Neahkahnie Mountain

Somewhere on Neahkahnie Mountain there's supposed to be a buried treasure chest — put there, according to a Tillamook oral tradition, by sailors from a European ship that anchored off the coast, sent a boat ashore, buried a large box on the mountain's southwest face, marked it, and sailed away. The mountain's name means 'place of the creator'; the treasure hunters have been digging holes in it for a hundred and fifty years.

The wreck is real. In 1693 the Manila galleon Santo Cristo de Burgos, sailing the Acapulco route with a cargo of Chinese porcelain and beeswax, went down off the Oregon coast — the 'Beeswax Wreck,' known for centuries from the tons of wax and porcelain that washed ashore on Nehalem Spit and were traded by the Clatsop and Tillamook all the way to Honolulu. Lewis and Clark's men wrote about trading 'bears wax' — a misspelling — with the tribes. The galleon's timbers were visible on the spit until about 1930.

The treasure-hunting became so intense that Oregon created a Treasure Trove permit system — ninety-three percent of all applications were for Neahkahnie — until the state repealed the law in 1999 to stop the digging. The marked stones, the buried box, the crew that reportedly killed the enslaved man they'd brought to dig the hole: all legend layered on a real shipwreck. The mountain is in Oswald West State Park now; the digging is illegal; the galleon is still in the surf.