That map my grandpa gave me turned out to be a treasure map for a place that never existed

I was cleaning out my garage last spring and found this old map my grandpa left me when he passed back in '09. It's this hand drawn thing on yellowed paper of a place called "Lake Verity" somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest. I showed it to my buddy who's a park ranger over in Olympic National Forest and he laughed his ass off. Turns out some guy in the 1920s made up the whole lake and the surrounding trails to sell fake fishing guides to tourists. My grandpa probably bought it at a flea market thinking it was real. It hit different because my grandpa was always the guy who believed in stuff even when it was obviously fake, like that time he swore Bigfoot was real because he saw a stump in the dark. Now I keep it framed above my workbench and it reminds me his secret weird side was actually pretty cool. Anyone else got a map they found out was completely made up?

2 comments

2 Comments

nathan8511mo ago

...and my buddy actually had that happen to him with some prospector's map he found in an old toolbox. Led him to a spot near some creek in Oregon that was supposed to have gold, spent like three weekends digging and all he found was a rusty horseshoe. He still keeps the map taped to his fridge though, says it's a good reminder not to trust everything you find at estate sales.

the_rose1mo ago

See I gotta disagree a bit here (respectfully). That map might have led him to a dead end, but the whole adventure of going out there and digging for three weekends sounds like a pretty good time honestly. Sometimes the real treasure is just getting out of the house and having a story to tell, even if it ends with a rusty horseshoe instead of gold. Plus estate sales have this weird magic to them where even the fake stuff feels special because of who owned it before. The fridge thing is actually perfect - it's not about the map being real, it's about the moment it gave him.