In Search of the Montreal Casque of The Secret Armchair Treasure Hunt: Six Questions with Evan Hoovler

This is the seventh of a series of Six Questions with dedicated searchers of The Secret (A Treasure Hunt) published in 1982 by Byron Preiss.  Each Six Questions of the series takes a look into a proposed location for a buried Casque of The Secret Armchair Treasure Hunt. There were 12 buried casques of which only two have ever been found. When will the next one be brought to surface?

The following takes a look at the believed location for a Casque in Montreal. Evan Hoovler, who has been a longtime fan of the Secret and is a moderator for the newest Secret-themed treasure hunt, Tribute: The Hunt for the 13th Casque, offers incredible insights into not only the Montreal Casque, but all of them.

Evan is also editor-in-chief of the popular fantasy football comedy site, footballabsurdity.com, has a book, Teaching with Comedy, coming out June 13th from Kaplan Test Prep’s publishing house, and wants to be your facebook friend. You are sure to laugh and enjoy the following Six Answers by the all talented Evan Hoovler, and want to join in on the adventures! Another casque is bound to be found soon!

It is believed Image 9 matches with Verse 5 leading to Montreal

• 1Q) When did you first hear about The Secret?

May 30, 2013

I frequent the SomethingAwful.com forums, home to impressively cutting-edge comedy nestled in mountains of impressively horrible posting. In 2013, forums user Allta posted a decently comprehensive summary of the hunt so far: SUMMARY

At the time I was waiting around the hospital while my wife recovered from having a basketball-sized fibroid tumor removed, so I had time to kill. I like puzzles, having designed dozens of puzzles for the computer game Puzzle Agent 2, and the parallel of trying to pull a casque out of the ground while doctors pulled a casque-sized growth out of my wife had esoteric appeal.

• 2Q) What inspired you to look for the Montreal Casque?

I like looking for all of them. The Quest4Treasure forums are fun because you can see people working on each puzzle stretching back 15+ years. Watching these eccentric-yet-charming characters work their way through potential evidence has been just as entertaining for me as solving the puzzle itself.

Image 9 always stood out to me for several reasons. First, it’s the only image that doesn’t have some sort of enchanting magic going on. It’s literally just a person. Why? Why not touch it up with a fairy nearby or a window with a disorienting number of moons? I started looking to see if there was more to it than at first glance. After over 5 years, I can definitely announce that… I am still looking and have found nothing deeper than what is there at initial sight.

Second, the legeater was perhaps the most astonishing discovery in the entire history of the hunt. A four-inch statue that nearly exactly matched the image and can be found nowhere else in the U.S or Canada?

Usually people find a lat/longitude that points to a city, or a park reference. The legeater took a search spanning two countries and pinpointed it to a city block.

Finally, it’s in Montreal, which is the one of the most exotic and culturally rich locations in The Secret, second only to “under some smog-choked freeway ramp in Boston.”

• 3Q) What makes you believe the Casque is in Montreal? Would you mind sharing some of the highlights of your solution?

The Legeater is obviously the smoking gun here, but what shocks me is that no one really seems to talk much about the other image matches right there outside the Mount Stephen Club. I think this might be in part due to the wiki proposing image matches that go all over the place with no sense of connection. A humorous example of this is the comparison of the cross-hatching around the neck of image 9 to a 1980 trading card for a Montreal auto race:

On July 4, 2013, this card was put forth as a totally-satirical image match by SomethingAwful dot com forums user Merlot Brougham: To reinforce that it was comedy, he rotated it, mirrored it, and highlighted only like five of the hundreds of lines to show a “match.” I’ve reached out to him while writing this, and he confirmed it was posted entirely in jest.

Well, the pbworks wiki now lists that trading card as “the only strong match” for the cross-hatching on the brown neck area of image 9:

Hey, it might be a match, but I doubt it. With Cleveland and Chicago, the artist did a solid job of making sure the obscure images near a dig spot were exact, right down to the odd lean of the post in the Chicago fence. The legeater, save for some artistic creativity around the nose, is an exact match. If Preiss was going to reference something as obscure as the background of an auto racing trading card, why would he ever pair that with abstract creases in the characters clothes?

