Legacy

What I’m about to relate happened 50 years ago.  My name is Jonathan Gold and I’m 76 years old.  This tale which most will read and say it’s a tall one, is in fact the truth.  I will admit it is nearly unbelievable and if I didn’t know personally that it is fact, I wouldn’t believe it either.  Nevertheless, this is what happened.

In my younger years I worked for a State Hospital located in Topeka, Kansas.   I had occasion to go through our thousands of feet of utility tunnels connecting the buildings on over three hundred acres to the  power plant.  It was my job to keep tabs on all hospital property at least once a year.  Fans and welders would be located at different spots in the tunnels.   Sometimes there were side rooms off of a tunnel.

A story I’d heard told was about one of our Maintenance people who found a bed and wood working shop set up in one such offset area.  A patient was assumed to be responsible as not all wards were locked wards.  However, no one was ever specifically identified as having set it up.  I now have doubts about that having been done by a patient even though patients were notorious in getting into places. The reason for that doubt will be obvious as my story unfolds.

The floors of the utility tunnels were dirt; so you can imagine my surprise when I made a bit of misstep which almost caused me to stumble. Instead my foot came down in a heavy dragging motion which revealed metal on the tunnel floor under about a half inch of dry fine dirt.  I swiped my foot around and found what appeared to be a manhole cover.

I’d heard tales about a long abandoned  sewer system from the  1800’s that opened directly into the river which was  only about a half mile to the north.  With the spooky elements of strange creatures that came out of the river (you know, like camp fire stories designed to impress the listener), it made me think that possibly there was  an abandoned sewer down there.

Being the curious type, I just had to pop the cover and shine my flashlight for a look see.  Was I surprised!   I thought I’d probably look at a mud hole and get a nose full of stench.  But, no, instead I saw a ladder going down about ten feet to a metal platform.  I just couldn’t resist further investigation.  So down I went.

I arrived at the platform and shined my light around.  It illuminated a light switch.  What on earth am I looking at, I thought.  When I flipped the switch, lights came on and illuminated a metal floored path going into a corrugated steel passageway.  My curiosity being piqued even further, I forged ahead to see where it would lead.

After what seemed to be about only fifty feet, the passage opened onto a larger platform and another light switch.  As I flipped the switch, I wondered what the power source was for these lights.  Are they hooked to the hospital power supply somehow?  I’ll probably never know.  More lights came on and revealed a spiral staircase going down through what appeared to be bedrock.  That was my guess, as I’m not a geologist.   Of course, at that point my curiosity was greater than my common sense.  I might have been going to a point of no return, but that didn’t occur to me at that time.  So down I went two hundred and seventy steps or about a hundred and thirty feet.  When I’d gone two thirds of that distance, I cleared the bedrock and descended into what appeared to be an enormous cavern.

When I reached the bottom, there was another light switch which I flipped.  The light revealed I was in a huge underground opening.  It was perfectly curved at the top, like in man-made.  And the center of that curve was probably fifty feet up.

After I stopped gawking, I noticed I was standing on a wide, rather lengthy platform.  Next to it was a jaw-dropping sight.  It looked like a slow-flowing river about fifty feet wide.  I had heard old tales about a large under ground river in that area.  It was supported by reports of blind catfish being caught in a flooded, abandoned quarry with an old coal mine at its bottom.  Supposedly they had come up from said alleged under ground river.  I began   thinking a lot of things my mind was awhirl with thought.

Then my eyes focused on the impossible.  I wondered if I was really elsewhere, hallucinating from a bad taco or something.  But there it sat, bobbing in the water with hatch open and gang plank to the platform.  A U2 type World War II German Submarine.  Not possible!  A subpen deep under the middle of the United States more or less with a Nazi Sub sitting in it.  Nevertheless, there it was.  By now, it’s obvious I had more curiosity than brains.  I boarded it, entered the open hatch, and climbed down in.  Yes, another light switch to be flipped, so I did.

I looked around and everything seemed a lot like I’d seen of sub interiors in the movies, pretty standard stuff.  It was a few days later that it dawned on me why the lights in the sub worked when its vintage-implied batteries should have been long dead.

Then totally unexpectedly I spied the pile of gold bars, all with the Nazi emblem stamped in them.  My greedy little eyes lit up like Christmas tree lights.  I’m rich, I’m rich, I said to myself.

