When you were a kid, did you bury a treasure (in a can or bottle)?

I buried neither treasures nor bodies. Especially not bodies.

Yes, I think so, but I don’t remember exactly.

There were some caches that were intentionally short-term, and that we did go retrieve. Often they were not so much buried in the dirt, but hidden, like in thick bushes, trees, or other places that people rarely look.

I had a friend who had been made a bit crazy by his parents’ attempts to restrict his sweet food consumption, which drove him to make caches of candy and food outside their house. At one point he started making a larger food cache in the forest, but it was quickly found and gleefully plundered by squirrels.

We also found some other people’s caches. Once, a memorable cache of shotgun shells.

I also have a metal chest which at one point I was going to use for that purpose, but kept, instead.

We put messages in bottles and put them out to sea. I found one recently that I never put out to sea.

I prefer mysterious messages and other mysteries, to treasures. I’ve continued to distribute those from time to time, peaking in my late teens and early twenties, and not so much any more, but I have a fair-sized trove of mysterious stuff from earlier, that I haven’t distributed yet. I haven’t thought of a particularly good place to put it, and there’s more $&#@ security cameras and paranoid attitudes and so on now, than there were before.

No, but when I was a kid it was a thing to bury a time capsule. Put a bunch of a stuff in a box that would be memorabilia from that moment in time.

It would be cool to find someone else’s box. With our own stuff we could just keep a box with us as we move from place to place, we don’t have to actually bury it. Maybe the purpose is for other people to find it.

Maybe that is not what you mean by treasure. If you mean money or things worth some money, I have never buried something like that, but I put them in places in my house that might as well be buried and half the time I cannot remember where I put some of it. A place in the ground might be kind of cool. Like a secret underground compartment.

x2 on @JLeslie‘s answer. The time capsule craze was real.

I have VERY vague memories of sticking things in a shoe box and trying to bury them in the backyard. But I’m about 90% sure I didn’t follow through. I definitely gathered things and put them in the box and brought the box outside. But I don’t recall actually digging the hole.

What I definitely DID do was construct very stupid series of riddles to guide someone to whatever bit of pocket change I was hiding. I justified it as ‘I might forget where I hid it’, but that was bullsh—. I just wanted an excuse to write riddles. I’ll bet they were terrible and unclever in retrospect.

I did not, but my ex-mother-in-law did. As an adult. She kept various stashes of cash hidden in her house. One time she took some of it, put it in a coffee can and buried it in a hole in the backyard. The next day she called my ex and wanted him to come dig it up because she thought the neighbor saw her digging the hole. She had issues, to put it mildly!

I buried a treasure under sand and leaves for my younger sister’s birthday once. My dog was part of the treasure hunt, and the little kids used her cue “Find It”. Not sure if she detected her humans’ scent on the treasure, or the smell of chocolate coins and animal crackers…but she sniffed around and dug it up like a perfect pirate’s assistant.

Yes. Not a treasure, but does my pet hamster “Hamper” count?
I buried him a glass Kretschmer Wheat Germ bottle about 60–65 years ago in the side bushes of my childhood home.
Someone else owns the hose now so it would be awkward.

We used to use my grandfather’s Prince Albert tobacco tins.

Yes. I however forgot where and what I hid now.

I also put a message in a bottle and cast it into the lake as well as notes tied to helium balloons.

I put a bunch of change – nickels and pennies back then – I was 7 years old – in an empty jar of jam and buried it way in the back yard. I year later we moved to a new house, and I have never been back to retrieve it (We moved in 1961).

So I imagine that my jelly jar is still sitting there next to the garage – I can remember where I buried it – and probably will never be found. (Until the archaeologists come in 2000 years.)

No, but I had the neighborhood kids going around digging holes to look for one.

It was always my job to think of things for the other kids to do. Sometimes it took a little work.

@elbanditoroso. If there had been quarters in there you would have silver quarters. Some of the pennies are probably 100% copper. Your jar is a treasure.

You could write the people who live there now. Assuming they haven’t built a new house, put in a pool, or some other structure, it’s probably still there.

A friend of mine has one of those metal detectors. He goes to beaches mostly to find treasures. He also has a magnet fishing pole. He pulls all sorts of stuff out of lakes. Most of it junk. More than anything he does it with his grandkids for fun.