It’s funny that it is called, “the only strong match.” If one simply goes on Google maps, pulls up the legeater, and looks at the building immediately to the right, one will see this building:

Let’s zoom in on that brickwork:

It’s not a perfect match. Not even close. But it’s at least as good a match as that auto race card, and it’s right next to the legeater. Oh, and check out that unusual wall pattern next to the brickwork:

That’s a decent match, right down to the windowsills above and below it. All of this is within 10 metres of each other (if you don’t know the metric system, 10 “metres” in Canada works out to about 10 “meters” in the U.S.) Throw in the fleur-de-lis between the legeater and that building, and we’ve got one exact image match, two really good image matches, and one kinda-okay-but-still-better-than-that-auto-race-trading-card match. All of these are crowded together on the same side of the street in 1/4 of a city block. So why have people been combing from Mount Royal all the way to Olympic Stadium to find other matches? We should be trying to find historical photos of what the area looked like in 1980. Assuming the dig spot is in view of all four, that’s only like 1/3 of a city block that needs covering!

Now, it’s been debated that Preiss simply hopped the fence of the Mount Stephen Club and buried it in their lawn. The Club has been remodeled extensively, so if it was there it was gone. I must admit, I was once a proponent of the “MSC Lawn theory.” Quest4Treasure user Gmantexas and I had a very illuminating debate about it. My argument was that, after Preiss buried it, the Bantam books legal team contacted Preiss telling him he had to cover his tracks so they wouldn’t get sued. So Preiss scribbled out the fleur de lis and added “get permission to dig out.”

Gmantexas took the other side. Although his reasons were well-thought-out and clearly stated, they can really be boiled down to “dude, he didn’t jump the fence and bury it in some rich club’s lawn. Come on!”

Since that debate, I have come to realize Gmantexas is most likely right, and I was very wrong. Something happened in my life to set me this way: I landed a book deal (Teaching with Comedy, in stores June 23rd, featuring artwork by Matthew Sparks and George Ward). It’s being published by a small company under the umbrella of a much larger publishing company. This is similar to how Preiss published The Secret under his own then-small company, backed by the powerhouse Bantam Books. The back-and-forth of the process has taught me that large publishing companies’ legal teams do not mess around. There wouldn’t be a “oh, hey, we might get sued so go ahead and add 5 words to the verse and scribble out some tiny thing and I guess it’s alrighty then.” It would be more like “what have you done!? You buried it in the private yard of one of the wealthiest clubs in Montreal? Wealthy people have powerful lawyers, get that image and verse out of the book or we are going to get court-blasted into the stone age!”

You might be saying, “well maybe Preiss didn’t tell them exactly where it was buried.” Sure, but I am 100% sure Bantam’s legal team would’ve demanded to know at least the general area, much of which points to the Mount Stephen Club, and then asked, “okay, you don’t have to tell us exactly where, but please promise us it’s not in the lawn of that super-elite private building?” So, I am now definitely of the faction that thinks it wasn’t buried in the yard of the Mount Stephen Club, but somewhere nearby.

And that’s great, because it means it might not be destroyed. That’s the best part of being a pessimist: When I’m wrong it means things turned out good!

So, if not in the MSC yard, then where? Well, we have such a small area, combined with such precise directions (provided that verse 5 matches with image 9), that I think all we need are historical photos from the time to put the final piece into place. Let’s examine the dig spot instructions from that verse:

Beneath the only standing member

Of a forest

To the south

White stone closest

At twelve paces

From the west side

Get permission

To dig out.

Okay, so we find a photo of the block from 1981, find a white stone, go twelve paces and dig. We probably don’t even need all those landmarks, this is a city block so it would have to be in a planter or somewhere obvious… In the area there are several dirt patches with trees.

