BagOfNothing.com

MILWAUKEE — Dan Deming had heard the rumors about the buried treasure on his central Wisconsin farm.

At first he made some halfhearted attempts to find it, and then searched in earnest for two or three years after receiving a metal detector for his birthday.

“I don’t know what I thought, if I thought it was really there or not,” he said.

The mystery ended recently while Deming was tearing down a 100-year-old shed on his property. A rusted box tumbled from the rubble and wads of currency dating back to the Depression spilled on the ground.

“I couldn’t believe it. I started running to the house with it,” Deming, 34, said Sunday. “My wife thought I broke my arm because I was just hooting and hollering.”

The bills were so deteriorated that it was hard to count the money. But the box also contained scraps of newspaper with dollar amounts written on them, a possible tally of the loot.

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Mourning is a strange thing, and different cultures deal with it in vastly different ways. But there’s a reason people associate the Victorians above all with morbidity and death, and one of them is memento mori like this:

The fact is, postmortem photographs like this were taken more than any other kind of photograph in the Victorian era — especially in the U.S. — and in many cases these carefully-arranged, meticulously staged pictures were the only ones ever taken of their subjects. From Stanley Burns’ book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America:

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