Speaker 1: Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean Smith, where
Speaker 1: for the weeks in between episodes we look at the
Speaker 1: stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it
Speaker 1: into the show. In last week's episode, Into the Abyss,
Speaker 1: we fell headlong into the seemingly never ending mystery of
Speaker 1: the Oak Island Treasure Pit. The hunt for what some
Speaker 1: have claimed to be the lost treasure of pirate Captain
Speaker 1: William Kidd is widely considered one of the most famous
Speaker 1: treasure hunts of all time. We might also say that
Speaker 1: what has played out on that island in the one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty odd years since the pit's discovery is
Speaker 1: nothing less than the story of humankind, of land and
Speaker 1: lives destroyed on a promise of riches. The beguiling Oak
Speaker 1: Island Mystery put me in mind of another much publicized
Speaker 1: as your Hunt, of an eminently more gentle variety, though
Speaker 1: it is a story no less interesting because of it.
Speaker 1: It began in nineteen seventy six with a request from
Speaker 1: publishing agent Tom Maskler to the then thirty year old
Speaker 1: artist Kit Williams to put together a picture book. Though
Speaker 1: Williams was open to the idea, he didn't want to
Speaker 1: create something that would just be flipped through by the reader,
Speaker 1: with his art being treated as something incidental, and so
Speaker 1: he hashed a plan. He accepted Mascula's offer on one
Speaker 1: condition that he be allowed to do something that no
Speaker 1: one had done before. Over the next few years, Williams
Speaker 1: developed the story and set to work on the sixteen
Speaker 1: paintings that would help to tell it. He gave it
Speaker 1: the title Masquerade. After completing the material, Williams, also an
Speaker 1: expert metal worker, retired to his craft studio, whereafter tinkering
Speaker 1: away for a few days, he crafted an ornate pendant
Speaker 1: made of eighteen carrot gold, fashioned into the shape of
Speaker 1: a hare and adorned with ruby, turquoise and mother of pearl.
Speaker 1: This was to be the center of his plan. Once finished,
Speaker 1: the pendant was set into wax to preserve it before
Speaker 1: being deposited in a ceramic bowl, on which was written
Speaker 1: the words I am the keeper of the Jewel of Masquerade,
Speaker 1: which lies waiting safe inside me for you or eternity.
Speaker 1: Some time later, one night in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, Williams and a friend drove out to a
Speaker 1: secluded patch of England where under the light of the moon,
Speaker 1: they dug a small hole. Into this, the hare, encased
Speaker 1: in its ceramic container, was deposited and covered over with earth. Finally,
Speaker 1: on the eve of publication a few days later, Williams
Speaker 1: made the enigmatic announcement to the world that contained within
Speaker 1: the pages of his new book were all the clues
Speaker 1: any reader would need to find the location of the
Speaker 1: buried treasure. The story of Masquerade was a simple one.
Speaker 1: It told the tale of a hare called Jack, who
Speaker 1: was given a golden ornament by the Moon to deliver
Speaker 1: as a gift to the Sun. Only when Jack reaches
Speaker 1: the Sun, he discovers he has lost the ornament. It
Speaker 1: was down to the reader to find it again. However,
Speaker 1: it wasn't in the text so much that the clues
Speaker 1: were hidden, but rather among the sixteen exquisite paintings that
Speaker 1: Williams had created, meaning, as had been his plan all along,
Speaker 1: readers would be forced to study his work like never
Speaker 1: before in order to crack the code. On the first day,
Speaker 1: the book sold fifty thousand copies, sending the publisher into
Speaker 1: a spin as they tried to keep up with demand.
