Sorry to call up an ancient thread, but I was reading through this one and remembered a story from my grandfather that he must have told me in the mid 1980s. When he was a little boy (around 1910) in Scranton, PA, he was playing with some other little kids, and they stumbled upon a cache. It was a hoard of gold coins stashed in a stone wall, which partly collapsed while they were playing on it. Unfortunately, they attracted the attention of a local bum who was passing by, and he chased them off angrily, screaming that the gold was "poison." Next time my grandpa saw him, he had all new clothes and looked like a million bucks.
I hope the gold really was booby-trapped with something poisonous and he died later.
Personally, I never found a cache, except for a couple of dropped change purses that don't really count. One contained a 1913 Barber dime and a 1908-D quarter, plus a stack of pennies dating from 1885-1915 that were horribly corroded around the edge. The other had a load of 1920s wheats, a 1923 Merc. in AU, and a Standing quarter that is probably 1919-s, but you can only read the "9" and the "s" due to wear.
I often wonder if I missed some caches over the years at old farmhouse foundations by refusing to dig "overload" signals. I despise getting a strong silver dollar signal, only to dig down 20 inches and find remnants of a corroded farm tool that didn't read out as iron. Thus, I usually skip the overloads. Maybe that's a mistake?