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Dylan Thuras: Hi, Johanna.
Johanna Mayer: Hey, Dylan. I’m here with a piece of local news for you today. It is about a time capsule.
Dylan: I love a time capsule because they’re just some wacky thing that someone comes up with and then people forget about it. And some, I don’t know, like I just, there are these funny little, these funny little things.
Johanna: Yeah. And I also find them very sweet, almost sort of provincial. And I mean that in a good way. They’re like this extremely low tech thing that—I think it says something about our human nature that we make these things. But the time capsule that we are talking about today is not just any time capsule. It is the world’s largest time capsule. It’s in Seward, Nebraska, which is like half an hour outside of Lincoln. And as of this recording mid-July, 2025, the world’s largest time capsule has been opened.
Dylan: What secrets from the past will it contain? What great treasures will it hold? All right. Well, I can’t wait to find out what is in the world’s largest time capsule. I’m Dylan Thuras.
Johanna: I’m Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura. We are cracking open the world’s largest time capsule.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: Okay, so the world’s largest time capsule has been opened. What are we talking about here? Like time capsules come in a lot of shapes and sizes. You know, they can be a locked room. They can be a locked box. They can be just a little shoebox, buried in someone’s yard.
Johanna: It is like a full-blown structure. So basically, all you can see from the ground is this giant pyramid. It’s white, made out of some sort of stone. And it’s big. I would say it’s probably about the height of two people stacked on top of each other.
Dylan: That’s serious.
Johanna: Honestly?
Dylan: That’s kind of a big pyramid.
Johanna: It’s a big pyramid. It honestly looks sort of like the entrance to some sort of cult chamber or something.
Dylan: Yes. Yes.
Johanna: Okay, so that’s like one level is this pyramid, which is part of the time capsule. But then beneath it is this 45-ton vault, and that is where the bulk of the time capsule resides.
Dylan: This is a two-chambered time capsule with a—
Johanna: It’s a multi-chambered time capsule, yes.
Dylan: This is very National Treasure. Who built this? How did this come to exist?
Johanna: Okay, so yes, that is one thing about this time capsule is that it is in the yard of the person who built it. It’s like just next to their house.
Dylan: This is dad’s project gone wildly awry.
Johanna: One hundred percent. So it was built by a guy named Harold Keith Davisson. I was not able to talk with Harold himself. He is dead. But I did get in touch with his daughter, and I barely caught her. She said she had been on the phone with reporters all day talking about the opening of this time capsule.
Dylan: Oh, wow.
Trish Davisson Johnson: My name is Trish Davisson Johnson. I live in Sioux, Nebraska, have lived here most of my life. My father put in a time capsule in 1975, and I have been the keeper of the crypt ever since.
Dylan: This is sweet.
Johanna: Keeper of the crypt.
Dylan: I love that she called herself the keeper of the crypt. This is really doing her father’s memory proud. Okay, what else did she have to say about this?
Johanna: Well, for one thing, she basically lives and breathes the time capsule.
Trish: I actually sleep in my childhood bedroom. When you have a time capsule in the yard, you can’t very well sell the house. So we moved back in after my parents died.
Dylan: Oh, wow. That’s like really serious dedication. Like, oh, like, wow.
Johanna: And it is like a—I think it’s like a high-touch management job because she’s talked about how she occasionally has to shoo visitors away who are trying to climb on. Like, Seward, Nebraska is a college town, so she would occasionally—
Dylan: Kids and drunk people love to climb a pyramid.
Johanna: Yeah, can’t resist.
Dylan: Of course. I would be the one being shooed away there almost definitely.
Johanna: So Trish has been the person sort of at the helm of caring for this time capsule since her dad died. And she said that there was basically no one like him.
Trish: You can’t really define him. He grew up in an era of poverty. He was raised by a widowed mother and had two older sisters, and he spent a lot of time scrounging for himself. He had a lot of, a lot going on in his head, and a lot of it came out. He put out a newsletter every two weeks—actually in his basement—newsletter every two weeks with a circulation up to 40,000.
Johanna: That’s like a huge circulation. If he made that a sub-stack, he’d be rolling in it.
Dylan: This would be his whole career. That’s amazing. The more I find out about Harold, the more I like him.
