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Claim: Japanese woman dies in Minnesota while engaged in a search for money buried by a fictional character from the film Fargo.
Origins: The search for hidden, unclaimed treasure has kept many a dreamer occupied in pursuit of instant wealth. Rarely do such quests result in the find of anything of value, and often the target is a treasure that was likely never real in the first place. Plenty of fortune hunters have spent years trying to locate the Lost Dutchman's Mine, attempting to extract riches from the infamous "money pit" on Oak Island, or searching for buried pirate treasure — that the Lost Dutchman is largely the product of myth-making, that Oak Island has yielded no treasure despite two centuries of exploration, and that the concept of buried pirate treasure has far more to do with the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure Island than with history hasn't deterred some relentlessly faithful treasure seekers. These caches of riches, at least, have become part of the fabric of our culture through the process of hundreds of years of legend-telling, but a case at hand today may have shortened that process to a mere five In November 2001, a 28-year-old Japanese woman named Takako Konishi was found wandering around a landfill and truck stop in Bismarck, North Dakota. Fargo, as most of us know, was a 1996 film by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, about a pair of petty criminals hired by a husband to abduct his own wife in a scheme to bilk her wealthy father out of the ransom money. The plan goes awry, the wife ends up dead, and fleeing kidnapper Carl Showalter (played by Steve Buscemi), attempting to keep as much of the ransom money for himself as possible, buries his cache of cash in the snow beside a highway. Fargo was a work of fiction, but the Coen brothers' prankish placement of an opening title announcing that the film was "a true story," that "the events Bismarck police attempted, in vain, to explain to But whether Ms. Konishi was actually looking for treasure, or whether she simply wanted to go to Fargo for other reasons (perhaps to commit suicide) and overzealous police who couldn't understand her language mistakenly assumed she was hunting for the Fargo treasure, remains unresolved. As writer Paul Berczeller reported in The Guardian:
Officer Jesse Hellman told me about Takako's map, a white piece of paper, on which she had drawn a road and a tree. "That's where she wanted to go, she kept pointing at it. She kept saying something over and over, like 'Fargo' or some word like that. Like that's where she wanted to go. I remember that real clearly. But in North Dakota, practically everywhere you look, there's a road and a tree. So that didn't really help much."
A few days later, a hunter stumbled across "I had never seen the film Fargo, but another officer in the station had seen it and he told me that there was money buried in this movie. And then we started to think that she had this false impression that the money buried by a road by a tree was real in the movie. That's where she wanted to go. We thought that was really odd, but suddenly it all began to make sense." Why Ms. Konishi came to Bismarck — and whether she was searching for a non-existent treasure there Last updated: 18 January 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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