The Extremely Enchanting, Totally Perplexing, Possibly Never-Ending Quest for the Golden Owl

For 30 years, this labyrinthine treasure hunt has had thousands of players cracking codes and digging up the French countryside. After a sudden death and bitter disputes, will the prize ever be found?

Illustration by Molly Magnell | Story edited by Jesse Sposato

Months after he buried it in darkness, Régis Hauser still dreamt of “the beast.” Of the hole he dug at 3:30 a.m. on April 24, 1993, three feet deep somewhere in France. How he lugged the hunk of metal from his car trunk and placed it in the dirt. When he told his tale to the French newspaper Libération, he made the entombment sound faintly gothic: “I hadn’t even finished, and my hands were bloody. When it was done, I went far away, to get breakfast. I looked at myself in the mirror at the cafe. I was barely recognizable, disheveled, covered in earth.” No one had seen him in the act, or so Hauser hoped. Years later, he recounted seeing just one person during his whole expedition: a dog walker looking for his animal. How could he forget the hound’s name: Dracula.

The object Hauser buried that night was a bronze sculpture of an owl. He had promised that whoever found it could exchange it for an identical owl cast in gold, silver, onyx, diamonds and rubies, worth about 1 million francs (around €235,000, or $257,000 today, adjusted for inflation). Its location could be divined by solving 11 puzzles, a combination of riddles and illustrations, published shortly afterward in a book he wrote called On the Trail of the Golden Owl.

Nearly 30 years later, the artist who conceived of both birds, Michel Becker, hacked at the dirt on the same spot where Hauser had buried it. With thousands of people still searching in what is now the world’s longest completely unsolved armchair treasure hunt, Becker wanted to assure everyone it was still locatable and intact. He had been digging for nearly three hours when his pickax chinked on metal; he dropped to his knees and gouged soil with his bare hands. “I knew my owl, its dimensions, its weight, and I started scraping around what I thought was the edge of a wing. I was on an emotional rollercoaster.” But when he pulled off its plastic shroud, he swore loudly: It was just a tawdry rusted metal bird, not his beautiful owl. 

What had happened? It was October 2021, and Hauser couldn’t tell him; he had died 12 years earlier. “Walking with rage-filled steps, I muttered, grumbled and fulminated inside, vowing to drag [Hauser] off to the stocks.” The trail, and his collaborator’s tale, had spun him around in circles.