Frank Halfpenny had been poor for most of his life. Every day he drove a beat-up old 1971 Ford Dart to work in a thrift store five days a week, eight hours a day, earning just enough to survive financially. Frank lived in a dilapidated old trailer home and could only afford what he could buy at the local Dollar Tree store.
At work, Frank collected cheap forms of entertainment, mainly VHS tapes. His kind manager knew he was poor and let him have or borrow what he needed. Frank collected all the movies he could see on his VHS machine that had been running smoothly for at least ten years.
One day, Frank brought home several VHS tapes to watch. When he slipped one of the tapes into the VHS player and clicked “Play,” he saw an old man digging a hole next to a young magnolia tree on a green hill with scattered trees. The tape continued to play and showed the man digging for approximately 30 minutes. When the man stopped digging, he looked exhausted, trying to catch his breath. He put down his shovel and walked slowly from the scene. Five minutes later, the old man returned with a medium-sized plastic box.
He then walked over to the chamber and opened its contents. Frank marveled when shiny silver and gold coins appeared upright in the box. “My name is ‘Burt McCoy’ in the woods here in Savannah, Georgia. This is my collection of rare coins inside this container that I started when I was 40. Now, I’m going to bury it, because they’re going to be here in an hour.” . He paused and continued, “If anyone finds this tape, I give you permission to search my collection that I am about to bury. These include ancient gold and silver coins in the best condition.”
Wondering why he was burying the coins, Frank thought who “they” were. As he watched the rest of the video, he saw Burt burying his coins and filling in the hole. McCoy then returned to the camera and said, “I live in…” Suddenly, the distant sound of screeching car wheels and the hum of full-powered trucks racing toward his driveway made McCoy look to his right and panicked. . “Oh no! They’re here for me. I have to go now and hide!”
McCoy quickly walked over to the camera and turned it off. The tape then ended with a blizzard pattern of static rushing across the screen. That was the end of the tape. Frank stared at the screen for five minutes with his eyes and mouth wide open. He quickly made up his mind to find the McCoy coins, if they were still buried.
Frank had to find out more about Burt McCoy. So he walked to the nearest library.
He sat down at a computer and went to the Google prompt that was already waiting and typed “Burt McCoy, Savannah, GA” and hit the “Enter” key. Several hits looked promising, but one caught Frank’s eye: “March 14, 1982: An elderly local millionaire shot up on his property while he was driving burglars out of his house with rifles.” The next ad read: “Burt McCoy murdered by robbers, caught by police.”
Frank started making the story along with the video clip of the man called “Burt McCoy”. He wondered where Burt lived, but none of the articles he checked gave an address. He wrote on Google: “Burt McCoy, Savannah, GA, home.” Unlucky.
Frank then searched a list of people the man might have been related to, typing in “McCoy, Savannah, GA,” but got almost no results. Then he decided to write “former McCoy home, Savannah, GA.” Fortunately, he got a good result: “McCoy house demolished; property turned over to local government.”
This news was dated September 2, 2018. Not long ago!, he thought. Also, the street name of the old man’s house was included in the article, and Frank quickly wrote it down. He also searched the internet for results of any kind derived from typing “missing coin collection found”. Fortunately, news of the treasure was sparse, encouraging that no one had discovered it yet. But first McCoy’s yard had to be located.
Frank ran back home to get a shovel. He then went to the thrift store to check if they had metal detectors. Fortunately, his boss gladly lent him an old one without all the modern bells and whistles. He practiced with it for half an hour until he felt comfortable using it.
Then Frank’s heart began to race as he drove onto the property. As he approached, he watched in horror as bulldozers combed an area toward the rear of the property. After panicking a bit, he tried to calm down to remember clues from watching the tape. First, McCoy had been digging next to a magnolia sapling, which would have grown quite large since 1982. Then Frank remembered McCoy looking to his right when he heard the noise of car engines coming for him.
After scanning the landscape, looking for overgrown magnolia trees, he saw three. She looked up where the house used to be, which was to McCoy’s right. Unfortunately, all the magnolias were prime candidates for the location of the treasure. Frank wasted no time in opening the trunk of his car to get out the detector and the shovel.
Frank thought he was racing against time to find the treasure because the excavator operators might see it and come see what he was doing. Frank chose one of the trees and quickly turned on the detector on it, moving it rapidly from one side to the other. He didn’t get any reading on the first one. He walked as fast as he could to the second magnolia and turned the machine around. No luck there either. The last tree had to be the one.
By now, Frank had attracted the attention of one of the excavator operators from a hundred yards away, and he got off the machine. Frank saw it and swung the detector around wildly and quickly got a strong signal. It had to be this! He thought. Then he dropped the detector and stuck the shovel into the ground just outside the mark.
He dug so fast that he hardly bothered to harmonize the container that contained the coins. But, the bulldozer operator picked up his pace, walking briskly toward Frank.
Frank dug until he found the plastic container. As he pulled it out of the ground. He felt quite heavy, which was a good sign that he was loaded with coins inside. The excavator operator recognized what Frank was carrying and began to pick up his pace. Frank carried the container, detector and shovel all at once to his car as fast as he could. Then he was gone, just before the guy reached Frank’s car door just as he was getting out.
As soon as he got to his trailer, he opened the dirty old plastic box and saw the coins. She looked through them and began tossing them into the air, yelling “Eureka…I’m rich!” Frank found out how wealthy he was after taking the coins to a reputable coin dealer in Atlanta, who estimated the total value of the hoard at $3 million, which at auction brought in $4 million.
A month later, the money was available to Frank, who already knew what to do with his wealth: buy Burt McCoy’s land and build a modest house roughly where the old one stood. However, he kept his job at the thrift store in case he discovered other hidden treasures.