If you’ve ever dreamed of finding buried treasure, this incredible story will give you a new reason to hope!
An Imgur user posting under the name branik12 recently took to the image-sharing website to show the world an incredible discovery.
The 35-year-old DIY builder had been working to remodel his family’s home for a few years now.
He completed the revamp of first and second floors, and decided that it was time to tackle the basement.
Like the devoted grandson that discovered a safe in the floor while renovating his grandparents’ house, branik12 had no idea that his house was full of buried treasure, until he started working and found a mysterious green tin box.
What he discovered during the project will send DIY enthusiasts all over the country running down cellars to see whether their houses are hiding any valuable secrets, too.
Scroll through below to see the spectacular riches he found inside!
Imgur user branik12 is an enthusiastic do-it-yourselfer and has been working his way slowly through his family home for years now.
The young man explains, "So my family and I have been living in our house we bought some years back. The house was built in the late '40s. I am a 35-year-old do-it-yourselfer, so I had remodeled everything on the first and second floor when it came time to remodel the basement."
When he got to tackling the basement, he peeled the walls back to the cinderblock, and then started clearing the old, dusty ceiling down to the beams.
That's when he found something unexpected hiding inside the ceiling: an old metal box.
Intrigued by the discovery, he couldn't help but hope that there would be something exciting in the box!
The box was clearly full. He writes, "It has something inside, but not heavy like coins or gold bars. Might get lucky though. Could be old sports cards?"
Old baseball cards could have been a valuable discovery, but what he actually found was worth so much more!
Documenting the whole process, he opened the box and discovered that it was full of vintage newspaper and "a few packages wrapped in what looks like wax paper."
Clearly, this box had been tucked away for a long time — probably decades.
Branik12 knows that the house was built in the 1940s, and explained in a post comment that it was first owned by a woman who was in her 50s at the time.
The mysterious contents of the box were wrapped up in a now-vintage newspaper.
Assuming the original owner of the box just wrapped up his stash in yesterday's paper, this particular broadsheet, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, dates the box to 1951.
The sheet, which looks like the sports page, is full of interesting vintage tidbits, including an ad for "light" cigarettes and a fluff piece about a pin-up girl learning how to bowl.
But the newspaper, while interesting, wasn't the main attraction.
It's hard not to be focused on those wax-paper packages, which show a definite hint of green.
Even before unwrapping the packages, branik12 and his wife had concluded they were dollar bills, and were feverishly hoping that there could be as much as $1000 wrapped up there!
Their wish seemed like it was about to come true when they unwrapped the first package and discovered it was a giant wad of mid-century twenty dollar bills.
They were thinking, "There could be a couple thousand here!"
Then, they unwrapped the next package, and discovered that this one was entirely made-up of 50s.
They unwrap the final package and discover that, incredibly, this one is all 100 dollar bills.
At this point, the excited homeowners were freaking out, understandably so! This is like winning the lotto and learning an awesome history lesson all in one!
They quickly counted up the total, and calculated that they were looking at a fortune of about $20,000.
But because the bills are all dated between 1928 and 1934, and some of them have special brown and gold markings, they weren't about to go spend their windfall right away. There's a good chance that some of these bills are worth a lot more than $100 or $50!
With some googling and a trip to the appraiser, branik12 quickly learned that those brown and gold marked bills are actually pretty rare, and worth quite a pretty penny!
All told, their incredible find is estimated to be worth $23,000.
He and his wife are still working with a lawyer to determine whether the money really belongs to them, but so far, things are looking as promising. As far as they can tell, the woman who owned the house in 1951 seems to have passed away decades ago.
Still, there's no way of knowing the history of that money, so they still have some puzzle solving! Since all the bills date to the prime gangster era of the late '20s and early '30s, they could even be looking at mob money or the haul from a bank heist!
But no matter where the money came from, it's pretty awesome to find a real-life buried treasure like this one, don't you think?
If you're stunned by this incredible find, make sure to SHARE with friends and family!
