What is the Bruton Parish Mystery?

Bruton Parish Church

     There exists a cache of hidden documents, the contents of which are so powerful, that their release could forever change the course of world civilization.  For centuries these documents have been protected by a secret society known as the Order of the Illumined, or the Illuminati.  These documents have been deemed so critical to mankind’s future that they have been called the Seventh Seal.  Interestingly, these keys to the future of mankind are buried in the cemetery of the Bruton Parish Episcopal Church in colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.  The Seventh Seal cache is said to be housed in a brick vault constructed by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I.  Apparently some of Bacon’s papers were also left behind in the vault, including documentation proving his authorship of the Shakespearian plays, his original Tudor birth records showing him to be the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I, an unabridged version of the King James Version of the Bible, translated by Bacon, and more, including GOLD!

     On September 9, 1991, a group of New Age mystics did an unauthorized dig for the Bruton Vault in the dark hours of the night.  Their intention was to follow up on a dig performed in 1938 which uncovered the church’s original foundations, and to bring to the public’s attention knowledge of the precious hidden national treasure buried at Bruton Parish. Church elders were not happy with the midnight digging, and by court order, the New Age seekers were forbidden from returning to Virginia.

     In an attempt to put an end to this urban legend, Bruton Parish followed up on the midnight dig by commissioning archaeologists, including Colonial Williamsburg archaeologist Marley Brown, to retrace the steps of the 1938 excavation to answer a question that arose in 1985.  In 1985, surface tests using radar-like equipment indicated that there was something under the Bruton Parish cemetery different from untouched soil.  That something could be, the hidden Vault, a tree root, or surface dirt used to fill in the 1938 excavation.

     After seven days of once again uncovering the remains of the original church walls, workers looking for Sir Francis Bacon's vault dug about 9 feet deep and reportedly found an object with brass tacks in it. Church officials said it was a casket and would not allow them to dig further.  By August 1992 the archaeologists hired by the Parish concluded that there was no hidden Vault.  End of story.

     But this is a story that will never end because of the way it began.  New Age followers claim the 1992 church sponsored dig was bogus.  The Parish knowingly dug in the wrong places.  There may also be sinister forces at work to suppress the release of the great secret, according to some conspiracy theorists.  These sinister forces may include the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale University (of which George W. Bush is a member), as well as Colonial Williamsburg's benefactor, the Rockefeller family.

     So just how did this urban legend get started in the first place?   There was, of course, a Sir Francis Bacon.  Bacon was a well-known English philosopher, statesman, and scientist.  Bacon is regarded as the father of empiricism and the modern “scientific method”. Bacon's movement for the advancement of learning was connected with the German Rosicrucian movement. The Rosicrucians were and are a secret society built on esoteric truths of the ancient past, which, concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe and the spiritual realm.  Bacon's book New Atlantis portrays a land ruled by Rosicrucians. How did Francis Bacon, the Renaissance intellectual, become the center piece of an urban legend?  Enter one Manly Palmer Hall.

     A junior high school dropout from a broken home, Manly Palmer Hall, who had a photographic memory, became a one-stop scholar of ancient ideas.  In 1920, at the age of nineteen, the charismatic and movie star handsome Hall was running a church in Los Angeles. He delivered Sunday lectures about Rosicrucianism and Theosophy, the mystical philosophical system founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky; as well as other esoteric teachings. Alternative religious movements were busting out all over Southern California in the first half of the 20th century and the devastatingly handsome Manly Palmer Hall attracted many rich female followers, which allowed him to produce his masterwork, The Secret Teachings of All Ages.  Through his writings and endless lecturing, Manly Palmer Hall became one of the people principally responsible for the birth of the New Age religious movement in the United States, first in California, starting in the 1920s, and then beyond.

      Manly Palmer Hall and his second wife Marie Bauer Hall (they were married in 1950) are the source of the Bruton Parish mystery.  While acting as a volunteer at Hall’s church in the 1930s, the then Marie Bauer, struck up a conversation with a visitor waiting to see Hall.  The visitor was a scholar who claimed to have deciphered codes hidden in Shakespeare’s plays that told of a treasure hidden by Sir Francis Bacon under a church in Virginia.  Marie Bauer, who said she was clairvoyant, felt an immediate connection between the lost treasure described by the visitor and Bruton Parish Church.  Bauer had once been given a tea towel from Williamsburg that included a picture of Bruton Parish Church.

     Marie took her finding to Manly Hall, and together they spent many happy hours deciphering hidden codes placed in various writings contemporary to Francis Bacon, including A Collection of Emblems (George Wither, 1635) and various Shakespearean plays, which demonstrated, at least to them, that a 10 ft. by 10 ft. brick vault was buried 20 ft. deep at the Bruton Parish Church, its exact location marked by certain, strategically placed encoded memorials in the Church cemetery.  In 1938, Marie Bauer initiated an excavation which revealed the foundations of the original Bruton Church, but no hidden vault.  Marie would have been happy to continue digging up the church graveyard, but further excavation was halted by Church officials.

Urban Legends of Virginia