Ten Lost Treasures People Are Still Hunting For

Imagine a whole room paneled in amber: roughly six tons of it, plus gilding and mirrors, covering about 180 square feet of wall. It began in Prussia in 1701, and in 1716 King Frederick William I gave it to Peter the Great of Russia as a diplomatic gift. In 1755 it was moved to the Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg, where it was expanded to fill a larger space.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German troops took the panels apart in about a day and a half, packed them into 27 crates and shipped them to Königsberg. The room was put on display in the city's castle, then crated again as Allied bombers closed in. According to History.com, a German museum director last saw it in January 1945.

After that, the trail goes cold. Some historians think the amber burned in the bombing and fighting that wrecked the castle. Other theories put it in a sunken ship in the Baltic, a sealed tunnel, or a forgotten bunker. In 2025, Polish researchers got permission to excavate a former SS training ground in northern Poland after radar showed an anomaly, though a geophysicist on the team cautioned it could be rubble. Russia unveiled a painstaking replica in 2003. The original remains missing.

Between 1885 and 1917, the House of Fabergé delivered 50 jeweled Easter eggs to the Russian imperial family. Most survive in museums and private collections. Six do not, and all six once belonged to Maria Feodorovna, the mother of Nicholas II. Counts vary slightly depending on whether two designed but undelivered eggs are included, but six is the usual figure.

The missing eggs include the Hen with Sapphire Pendant (1886), the Cherub with Chariot (1888), the Nécessaire (1889), the Mauve (1897), the Royal Danish (1903) and the Alexander III Commemorative (1909). Some were listed in Bolshevik inventories after the revolution and may have been sold abroad in the Soviet push to raise cash from czarist treasures. Others seem to have vanished before the inventories were made. For several, only old photographs or descriptions survive.

The best reason to keep looking is the Third Imperial Egg, a gold egg of 1887 that was also once on the missing list. A scrap dealer in the American Midwest had bought it for about $14,000, planning to sell it for its gold. Around 2012 he searched online, recognized his egg in a news photo, and took it to the London dealers Wartski, who confirmed it and put it on show in 2014. It was valued in the millions. If one imperial egg could hide in plain sight, others might too.

Masamune is often called the greatest swordsmith Japan ever produced, and the Honjo Masamune is the most famous blade linked to his name. It takes that name from General Honjo Shigenaga, who is said to have claimed it in 1561 after an opponent's stroke split his helmet. The sword later passed to the Tokugawa shoguns, whose family kept it for centuries, and it was later recognized as a Japanese national treasure.

Then came the end of World War II. Under the American occupation, Japanese citizens were ordered to surrender weapons. In December 1945, Tokugawa Iemasa, head of the family, handed over fourteen swords, the Honjo Masamune among them, at a police station in the Mejiro district of Tokyo. Accounts say the swords were then passed to an American sergeant recorded under the name Coldy Bimore. No soldier by that name has ever been traced, which suggests the name was garbled in the paperwork or simply false.

Nothing about the sword has been confirmed since. It may sit unrecognized in an American attic, belong to a quiet private collector, or have been lost or destroyed. Collectors and historians have not given up hope that it survives.

In April 1865, with Union troops closing on Richmond, the collapsing Confederate government fled south with what remained of its treasury. One shipment that left Danville, Virginia, on April 6 carried $327,022 in gold and silver coin, bullion and donated jewelry, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Separately, Richmond banks sent along roughly $450,000 of their own money. Much of the Confederate treasury ended up in Georgia, where most of it was paid out to soldiers before Jefferson Davis was captured near Irwinville on May 10.

The bank money is where the mystery starts. It was left in Washington, Georgia, and later loaded onto wagons to be moved under Union escort. On the night of May 24, 1865, the wagons stopped at or near the Chennault plantation in Lincoln County, and raiders struck. They made off with $251,029. Bank officials eventually recovered about $111,000, which leaves well over $100,000 never accounted for.

A Union general who investigated arrested and abused members of the Chennault family, who were innocent, and was removed from command. Since then, stories of buried coins have attached themselves to farms, creek beds and churchyards across the region. No confirmed cache from the 1865 robbery has ever been found.

On July 6, 1907, days before King Edward VII was due in Dublin, officials discovered that a safe in Dublin Castle was missing its most precious contents. Gone were the diamond-studded star and badge of the Order of St. Patrick, along with several gold collars. Rubies, emeralds and Brazilian diamonds were involved. The pieces came to be called the Irish Crown Jewels, though they were really ceremonial regalia.

The safe had not been forced, which pointed to someone with a key. It sat in the library of the Office of Arms because it was too big to fit through the strongroom door. Sir Arthur Vicars, the official responsible, had been careless with keys in the weeks before; according to Atlas Obscura, a door key had gone missing and doors had been found unlocked. A £1,000 reward went unclaimed.

Instead of a public trial, a closed commission in 1908 examined Vicars's conduct rather than the crime itself, found him negligent, and he lost his post. No one was ever charged. A 1998 claim that the jewels were hidden on Vicars's old estate turned out to be a hoax, and some historians suspect the stones were broken up and sold long ago.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers buzzed the side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, claiming they were answering a disturbance call. The guard on duty let them in. The two guards on shift were soon handcuffed and tied up in the basement. The thieves spent 81 minutes inside.

They left with 13 works, including Vermeer's The Concert and Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Another Rembrandt painting, five Degas drawings, Manet's Chez Tortoni, a Chinese bronze beaker and a Napoleonic eagle finial went too. The haul has been valued at around $500 million, making it the largest art theft in U.S. history.

In 2013, the FBI announced it believed it knew who the thieves were and that the art had moved through Connecticut and Philadelphia, but it did not name them publicly, and nothing was recovered. The museum offers a $10 million reward for information leading directly to the safe return of the works. Inside the museum, the empty frames still hang where the paintings used to be, as placeholders for their return.