The golden hare that sparked an international wild goose chase
How bestselling book Masquerade set a trail of clues to a buried treasure... but the biggest mystery turned out to be the identity of the man who nabbed the £30,000 prize
FROM September 1979 to March 1982, the parks, forests, hills and beaches of England were teeming with people carrying maps in one hand and spades in the other. They were all desperate to be the first to find buried treasure: a golden hare, studded with precious stones. It was valued at £5,000, but would later go on to sell for six times that. They called themselves the Masqueraders.
When artist KitWilliams was challenged by a publisher to make a picture book “like nothing that has been seen before”, he came up with Masquerade.The book told the journey of Jack Hare, entrusted to deliver a gift from the moon (painted as a woman) to the sun (depicted as a man). On reaching the sun, Jack finds that he has lost the treasure, and at that point the reader is challenged to find it.
Williams narrowed the location down to “public land, somewhere in England”.
In fact, he had driven out to the site in the dead of night and buried the hare in a wax casket to evade metal detectors. The burial was witnessed by Bamber Gascoigne, TV host of University Challenge, thought to be a man the public would trust.
ONCE the treasure was interred, Williams hid evidence of digging beneath a cow pat he had brought along in a Tupperware box.
The book contained 16 intricate, fantastical paintings each bordered by enigmatic, four-line poems. Among them, a woman in a dress made of dandelion leaves flying high above a playing field painted with mysterious numbers; a wooden puppet broken on a seashore; and a little boy staring through an old-fashioned shop window.
Was the secret hidden in the words, the pictures or the numbers? Was it astronomy, history, maths or logic? Williams wasn’t telling. The less the puzzlers knew, the longer they would have to engage with his paintings.
And engage they did, in their hundreds of thousands, and then their millions.
The book was reprinted after just two days, topping the charts in the US and Japan as well as the UK. An airline sold transatlantic Masquerade tickets, which came with a free spade on arrival.
So many hunters descended on Haresfield Beacon in Gloucestershire that Williams paid for a sign notifying searchers the hare was not hidden nearby.
Real-life locations reproduced in the paintings were vandalised, including Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. Puzzlers even dug up private gardens.
The search brought families together, as they traded theories into the night… and blew them apart. The book was cited in divorce proceedings as one woman complained that her husband’s obsession with finding the golden hare had taken over their marriage. The more determined Masqueraders began to turn up on Williams’ doorstep. His neighbours began to deny any knowledge of him.
Masquerade soon became embedded in the national culture. In a 1982 episode of the sitcom Sorry!, hero Timothy (played by Ronnie Corbett) goes on a hunt for a golden rabbit. He ends the episode having gained a new girlfriend – the true treasure.
A copycat book, Cadbury’s Conundrum, containing clues to golden eggs designed by royal jewellers Garrard, had to be called off when, once again, people started digging up protected sites.
Spitting Image made a pastiche of the hunt, in which puppeteers Fluck and Law created a “golden brain” and hid the clues in 1985’s Appallingly Disrespectful Spitting Image Book. People were so convinced it was a spoof that they didn’t even look for it. The trail was even more esoteric than the original Masquerade puzzle, involving Morse code hidden in a sketch of Ronald Reagan’s brain.
Three years after Masquerade’s publication, the hare remained buried. And then, in 1981, two physics teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau hit on the solution. The reader had to draw a line from the eye of each of the animals in the 15 paintings through hand or paw to a letter in the border.
This revealed a word or phrase which, put together, formed the crucial clue.
It read: “Catherine’s / Long finger / Over / Shadows / Earth / Buried / Yellow / Amulet / Midday / Points / The / Hour / In / Light of equinox / Look
you.” When arranged in verse, the acrostic of the first letters spelled out “Close by Ampthill”.
The burial spot was where Williams knew the shadow of Catherine of Aragon’s cross fell on the spring and autumn equinox – meaning it would point to the right place on the right day.
In January 1982, Barker and Rousseau visited the park to dig for their treasure but, without the precise instruments to calculate its resting place, returned emptyhanded.They resolved to wait for March’s equinox to point them to their prize. But someone was about to beat them to it.
In March that year, a puzzler calling himself Ken Thomas sent Kit William a sketch that showed the hare’s true whereabouts, and was filmed removing the golden hare from its wax case.
BUT something was off from the start. Rather than celebrate his victory, Thomas shunned publicity. He covered his face when collecting his prize, then refused to appear on camera at all, and had no real knowledge of the clues. Masquerade fans grew suspicious – as did the artist himself.
How had this strange man come to his conclusion? Eventually, a Sunday newspaper uncovered the link between Thomas (whose real name, it turned out, was Dugald Thompson) and an ex-girlfriend of Kit Williams, who had remembered a passing remark he’d made during a visit to Ampthill park years earlier.
The Masqueraders had been right: the find was a fraud, and some believed the artist had been in on it. After years of searching for hidden clues, they saw another in an anagram of Kit Williams: “I will mask it”.
The hare was eventually sold at Sotheby’s London in December 1988 for £31,900 to an anonymous buyer
Even today, some hunters believe the prize remains hidden, and the search continues. Williams now lives in remote Gloucestershire, where he continues to paint. He has a devoted following – celebrities including Elton John have owned his works – but only exhibits privately. To see one of his shows, you need an invitation.
I discovered Masquerade as a four-year-old in 1983. By then, the treasure had already been found but I was captivated, even though I couldn’t read the text on my own, much less understand the puzzle.
Even at such a young age, I understood what it meant to be captivated by Masquerade.As I grew up and the controversy unfolded, I became fascinated by the people whose obsession had at some point peeled away from reality.
I rolled the idea around in my head for decades, until it eventually became my latest gothic thriller, The Skeleton Key, about a fictional treasure hunt book and the artist who created it with no idea of the terror he would unleash.
The treasure in my book is not a hare but a golden skeleton, its bones scattered at seven different locations. Only one remains – and when it is discovered, all hell breaks loose. Writing The Skeleton Key, I drew not just on Masquerade but on the many copy-cat treasure hunt books that followed it. In the US, The Secret was a picture book with multiple clues to multiple treasures, all based on North American folklore and history.
The authors are all dead, and several of the sites are thought to have been built upon, meaning that the definitive answer may never be known.
For every puzzler that bemoans this, there are others that love it, as they can trade theories online for all eternity.
And one treasure hunt became infamous, when antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn buried a real-life treasure chest in the Wyoming mountains. The search has so far claimed the lives of five men, so intent on being the first to live out their real-life Indiana Jones fantasies that personal safety took a back seat. Fenn himself became the target of stalkers: his house was broken into multiple times.
The Skeleton Key is set now, so it’s about what might happen when treasure hunters are equipped with smart phones as well as boots and shovels, and the dark corners of the internet are the modern equivalent of dark alleyways.
If Masquerade was published now, when any obsessive can find your address, what would that mean for the artist and his loved ones?
My book is immersive and dramatic, with family secrets buried along with golden bones. But when you think about the reallife lengths people will go to when they want to find buried treasure, is it really any stranger than the truth?
‘Even today, some hunters believe the prize remains hidden and the search continues’
The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly (Hodder, £16.99) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3832