I think every family has one relative who loves to hike through the woods with a metal detector.
One of my uncles spends a lot of time searching the wooded lot behind his house.
Over the years he turned up a few arrowheads (which look suspiciously like pointy rocks) but never found any real treasure.
Meanwhile, Ryan Parsons and his girlfriend Lisa made a life-changing find during a hike near their home in West Virginia.
A mysterious box
Parsons, a pastor, had regularly gone metal detecting as a hobby, but his girlfriend Lisa had never joined him before their hike last year.
Bringing a camera along to record the event, Parsons captured the moment when he found a signal out in the woods.
His detector led the couple to a strange button, which Parsons said was from the 1800s.
Thinking there could be more Civil War-era artifacts nearby, Parsons started digging under a suspicious rock close to the button.
What he eventually turned up was a strange, antique wooden box.
"The find of a lifetime"
Parsons could barely contain his excitement, passing the camera to Lisa so she could "document" the discovery.
"This could be the find of a lifetime," he told her.
Lisa taped Parsons as he gently dusted off the box and pried it open, warning him to be careful.
Eventually the mysterious antique opened, revealing a pair of Bible verses written on parchment.
But there was one more surprise in store for the pair.
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden"
Luckily, Parsons happened to have his Bible nearby, and decoded the first verse in the box, Matthew 13:44:
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Lisa said she thought she would cry as Parsons read the verse, but he stunned her when he read the next one.
As he pulled out another box wrapped in a white cloth, Parsons read Proverbs 18:22 from memory:
He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor from the Lord.
Yes, the whole treasure hunt was a special proposal, and Parsons unwrapped the box to reveal a diamond ring for his wife.
A sneaky proposal
Before the hike, Parsons had bought an antique box from a store in town.
He stashed the ring - with a diamond from Lisa's grandmother in a new white gold setting - alongside the Bible verses in his treasure chest.
Then, Parsons buried the box, placed the antique button nearby, and waited to surprise Lisa.
Of course, she said "Yes" to the romantic gesture the moment she saw the ring, and the pair are now man and wife.
But some people really have found buried treasure in their own backyards.
A treasure chest in the backyard
Lukichev Dmitry from Kyrgyzstan was building a new outhouse beside his cabin when his shovel struck metal.
A little more digging revealed something almost unbelievable: a real life buried treasure chest, which had been hidden on the property for decades.
The contents of the chest were even more surprising: the personal belongings of a German soldier from World War 2.
Dmitry's property had once been a part of Soviet Russia, which explains why the German soldier had been there, but not why his trunk was buried.
Inside, all of the soldier's clothes and personal effects were perfectly preserved, including the money in his wallet and a few bottles of rum.
There were even boxes of cigars in perfect condition, still waiting to be smoked after more than 60 years underground.
Historians took possession of the box, hoping the soldier's name tag would help them track down his descendants.
Have you ever stumbled across any buried treasure?
[H/T: InspireMore]