'Urban explorer' finds stash of vintage Hotel Vancouver silverware buried in the woods

In his spare time, North Vancouver’s Christian Laub enjoys searching for and collecting vintage items. So when he got a tip about a car buried in the woods near UBC late last month, he headed there with a fellow urban explorer.

While probing the ground, they hit upon some 1940s custard cups and three pieces of silverware stamped with the words "Hotel Vancouver."

“I continued my probing, and all of a sudden I hit what I could feel was a big cluster of silverware. So that’s when I knew I had to turn the video camera on,” said Laub.

He recorded as his astonished partner dug up 121 pieces of silverware with the hotel's name on them, all buried together in the same shallow hole.

“Some are half deteriorated, some are immaculate condition, so it’s a real mixed bag,” said Laub. When he posted video of the find on Instagram, other treasure hunters were in awe.

“I had quite a few metal detectors reach out to me and ask, 'What machine were you using?' I was like, 'I wasn’t using a metal detector,'" he tells CTV News.

"Somebody that looks for stuff without a metal detector, you don’t find stashes of silverware –it just doesn’t happen,” he said, adding, “It was kind of a miraculous combination of elements that all came together.”

The first thing Laub wanted to find out was how old the silverware was, and the insignia on the handles was a clue.

“It matched the same logo that Canadian National used, the train company that had their hands in (building) the hotel,” said Laub. “So the cutlery dates from somewhere when the hotel opened in 1939 to when that logo was changed in the early 60s.”

This photo shows a close-up of a piece of vintage silverware found buried in the woods near the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

His next question was harder to answer. Who buried the silverware in the woods, and why?

“This definitely had the feel of intentionally being put there at some point,” Laub said. “Everyone loves a good story, and I would love to believe that, at some time in history, there was a thief who stole all the cutlery – maybe an angry chef who quit his job or something –and somehow it ended up hidden in this forest.”

Laub has offered to donate a set of the silverware to the Hotel Vancouver. “It was also suggested to me that the Museum of Vancouver might be interested,” he said.

He also plans to keep some for himself. They’re silver-plated brass, not solid silver, so they won’t make Laub rich. But the pieces have sentimental value.

“It will go into my collection, probably I will make a shadow box, having all the pieces nicely lined up,” Laub said. “It’s an amazing memory of one of my finds.”