60 years of searching… for what exactly? We still don’t know.
Photo courtesy N. Elladee/Wikimedia Commons
As the semester comes to an end, we wanted to recap the Campus Treasure that has been known but never found for the last six decades. As we have all heard many times before from oral retellings, in 1962, the senior class hid a treasure of great value—though the value of the treasure or even the certainty of its existence has remained unknown. Unfortunately, they did not leave the rest of the student population with many clues, and over time, the few clues that once were have been lost.
Over the last 60 years, many have tried to find this treasure. Staff of The normaL interviewed a first-year student, Ian Howe, about his participation in the hunt. Howe said that during his first week of orientation, he was informed that the treasure hunt was a mandatory part of the school’s curriculum. Howe explained, “I have been out treasure hunting every night because I thought they wouldn’t let me graduate if I didn’t.”
Another student by the name of Abigail Chase also weighed in on her experience. Chase explained that she has been participating in the hunt with no luck for the last seven years. She explained that she has intentionally failed her classes year after year to remain a student at Geneseo because she feels that it is her destiny to find the treasure, though Chase went on to say that this will be her last year at Geneseo because the school won’t let her be a student anymore, since she hasn’t paid her tuition in the past four years. When asking her if she thought she would find the treasure before graduation, she began to cry. Though on a more positive note, upon graduation, Chase will be opening a business dedicated to the training of hunters for the Geneseo Treasure.
Now, it is no surprise that the treasure has yet to be discovered, as the only two clues that students have to go off of are a QR code that leads to a video of the song Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley and a clue that is supposedly in a room in the basement of Blake Hall that has been locked since 1973. Over the past couple of weeks, as we have observed participants of the hunt around campus, we have caught them doing some remarkable things. First, we stopped some treasure hunters who were at the CIT HelpDesk in Milne Library, asking the HelpDesk technicians to hack into the school's mainframe and cut the power to the whole campus so that the lights would go off and they could shine a blacklight in the buildings in hopes that it would lead them to another clue.
While we don’t expect the treasure to be found anytime soon, based on the past 60 years, we wish all students the best of luck in finding the treasure.
Editor's note: Three days after the submission of this article, it was confirmed that the campus treasure, after over 60 years of search, had been found. A student by the name of Sandusky confirmed that he had finally found the treasure. Sandusky recalled that, during a dream he had one night, Emmeline the Bear whispered to him that he could find the treasure buried 18 feet north and 71 feet west of the southeast corner of Wadsworth Hall. The next morning Sadusky went to that location and unburied the treasure. Three feet under the surface, he found a metal canister, and in that canister he found a note that said “Better luck next time.”Maybe we will never know what the Geneseo campus treasure actually was.