Johanna: Yeah. So this is clearly a guy who had, like, boundless physical and mental energy. And in 1974, Harold got the idea to make this time capsule with the explicit intent to open it 50 years later on July 4th, 2025. And Trish says that he was really thinking not about people a thousand years in the future, but just about his own grandchildren, who were toddlers at the time. But he also made a point to open it up to the community, and he invited people outside of his family from the town of Seward and beyond to put stuff in the capsule. So he hired a construction company to dig this giant hole in his yard, and completed it the next year in 1975, and called it “the world’s largest time capsule.”
Dylan: Is it actually the world’s largest time capsule? I mean, it sounds huge. But I also feel like, from what I know about Harold so far, this might be just a thing that he felt like he—
Johanna: Potentially an exaggerator.
Dylan: Yeah, or maybe even like, I could just say this because why not? You know?
Johanna: Funny you should ask. This did become a whole thing. So in 1977, which is two years after just the vault portion was completed, no pyramid yet, the Guinness Book of World Records did certify Harold’s time capsule as the largest in the world. But Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, immediately freaked out and said that their Crypt of Civilization is the largest time capsule, which is—
Dylan: I know about this one.
Johanna: You know about it.
Dylan: I know about this one, yeah. It’s like from a long time ago. I think they sealed it in like the 1940s, and it’s been to be opened in some—
Johanna: The year, like, 8,000, yeah.
Dylan: Yeah. Which like, guys, no. No one, your time capsule is not like, too much will have happened by that time, I think.
Johanna: The other thing is that the Crypt of Civilization is basically just like a sealed off room in a campus building. There was no, you know, no locked box or anything. It’s just a room that has not been opened. Harold argues that that therefore means it’s not a time capsule. The Guinness Book of World Records did eventually settle the argument by simply removing the time capsule category.
Dylan: Cowards. You cowards. Take a side.
Johanna: Yeah. But in any case, just to be extra sure, Harold went a step further and constructed the giant pyramid on top of the vault and was like, now I definitely have the world’s largest time capsule.
Dylan: Dude. Way to go, Harold. First off, just excellent job. Really good. And now it’s open. And now it’s open as of a week ago.
Johanna: It is.
Dylan: This is the completion of an extremely epic arc of story. I kind of love the concept of time capsules in general. When did this start as a, like as a thing? When were people starting to be like, hey, we got to bury stuff for the future. What they’re going to want in the future is the stuff we’ve got now.
Johanna: So the word time capsule, the phrase was coined at the 1939 World’s Fair, which took place in New York City. So for this World’s Fair, Westinghouse Corporation, which is an electronics company, developed a time capsule and they buried it 50 feet below Corona Flushing Meadows Park in Queens and set it to be open 5,000 years in the future in the year 6,939. But of course, this one in Queens from the World’s Fair is just one of many. There’s of course like Voyager 1 and 2, which were shot out into space. There’s the future—
Dylan: Oh, right. Those are kind of like time—I never thought about them as time capsules.
Johanna: I would think of those as time capsules.
Dylan: And those ones will actually exist in a million or even a hundred million years.
Johanna: Somewhere.
Dylan: If they don’t hit something.
Johanna: They’ll be out there somewhere.
Dylan: They’ll be out there.
Johanna: For someone to find.
Dylan: I wonder how long. Anyway, go on.
Johanna: There’s also the Future Library Project. Maybe you know about that. So this is a project where they collect an original work by a popular writer every year from—it’s from 2014 to 2114. And the works will remain unread and unpublished until 2114. And they grew this whole forest specifically to house these works. We have an episode about that.
Dylan: Yeah. Margaret Atwood has a book that’s going to be published. She’s got a work that’s for that paper from those trees, but will only be published in like 2114 and like no one can see it until then.
Johanna: So this is obviously a thing, but like people have been doing this for much longer than the 1939 World’s Fair. Did you know about the time capsule that John Adams and Paul Revere made?
Dylan: No, I have—is this a real thing that they did?
Johanna: It’s real, yeah, yeah. It was discovered in 2014. It’s like a little box. They laid it within the cornerstone of the Boston Statehouse in 1795 to commemorate the building and the imminent 20th anniversary of American independence. And there were some coins in there and the seal of the Commonwealth and a silver plate.