Speaker 1: The following day, it was another fifty thousand copies, and
Speaker 1: by the end of the week a quarter of a
Speaker 1: million copies of the book had been sold, and not
Speaker 1: long after came the letters. Are you always taking care
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Speaker 1: avoid treasure hunters unnecessarily carving up the British isles. Williams
Speaker 1: had encouraged readers to write to him with their answers,
Speaker 1: whereupon he would call them back if they had solved
Speaker 1: the puzzle correctly. Soon he was receiving thousands of letters
Speaker 1: on a weekly basis, but whether he got back to
Speaker 1: readers or not, it did little to stop the more
Speaker 1: adventurous from putting their theories to the test, with some
Speaker 1: traveling from as far as Japan, Germany and the United
Speaker 1: States in the quest to uncover the hair. Some even
Speaker 1: turned up at William's door begging him for more clues,
Speaker 1: but as the months went by, some grew skeptical that
Speaker 1: there was even a puzzle to be solved, or that
Speaker 1: at the very least, there would be no treasure to
Speaker 1: be found at the end of it. Publisher Tom Maskler
Speaker 1: received one letter from a reader convinced he had uncovered
Speaker 1: the ruse, believing there was no such person as artist
Speaker 1: Kit Williams since his name was an anagram for I
Speaker 1: will mask it. It was over two years later when
Speaker 1: Williams's wife Elaine, headed downstairs one morning to collect the
Speaker 1: latest batch of posts in amongst the bills and the
Speaker 1: mound of letters from people who regularly wrote in she
Speaker 1: came across one envelope that was unlike any of the others. Intrigued,
Speaker 1: she took it upstairs and handed it to Kit to open.
Speaker 1: Inside he found a letter, as well as a series
Speaker 1: of small sketches, including one of a monument underneath which
Speaker 1: they had drawn across. Kit recognized it as the place
Speaker 1: where he had buried the treasure. Using the phone number
Speaker 1: that had been included, Kit Julie gave the mysterious reader
Speaker 1: a call. Moments later, he was speaking to a softly
Speaker 1: spoken man with a croaky voice, who introduced himself as
Speaker 1: Ken Thomas. Although Kit was relieved that the puzzle had
Speaker 1: finally been sold, he was a little disappointed to discover
Speaker 1: that Ken had apparently only managed to partially solve it
Speaker 1: before he found the location. Perhaps more unexpected. However, he
Speaker 1: didn't even seem that happy that he had done it,
Speaker 1: being reluctant as he was to go back to the
Speaker 1: site and dig up the hair since he was suffering
Speaker 1: from a slight cold. As for the puzzle itself, Kit
Speaker 1: believed he had set it up in such a way
Speaker 1: that it was virtually impossible to solve it without all
Speaker 1: the information. If anything, it was almost impossible either way.
Speaker 1: Each of the books sixteen pictures were formed of a
Speaker 1: central picture bordered by a cryptic set of words, some
Speaker 1: letters of which were painted red or had a line
Speaker 1: drawn across them. Selecting each of these letters would reveal
Speaker 1: two more words. In each of the pictures were also
Speaker 1: to be found the image of a hair, often hiding
Speaker 1: within it, as well as a number of other animals.
Speaker 1: Some pictures also included number sets, and all were covered
Speaker 1: in symbolism, where even the positioning of limbs could have
Speaker 1: a double meaning taken in its entirety. These clues, of
Speaker 1: which many were red herrings, did provide significant hints as
Speaker 1: to the location of the treasure. But the big piece
Speaker 1: that most failed to work out was that by drawing
Speaker 1: a line from the eye of any living animal depicted
Speaker 1: in a painting through its corresponding hands and feet would
Speaker 1: reveal another set of words. Taken together, they gave the
Speaker 1: phrase Catherine's long finger overshadows, earth, buried, yellow, amulet, midday
Speaker 1: points the hour in light of equinox. Look You. Then,
Speaker 1: by taking the first letter of each word, you found
Speaker 1: another line close by Ampthill, a market town in the
Speaker 1: County of Bedfordshire in southern England. Ken Thomas had done
Speaker 1: none of this. Instead, he claimed to have first deduced
Speaker 1: that the location had something to do with King Henry
Speaker 1: the Eight's first wife, Catherine of Arragon, before later hitting
Speaker 1: upon the town of Ampthill from other clues in the book.
Speaker 1: On a whim, he had traveled to the town one
Speaker 1: morning with his dog and ended up walking in Ampthill Park,
Speaker 1: a large country estate on the edge of the town.
