A long roundabout explanation for which I apologize. Then they disappeared or put out their lights maybe somewhere near the edge of the lake. That is my guess because there was a commotion on the water. The geese were shrieking. When I got back to my house which took some time because the fields are at a much lower elevation than the neighborhood I was nearly frozen and my wife practically dead from fright. She was worried something fierce but after a talk and some fumbling with my phone I was able to show her what I had seen. And would you know it! She was not surprised in the least because she had seen something like that too a while back when I was at water aerobics. I would say I felt like the last person who has been let in on a joke or a secret. So at that point I had come full circle with all of my neighbors. It was a, I told you so moment, for sure.
But I would like to think that I took more than a cursory interest in what I had witnessed. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Mysteries do not sit well with me. As a boy I would read the final pages of Sherlock Holmes stories. I have never handled suspense with reason. Or measure. My neighbors were the obvious place to start but they were just as clueless as I was. They knew about the original buried treasure story but had no inkling of anything contemporary. That is to say they had no explanation. Whereas I had seen for lack of a better term new treasure going into the ground, and I was able to confirm my suspicions about what was put in the ground by digging it up! If that is not treasure then nothing is. Now imagine the earful I got when I took my phone to my son and showed him the pictures. Suddenly his gift had become useful and to this day I still do not hear the end of it. Another, I told you so, moment. My son, God bless him, has served and been deployed in many places around the world. Unfortunately he has spent a good deal of time in the Middle East. Such is the terrible state of things. I described to him the Bedouins carrying the red lights which are difficult to make out in the pictures. I asked him if he had seen anything in the Middle East like that before. He said no nothing akin whatsoever. My line of reasoning was on Muslim Islamic religious ceremonies of one kind or another but my son said there was not anything close to it represented there. He had more than his fair share of stories about mosques, temples, even pre Islam pagan religious sites that were bombed by extremist groups and governments as memories of blasphemy but out of all that there was nothing comparable. My own service was all on the open sea so there was nothing in my experience either. After enough time one port looks just like the rest. So that was the second dead end. The Bedouins got me nowhere. On to the next in line! I asked an old acquaintance of mine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a researcher and anthropologist. Maybe it was serendipity that we met when my old outfit was hunting for utilities near and on the campus with ground penetrating radar. In retrospect it is a kind of treasure hunting for sure. I was confident. Maybe more than I should have been given these coincidences that his study would lead somewhere. To this day I still get the answer, I am looking into it. A black stroke for academia. Then again I did just fine without a college degree. It did not stop me from insisting my son improve upon his knowledge and his character with university study though. There is the rub I suppose. Neither of them had an answer for me! And the self taught live on for another day.
To go on, I went to the local library in Doylestown and learned everything I could about any and every subject I suspected could be potentially related to what I had seen. Close to home were the stories of treasure at Bowman's Hill and Doan Cave. Both are on the order of 40 minutes from where I live. Somewhere I read that there are supposedly cannons full of gold and silver sunken in the Delaware River right here in Bucks County. This material is probably old hat to a lot of people here but it was news to me. Fascinating but ultimately unrelated. I could find nothing about Warrington though except for a handful of vague references to the tall tales floating around the lake area. My grasp on the available literature was as follows. There was plenty of information about searching for and digging up buried treasure but next to nothing about burying it. Another strike out. But indicative of shrewd financing on the part of the authors! It is time to face the music and admit that I am indeed an old timer as my son would say. Youth is wasted on the young. I write this because what I did next I considered to be biting the bullet. Having used the internets on my phone for weather only up to that point I swallowed whatever pride folks from our generation set against technology and sat at a computer terminal in the library. With a heavy sigh I can tell you!