Dylan: This is so cute. This is like John Adams and Paul Revere like off on our little mission to sneak and hide a time capsule in the statehouse is really very charming. But they didn’t like—did they tell anybody?
Johanna: I don’t think they told anybody about it, which I love, it’s their own little private joke.
Dylan: That’s really nice. I just love it. There’s something very human about this. It really acknowledges that we exist in a brief moment in time. You’re trying to sort of say like this is the stuff that matters at this point in time. All right, well, so this all leads us back to the big question. What the hell was in Harold’s giant multilevel time capsule? What did this guy feel like, “All right. Here’s what I’ve got to save for the future.”
Johanna: There was a motorcycle.
Dylan: Cool.
Johanna: A teal leisure suit. Very fetching.
Dylan: Extremely cool.
Johanna: A lot of pet rocks down there. Love that. This was the ’70s. And there was a brand new Chevy Vega car inside, like a full-on car.
Dylan: Famously crummy car.
Johanna: Yes. Okay, yes.
Dylan: The Chevy Vega is like a terrible car.
Johanna: Famously bad car, yes. But there was also about 50,000 letters that people had written. There were letters from grandparents. One family traveled all the way from Colorado for the opening. There was one young girl with her parents who came to find these recorded voice messages from members of their family that they left there. I guess they were on tapes. One man left his wedding invitation.
Dylan: Oh, there’s like a lot of like really sentimental stuff for other people.
Johanna: Yes. Oh, oh, yes. It was like a whole community thing. And I think that witnessing that was really moving for Trish as well.
Trish: People are finding stories about their family that they never knew. You know, what was my mom thinking when I was born? What was going on when my dad went off to war? Who is this woman who I always saw as a very stern grandmother? Who is she playing with this little boy and talking in these glowing terms? They’re finding all sorts of things they never knew.
Dylan: Wow. That’s really sweet. How’s Trish feeling about all of this?
Trish: Highly emotional. It’s going to be about two weeks before I can put into words what I’m feeling. My older daughter had been down in the castle when she was a toddler with her granddad. And I was there the day they were going to close it in ’77, climbed down the ladder. And I was pregnant at that time. So I can say both my daughters were in the time capsule.
Dylan: Yeah. There’s something just really beautiful about honoring this strange thing that her father did. I feel like in the last 10 years, I have never felt more uncertain about what the future holds. And I think there’s something about a time capsule that is like, it allows you to like, in a weird way, put your hopes and dreams and wishes for the future and kind of crystallize them. And then, you know, it’s like an act of hope that someone someday will open them up and see them and there’ll be someone to care and have that reaction and sort of visit you from the past. And so there’s something there’s something so lovely about it.
Johanna: Totally. And I think that we as a species, humans have a lot of anxiety about disappearing one day. Change and just, you know—
Dylan: Mortality.
Johanna: Dying.Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dylan: The big change.
Johanna: And disappearing and being forgotten is the big thing. And then I think that that manifests in many different ways, whether it’s someone wants to write a book or leave, you know, leave a mark on the place in some sort of way. And this just strikes me as such a small, simple way to achieve that.
Dylan: Totally.
Johanna: What would you put in? What would I put in a time capsule?
Dylan: That’s a good question. I think I’d put in some of the books that you know, some of the Atlas books, they represent big portions of my life and important milestones. I think I’d put in some Dungeons and Dragons dice and stuff like character sheets that my kids have made, you know, because it’s like a very sweet moment in my time with them.
Johanna: I love the people who put the voice recordings in there. I’m like, I gotta do that. It makes me just want to record everyone that I love.
Dylan: Let’s put the whole podcast in there. There’ll be 1,000 episodes of this show waiting for someone. They’re gonna be like, what is all this?
Johanna: What a treat.
Dylan: Well, I love this time capsule. And I love that Harold, the mission was completed. He had a dream, this wacky idea of putting a car in a hole in his yard.
Johanna: The logistics.
Dylan: What a thing.
Johanna: The logistics alone.
Dylan: And then and then like his grandkids actually did get to see it opened up. Let’s all live like Harold. This is like, I’m into this.
Johanna: Rock on, Harold.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Manolo Morales, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.