“Beneath the only standing member of a forest to the south” might mean “start at the north side of a tree.” There’s currently a tree on the west side of the MSC:

(Keep in mind this photo faces south, so west is to the right)

Okay we’re at the west side. Take 12 paces from the west side and it puts us right about at that other tree. Because the sidewalk slopes at a slight angle so it’s not exactly east-west, standing at the north side of the first tree and walking due west puts us right at the second tree. If you go back about a decade on Google Streetview, there are just patches of dirt, so perhaps trees have come and gone over the years. Maybe in 1980 the casque was buried in the loose dirt there. Maybe it still is.

Now, you might be saying, “why would Preiss write “the only standing member of a forest, when you have cited two trees,” or “what about the white stone close at hand?” or “why would he tell us to get permission?” To which I respond, “what are you just reading this article to point out what’s wrong with my solve? Are you a treasure-hunter hunter?” Maybe there was no tree at the end there in 1980. Maybe there was a white stone somewhere near. Maybe there wasn’t, but I think that tracking down that info would be a lot more useful than wandering all over Montreal looking for wingless birds ascending or whatever.

• 4Q) What is the most unique thing you found while searching or what did you enjoy most about your search?

For Montreal, I loved when we first started focusing on Google Streetview. A few of us, including Josh Cornell (he can be cool sometimes) and Erexere started a virtual tour walking around the area and discussing possible matches. As a writer with two small children, I don’t get many chances to venture out and explore in the real world, so being able to do in online is one of the few things keeping my life from becoming a The Shining-like situation.

• 5Q) What would you say is the major obstacle preventing a successful unearthing of the Casque?

Same thing keeping all the other casques in the ground: People reinventing the wheel instead of digging up photos and putting boots on the ground in areas where skilled veteran solvers are looking.

Take the Cleveland solve: It wasn’t until quest4treasure user Johann posted a picture of the wall that anyone suspected Cleveland. A photo of the area that was unchanged since 1982 led to the casque.

Take Chicago: To this day, the dig spot isn’t available on street view. Boots on the ground led to the casque.

You have this flood of new solvers, most of who decide that these casques haven’t been found because everyone’s been doing it wrong, then piece together hugely speculative interpretations using maps and google satellite and creative interpretations of poetry. Yet the solved casques required photos and boots on the ground.

New Orleans is a classic modern example: People flooded the New Orleans online channels with new verse pairings, landmarks found on Google Image Search, even inventive new ways to solve like playing with the images on a computer or looking at topography. But did that advance the hunt to a new perfect image match discovery? No. What did was George Ward, John Michaels, and Brett Zingler going to New Orleans, following one of the most popular paths to a solve, seeing a new area that was in view of the general solve spot, then saying, “oh, this column is an exact match to the oddly asymmetrical clock base, which doesn’t really show up through any online resource.”

Boots on the ground and being observant works. Coming up with the thousandth flowery interpretation of the verse doesn’t. Seriously, every single object that’s not lying on the ground is “a wingless bird ascended.” Well, except for, you know, birds. Spotting some raised up thing isn’t going to be a smoking gun that leads to a Montreal dig spot.

• 6Q) Do you have any advice for someone else looking for this treasure or is there something more you would like to add?

Take constructive criticism. Brian Zinn was looking in Philadelphia until Johann posted the Greek Garden wall. Zinn said, “oh, I’ve been wrong, I will adjust my plan” and went and got a casque. Rob Wrobell and his team were digging around the fencepost area until they decided to call Preiss, then said “oh, we’re kind of off. Let’s adjust our plan.” Yet so many people become convinced that their initial interpretation of the puzzle is the only correct one, even though that didn’t work for the two solved puzzles.

Being able to say, “hmmm, I like this image match initially, but now I see that this other proposed match is better,” and “I think I have the general area. Rather than pigeonholing a dig spot based on some loose interpretation of images and verse lines, let me actually go there and take a bunch of pictures and maybe someone else can spot the final piece to this puzzle” will go a long way towards finally getting another cask out of the ground.

But, hey, if you’re having fun, feel free to ignore my advice and do whatever makes you happy. That’s ultimately what the hunt is all about.

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