Now the bars were smaller than USA bars.  There were approximately two hundred of them.  As it turned out, they were a little over fifteen pounds each. All mine. Wow!  But how could I get them out and hide them?   For one thing, nobody would want to try to explain how they got so much Nazi gold  at a time when gold ownership in America was very limited, and one bar would exceed those limits.  Then there was the matter of how to get them out.  The stairs were many and would stress even young legs without a load.  So I decided one bar at a time was the only way possible.

I made the round trip to the sub and back once a week for four weeks and hid the gold in the attic of the five-story Main Administration building because the fourth and fifth floors had been vacated from use many years ago and were now part of my storage areas.

I knew I couldn’t take it home because the wife would think I stole it. Maybe I did technically, but what the heck?  I thought it was more like found it, and finder’s keepers.

The fifth week I went back to get a fifth bar, but got a very big surprise.  The sub was gone.   What I found was a flashing red light.  Now even the village idiot knows that means danger, so instead of standing there wondering what was happening, I decided I’d better get out of there fast.  That was a wise decision because as I turned back towards the staircase I noticed a bundle with a flashing count-down screen.  A quick glance showed eight minutes left.  I didn’t know I could climb that many stairs so fast, but fear gave me speed.  I had barely cleared the man hole back into the utility tunnel when I heard a muffled explosion and the sound of falling rock.  I sat down and shook for at least thirty minutes.  That close of a brush with sudden death rattled me.

Finally gaining my composure, I went back to my office saying to myself, so much for dreams of riches and glory.   No fame in telling my story.   If I did they would throw a net over me and I’d become a patient in the hospital in which I worked.   So silence was golden, at least up until now.

I know the reader is wondering what happened to the four  gold bars I did get out.  Fair question, and here is the answer. Over the next twenty-five years I busted it up three of the bars and took out two to three-pound chunks at a time.

In those days one couldn’t by law own bullion, just some jewelry items.   So I melted it down little by little using a home-made sluice  and blow torch to melt it,  I let it run into a cross-shaped mold I’d made, therefore an item for a necklace, and slowly peddled them to pawn shops in  four different cities.  It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good.  At least I paid for  my house and helped put my two boys through college.  Being an avid rock and semi-precious gem collector, I also amassed in my fancy wooden chest of many drawers (the one I call the money drawer) about eight hundred rather nice diamonds.  Someday my heirs will be pleased to find them.

Well and good, you say, but what about the fourth bar?  That’s a very sad story.  You see, I changed departments and in the process no longer had free access to where it was hidden.

After the  eighth year that I was in a different department, the hospital closed.  I moved away to another state and after being there ten years an old friend sent me pictures and a news article about the Main Administration building which was built in the 1800’s.  It was being torn down and demolished in spite of efforts to get it put on the historical register to save it.  That was sad.   I loved that old building.

It was then that I remembered something else.  Part of my duties on the first job was to secure and preserve really old valuables that went unclaimed after a patient’s death.  I had forgotten all about them and they were never on anyone’s mind.  They were well hidden on the fourth floor in a closet behind what I’d made appear to be trash and debris to help keep snoops from stealing them.

Sorry to say, about $5,000 worth of unclaimed valuables along with my gold bar ended up in some landfill to never be seen again.  That bar would have been worth over three hundred thousand dollars in today’s market.

After thoughts can also be interesting.  On the inside of the submarine fastened to the hull was a framed picture that might have been worth more than all the gold ten times over.  I should have taken it.  Of course, someone, especially the government, would have debunked it as a fake.  I assure you it was not.

It was a picture of Adolph Hitler shaking hands with a red-robed humanoid with a rather long face and a very large cranium.  This being appeared strange in other ways, such as slightly bluish skin, no eyebrows or hair.  But part of his forehead and scalp appeared to have scales.  Now back in those earlier days the word “aliens” was not on the tip of everyone’s tongue.  The word “freak” would have come to mind, but that was then.

Since that time I’ve seen a lot of documentary shows on the History Channel, including one that Hitler had  access  to alien technologies and may even have had personal contact.  Spooky, but it could go a long way in explaining the picture and fantastic technology it would have taken for a submarine to wind up beneath Topeka, Kansas.  Sleep well.