Has anyone found something unusual or valuable inside an old house?

Has anyone found something unusual or valuable inside an old house? Maybe behind a wall, in a ceiling panel or it was under floorboards.

The house I live in is about 100 years old, while I was searching through my tiny broom closet this was hidden above the ceiling, on a small ledge and I just sold it on Craigslist for $30.50:

 

some friends bought an old house and they found a beer bottle from the 20's. Still had the original cap but no paper on the sides.

 

I have heard stories about workers using empty cavities as garbage disposals or maybe back in the day that was poor man's insulation.

 

My Dad & I visited the house he was born in, grew up in and eventually left to start his own family - I found a couple things:
an aluminum lighter - about 1940's vintage - SIMILAR
and a defunct leg trap for small game

The lighter is precious due to circumstances - and yes, it works.

 

yeah it was under the crawlspace, prob just garbage...the brewery was long since gone out of business. I'll have to remember to take a pic.

 

When I was doing some sheerwalling in my basement I found 3 or 4 unopened packages of ~1/4” drills that, iirc, were about a century old. I found them on tucked in between two floor joists, on top of a perimeter wall. The builders must have floored right over them. They were just wrapped in paper like an old pack of baseball cards, and covered in grease. Think they were about 10¢ / pack with I think 12 drills in each.

My neighbors were doing a community project a few years ago, digging up some unused section of a lot behind an apartment building to use as a community garden (currently overgrown with weeds). One of them dug up an old rifle in its case. Fuckin crazy liberal proggy (no offense - he’s actually pretty cool and gives me haircuts) called the police and handed it over. I guess that was the right thing to do but I’d surely have kept it if the rightful owner couldn’t have been found. And if it would have been legal, of course

Edit: made up the price and date of the drill bits, but here they be:

 

I found a vintage glass beer bottle when I moved in from Lawrence, Ma, called 'Diamond spring ale', I think it was a local brewery and sold in small batches. The bottle was used to store oil but looks in great condition. The best part about the bottle is the statement on the top "Taxes paid at the rate prescribed by the internal revenue law".

 

The drill bits sounds like they were preserved if they were covered in grease, that would cool "man cave" stuff, as would be the gun too.

 

Thats cool! I have found some small bottles and stuff like that in old dump sites from the early 1900's..but nothing really too exciting in houses...we did find some worl war II newspapers that they used for wallpaper in an old school we were tearing down for a summer project for the city. I think they saved them somewhere

 

Any company called "The National twist drill & tool company" is cool IMO.

 

Found some porn pages when I removed the carpet. Nothing special

 

Finding newspapers would be a kind of date stamp when the work was being done. Some old bottles can be worth a lot of money to the right collector.

 

Yep they are well preserved. Not a speck of rust. They packed that grease in there heavy.

 

yeah, they werent too collectable I dont think...old listerine, old aspirin bottles etc. I like digging them up not really concerned on value unless it was worth a couple thousand or something

 

I heard of someone that bought an old house, took a wall down and found $7k or 8k cash

 

Found two newspaper from when Germany and Japan surrendered. Don't know if they are worth anything but I think they are cool.

 

Right after my mom died, I was cleaning out a very old hardwood dresser and found a collection of 1930's-1940's era coins stuck in a number of gaps in the body of the dresser (not in the shelves).

 

What kind of coins?

 

Found an old pocket watch when I was 12 or 13 in the remains of an old farm house near a pond we fished in.

It was in such nice condition I was sure it should work. Being a kid, I tried to take it apart to fix it. Realized I had messed up when the face broke and it was ceramic...I still have the silver back to it somewhere. It's engraved with leaves and vines.

 

I found an old bomb shelter in my back yard during the closing/purchase process of my house. A month after getting moved in I bought a sump pump and drained it (it had 6 feet of standing water) and got to check it out for the first time. On the far wall there was a lock box, opening that I found ...
a child's makeshift tea set and some doll clothes that disintegrated when I picked them up.

Well crap, I was hoping for something more profound than that.