Name: The Crazy Story Of A Real Life Treasure Hunt
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T17:01:22.000Z
Duration: 7 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's something about treasure hunts that capture every imagination.

Maybe it's our love for adventure or our love for solving puzzles.

Adverbs of degree

Or maybe it's just the anxiety of knowing that something's out there waiting to be found.

In the mid-1970s in England, the renowned publisher Tom Mashler approached a little known painter by the name of Kit Williams with the idea of making a children's picture book.

Mashler wanted something that no one had ever done before.

But Will Williams was resistant to the idea.

He didn't want to work on a dozen or more paintings only to have people flip through them casually.

How could he get readers to give his pictures the attention they deserve?

Without telling Mashler, Williams came up with the idea of a puzzle book containing 16 original paintings that hid clues to the location of an 18 karat gold rabbit that he constructed himself and buried somewhere in England.

It was published in 1979 and it was a massive hit.

We thought we'd bound to have enough till Christmas and we reprinted a further 50,000 the day after publication and three days later, yet another 50,000.

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people set about solving the puzzle of Masquerade.

A year went by, then two, and still nobody had cracked it.

But Williams was receiving huge numbers of letters every day.

He was forced to read, or at least skim through, so he could confirm whether anyone had solved it.

This package has got today's American letters in it.

I mean, this is, this has been going on like for so long, every single day.

Then in March 1982, a little over two and a half years after Williams buried the hare, he received a letter from a man named Ken Thomas.

The letter didn't have any insight into how the puzzle system worked in Masquerade.

But there was a crude map that pointed to the exact place where the Treas treasure was hidden.

Williams, relieved at this point, told him that he was right and said, go dig it up.

The puzzle of Masquerade is completely unique.

Williams invented it himself so that theoretically, anyone of any age could figure it out.

Every page features an intricately designed picture surrounded by a border with a phrase.

The trick was to identify every living creature in the frame and trace a line from its left eye through its left hand, its right eye through its right, left eye through its left foot, and

These lines would point to letters in the border that could be unjumbled into a word.

If you followed this pattern for all 15 pages, you'd end up with a master phrase that goes like this.

Catherine's long finger overshadows earth buried yellow amulet.

Midday points the hour in light of equinox.

You have to take the first letter from each page's word or words and string them together.

If you do that, you get close by Amtill and that's it.

Am Till refers to the town of Amtill, about an hour north of London.

And Catherine's long finger refers to the tall cross that commemorates Catherine of Aragon, first wife of King Henry viii.

At noon on the equinox, the sun projects a shadow of that cross onto a specific spot in the grass.

That's where Williams hid the golden hair.

Without my dog I don't think I'd have bothered if I hadn't stopped to let him have a look, you know, had to run another wee.

And that's how Kit Williams Masquerade Golden Hair was finally found.

You see, six years after the nationwide search was over, the Sunday Times in Britain, with the help of a local paper in Amphil, discovered that Ken Thomas was actually a pseudonym for Dugald Thompson, who was the business partner of a man named John Gard, who at the time of masquerade was living with Kit Williams ex girlfriend Veronica Robertson.

Robertson had been to Am Till park with Williams on a couple of occasions and guessed that might have hid the prize there.

Garden Thompson Metal detected the whole area, dug holes, but they couldn't find it.

It was only after they saw where two physics teachers who had actually solved the puzzle had been digging that they were able to snatch the hair for themselves.

By the time everyone found out about this scandal, Thompson had already used the hair to start a video game company called Hairsoft.

Its flagship title, Hair Raiser, was a puzzle game that promised the real golden hair to the winner.

The game is pretty much incomprehensible.

In a hilarious video on hair racer, comedian Stuart Ashen details why it's probably unso.

Nevertheless, by the time that the expose on Masquerade came out in 88, the company had gone bankrupt and the golden hair was sold by Sotheby's at auction for £32,000.

No one knows who bought it, though the BBC did track it down for a documentary on Williams in 2009, after which it went back to its owners to live in secrecy once again.

Masquerade launched a new genre of armchair treasure hunts, like Forest Fen's million dollar chest of antiques hiding somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, still unsolved.

And our love for hidden treasure is clear in the popularity of books like the Da Vinci Code, or games like Pokemon Go, or in escape rooms which have flourished across the world.

It's just fun to solve a puzzle and go searching for treasure.

I'm gonna steal the Declaration of Independence.

Don't steal the Declaration of Independence.

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