Some people take out loans or apply to get grant money, others stumble upon money. Treasures can be found in the strangest of places, in the oddest of ways. Here are some of the unlikely but true stories of discovered treasures:
1) From my cold, dead, and lucky hands
A retired man in Connecticut named Donald Peters (79) bought two lottery tickets at a 7-Eleven, just hours before dying of a heart attack. A few weeks after his death, his wife Charlotte (78) was going through his things, and came across the tickets. Charlotte brought them to the shop, only to find out that she just won $10 million! According to the Peters’ son, Brian, their father would certainly have appreciated the irony of the event. “He’d be very mad, he just passed away and she won a lot of money.”
2) Money down the crapper
In January of 2009, an Arizona plumber named Mike Roberts, found a 7-carat diamond, worth $70,000. It seems the ring had been flushed down the toilet at the “Black Bear Diner” in Phoenix.
3) Contract killer
Apparently, bathrooms can be pretty useful spots to hide your money, as contractor Bob Kitts from Cleveland, Ohio discovered. Kitts found $182,000 of Depression-era money hidden in a bathroom wall. He told the homeowner about the money; arguments broke out quickly on how to repartition the findings. This led to a legal battle between the homeowner and the contractor, and eventually between the found money’s family descendants who had been traced back from the return address on the envelope the money was found in. The contractor would have done well to keep his mouth shut.
4) A Hole: Lotta Gold
Jeff Bidelman, a Johnstown Rare Collectibles owner, was helping a family clean out the house their relative had abandoned over twenty years ago. As he was dragging a bag of old coins downstairs, he noticed a hole in an upstairs wall. When the first floor got torn down, a mounting pile of gold coins worth about $200,000 was found. Apparently, they had been thrown down the hole Bidelman had noticed earlier.
5) Old Money
Full-time plumber and part-time fossil hunter, Greg Riecke, was on one of his expeditions near the Riverside County Flood Control and Water Conservation District in Perris, California, when he discovered a nearly intact Mastodon tusk (one of the rarest fossils on the planet), dating anywhere from 16,000 to 2 million years old!
6) Tired of poverty
Three Mount Comfort state highway workers found $100,000 in an abandoned tire as they were picking up litter. Unfortunately, drug-sniffing dogs found the scent of drugs on the bills. Their lucky find had to be turned in to the Indiana state police.---www.cosmoloan.com