Speaker 1: It was here that his dog ran off ahead towards
Speaker 1: a cross monument, where it promptly urinated. When Thomas caught
Speaker 1: up with it, he found, to his surprise that the
Speaker 1: monument was dedicated to Catherine of Arragon. Realizing he had
Speaker 1: found the location of the Golden Hair, he promptly wrote
Speaker 1: his letter and sent it off to Williams. Thomas would
Speaker 1: eventually claim his prize in March nineteen eighty two, and
Speaker 1: later meet Williams and some photographers in Amphill Park for
Speaker 1: a series of publicity shots. However, eager to maintain his anonymity,
Speaker 1: Thomas strangely wore a disguise throughout and that as bizarre
Speaker 1: as it sounds, was that, or so it was thought.
Speaker 1: Five years later, in nineteen eighty four, a computer game
Speaker 1: called Hair Raiser was released onto the market. Only it
Speaker 1: wasn't a game as such, but a treasure hunt, whereby
Speaker 1: the treasure was the same golden hair that had been
Speaker 1: found by Ken Thomas five years previously. The game's creators,
Speaker 1: Dougald Thompson and John Guard, claimed to have come into
Speaker 1: possession of the pendant a few years earlier and decided
Speaker 1: to use it again for their own venture. The game,
Speaker 1: which was sold in two parts at almost five times
Speaker 1: the value of the original book, was composed of a
Speaker 1: series of static screens showing a variety of images and
Speaker 1: occasional text. It soon became clear to those unlucky enough
Speaker 1: to have purchased it, however, that the puzzle was probably unsolvable,
Speaker 1: and as a result, the game failed to sell. The
Speaker 1: existence of the prize, however, was genuine enough, although rather
Speaker 1: than giving it to a lucky winner, Thompson and Guard
Speaker 1: were forced to have it sold at Sotherby's auction house
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty eight when their company went into liquidation.
Speaker 1: It would eventually sell for thirty one thousand pounds equivalent
Speaker 1: to eighty thousand pounds today. And then in December that year,
Speaker 1: something unexpected came to light. Although it was thought that
Speaker 1: a man called Ken Thomas had successfully discovered Kit Williams's
Speaker 1: golden hair, in truth there was no Ken Thomas. Thomas
Speaker 1: was in fact dugal to Thompson, the maker of Hair Raiser,
Speaker 1: as revealed in a Sunday Times expose. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: his business partner, John Guard's girlfriend, Veronica Robertson, had once
Speaker 1: been Kit Williams's girlfriend. More to the point, she had
Speaker 1: been his girlfriend when he conceived the puzzle for Masquerade
Speaker 1: and knew roughly where the treasure was buried. Robertson was
Speaker 1: convinced by Guard to give up the location on the
Speaker 1: promise that he would donate the treasure to an animal
Speaker 1: rights charity. He did no such thing. Kit Williams was
Speaker 1: understandably devastated when he heard the news, as were two
Speaker 1: young physics teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau. Barker and
Speaker 1: Rousseau were the only people to successfully solve the puzzle
Speaker 1: in its entirety, and had traveled to Ampthill only days
Speaker 1: before Dugald Thompson went looking for the hare, only to
Speaker 1: miss uncovering it by inches. In fact, Thompson later said
Speaker 1: it was only because of Barker and Rousseau's dig marks
Speaker 1: that he realized he was looking in the right place.
Speaker 1: Next week's episode twelve will be the final episode of
Speaker 1: season three. However, we will return in mid November twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen for season four. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained
Speaker 1: and would like to help support us, you can now
Speaker 1: go to Unexplained podcast dot com forward slash support. All donations,
Speaker 1: no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All
Speaker 1: elements of Unexplained are produced by me, Richard mcclained smith.
Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes. Feel free
Speaker 1: to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding
Speaker 1: the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have
Speaker 1: an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You
Speaker 1: can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Unexplained Pod. Now it's time to take
Speaker 1: care of yourself. To make time for you, teledoc gives
Speaker 1: you access to a licensed therapist to help you get
Speaker 1: back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist
Speaker 1: by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine
Speaker 1: pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is
Speaker 1: available through most insurance or employers. Download the app, or
Speaker 1: visit teledoc dot com Forward slash Unexplained podcast Today to
Speaker 1: get started. That's t e ladoc dot com Slash Unexplained
Speaker 1: Podcast