Again I was proven wrong to avoid it and within a few minutes of searching and the assistance of a cordial young lady I found this website and references to a massive discussion not only about buried treasure right here in Warrington and all the rumors and gossip of years past but what I think was exactly what I saw on January the sixth people dressed as classic Arabs or Middle Easterners, the Bedouins of my estimation, conducting an annual ceremony by the lake in which they burn torches and bury three treasures as some kind of offering. Three! One of which I recovered. Pardon the long sentence. Not only that but the discussion claimed this had been going on for decades! It was absolutely thrilling to find this information. The other side of the coin is the torture of realizing it had been there on the internets this whole time while I went casting around for answers without thought for online resources. Old timer indeed. I read what I could. I was amazed and then some. It was like pouring over a journal of local events starting in the summer of 2012 . Like reading a story and discovering you and the people you know are characters within it. If you follow me. With references to incidents that were alleged to have taken place years ago, I recognized them as subjects of folktales with which the neighbors had acquainted me when I moved here. Not only that but I read plenty of contemporary accounts that I recall hearing news of at the time of their occurrence. It was an eye opener make no mistake. Almost what amounted to a window onto the whole affair. An outside perspective.
My problem is that I was unable to read the original discussion on this site. I found snippets on Google but when I clicked on the links this website would not permit me to access their source. Other snippets I found on pages called caches which I learned were copies preserved elsewhere. But again when clicking on the source TreasureNet indicated that the discussion apparently did not exist. Or was removed, I am not sure. Please excuse my awkward language. I am by no means well versed in online specifics. At least the terminology which to me is just gobbledygook. Popular but still gobbledygook. To continue, I read everything I could but it was all reproductions of the discussion in bits and pieces. Sadly I have wasted almost a year nursing my pride instead of my curiosity. Please forgive an old man! Had I turned here first I might have met with more success. The cached references to Bedouins have gradually disappeared since I first located them but I was prudent enough to copy and paste what I could. A foremost internets skill if there ever was one. My son was right, bless his soul. Though it was too late when I realized it. Not much was left in the way of information. Hence this post. Another roundabout explanation for my presence here. The ramble has ended.
So I have two questions for the experts. One, what happened to the discussion about the treasure hunt in Warrington? Two, what if anything can you tell me about treasure burying ceremonies involving three men dressed as Arabs putting three treasures into the ground? Why is it done annually on January the sixth? Is this common elsewhere? By extension did the missing discussion that is or is not here contain details about it? I apologize if this inquiry should be taken somewhere else. I wrote in the beginning that this might be more about burying treasure than digging it up. And my apologies for expanding this essay, but a further issue. When word spread of the happening they all started to laugh and say "now old John's a believer too" and it hurt more than lightly I can tell you. I can handle an, I told you so, from my son, and I sure did but the neighbors are not family. If you follow me. To go on, one day not too long after the bell rings and there's a young man at the door. Notes. Sketches. Photos. All bursting out of a shoulder bag and the air of an unemployed college student with too much time on his hands. Bouncing around since 2012 collecting every scrap of information about the goings on by the lake. His own admission. A confessed goose chaser with conclusions far removed from reason but a list going back decades to many January the sixths and many Bedouin sightings. If I am to believe what he said I was not the only witness this year or others. Allow me to spare you from another ramble. Something he showed me was a computer rendered illustration of the lights I saw. Identical lights. How did he know? This was described to him by a neighbor who enjoyed a view of the same spectacle in 2013. It was already a year old, the drawing. Again if I am to believe. Meaning I am just one of perhaps many who saw the Bedouins. He knew he had me then. I saw the grin on his face. Kids and academics, what an arrogant mix. I saw it years ago in my own son by thunder. It was my doing to send him for a higher education so I cannot complain. Maybe about the price!
To go on, I could not help but show this upstart the shot I took with my phone. We held them side by side and whistled. I let him download the photos in exchange for a picture of his rendering. I wanted to show everyone else the side by side although it didn't help me figure it out in the end. As if the happening was not already above my pay grade before this fellow appeared on my doorstep! He told his fair share of tall tales make no mistake. I was surprised to hear that more than a few people saw the ship building and the burning ships which is the buzz around here lately. As an old sailor that would make my day. It makes you wonder where the line between fact and fiction is drawn and who is drawing it. Old Hiram is loving every minute! Wherever he is. Again we leave the judgment to the Judge. Let me bring this to a close. What am I looking at, what did I see?
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