Imagine being given a very old and mysterious family safe, the contents of which are unknown… However, there is a catch: you must discover a way to remove the 1,000-pound object from the basement of a house that is about to be demolished. That was Jacob’s predicament when he resorted to Imgur to explain his quandary. Jacob was so preoccupied with getting the safe out of the house that he almost forgot about what he could find inside.
However, when the safe was ultimately opened, the contents shocked him.The safe was in the basement of his great-uncle’s house, but no one knew who it belonged to because the house had been in the family for decades. He set to work, knowing he only had a limited amount of time to save it: “A friend and I had a furniture dolly and thought we could get it by ourselves.
We got it on the dolly with relative ease, but when we tried to bring it up the first step, we realized we’d been beaten by an inanimate object…for the time being.””We knew man power wouldn’t be enough to pull this thing up the stairs, and we weren’t going to waste time, so we attached a tow strap to a chain and used our skid loader to pull it up the stairs and around the corner.”
“This was finally the rig that worked!” after a few different variations. Her first view of daylight in a long time.”Without much more effort, we got it installed in my garage.” I cleaned it up a little, and here she is. I learnt a lot about the safe after chatting with my grandfather about it, which I’ll discuss later, but he came out to the house and handed me a piece of paper.
It was a duplicate of the original manufacturer’s paperwork, complete with the combination! “It’s time to crack open this bad boy.””The lock’s design was unlike any I’d seen before, as it had four entries.” According to the manufacturer’s instructions, you had to spin to the first number clockwise, then 3 times counterclockwise to the second number, 2 times clockwise to the third number, and 1 time counterclockwise to the final number.
Thank god my grandfather had that document because I would never have figured that out if he had just written down the combo numbers.” “I was relieved to find that the key had already been placed into the safe. I was scared it was the end of the road when I initially opened it and saw another door.””Ray was known for being a hoarder when it came to money and was the family scrooge, so I had no idea what to expect when I turned this key.”
He liked gold, land, and vintage greenbacks, but he made most of his money on the stock market. Being a farmer in the middle of rural Illinois wasn’t paying him well, and he knew it.””Documents on top of documents!” Another keyed box yielded no results, so Jacob returned to sorting through the documents…”We discovered two different Disney Co. Stock Certificates totaling 30 shares.”
Our belief was that my great uncle’s trust (the name on the certificates) had been closed off and liquidated upon his death.”But, after some prodding from fellow Imgur users, Jacob performed some research: “After speaking with [a financial advisor] and conducting some documentation and inquiry, it was discovered that these certificates ARE still outstanding!!!…
My grandfather and I are in the process of changing the names on the certificates to remove them from my great uncle’s trust so that they can be used again.” In the end, these shares might be worth more than $50,000! What a bizarre story. You never know what hidden gems you’ll unearth or extract from an old property. Have you ever discovered something interesting among the possessions of a deceased relative?