7 Discoveries That Turned Ordinary People Into Rich Men

On a scrap heap, during sales, renovations, in the garden or in the middle of a field. Luck can come at unexpected times and places, and sometimes even in surprising ways.

O awesome.club tells below 7 stories of people who, by chance, found things that made them very rich.

In the city of Windber, US state of Pennsylvania, an old house spent 20 years abandoned. One day, during a game, children entered the house and found a handful of old coins next to a wall. When the little ones told the adults about the discovery, some people went to the place and destroyed a wall, finding hundreds of coins behind it.

According to calculations, there were 8,500 dollars in there. But among the common coins there were some rare ones, produced in limited editions between the years 1793 and 1857, whose value was estimated at 200 thousand dollars.

In the Australian town of Ballarat, a local farmer walked through vacant lots near his home with a metal detector. As soon as the device activated the alarm, the man began to dig. Literally right away he found small gold nuggets.

As he continued digging and reached a depth of two feet, the farmer found a huge gold nugget weighing 12 pounds and worth $315,000.

The curious thing is that the same region had been searched several times, but nothing of value had been found. See here the nugget found.

Another lucky person from Australia found the rarest opal in the world. A miner named Bobbi (who prefers to keep her last name a secret), on one of his days at work, found a large, shiny opal at the bottom of a container full of common stones. The man decided to take the object as a souvenir. And only 14 years later he showed the stone to a specialist. Yeah, Bobbi had found an amazing black opal.

The stone was named “Royal One” and, after evaluations, had an initial bid at auction set at 3 million dollars.

See here the rare black opal.

In 2009, a mason from Cleveland (United States) named Bob Kitts was doing a construction job for Amanda Reece, his friend since high school. When the man removed the bathroom tiles, he found two metal containers inside the wall, and inside them were dozens of envelopes with money. The $182,000 fortune was destined for the P. Dunne communications agency.

The friends of choice were very happy with the discovery, but they could not agree on how to divide the money. Amanda proposed giving Bob 10%, but he wanted 40%. They decided to take the case to court, and the P. Dunne agency also joined the fray wanting its part. Ultimately, the court split the money equally among the three parties to the lawsuit.

In 1992, British farmer Peter Whatling lost his hammer. He asked his friend Eric Lawes for help looking for the object, as he had a homemade metal detector.

Within the first few minutes, Lawes found a small silver coin. He began digging at the site and soon found a wooden box filled with jewelry such as a gold necklace, as well as hundreds of other silver coins.

Archaeologists dubbed the find the “Hoxne treasure”, which was valued at $15 million. All objects were handed over to a British museum. Eric received a $2.3 million reward, which he shared with his friend. But Whatling was left without his hammer.

A man from Pensilvannya (USA) paid 4 dollars for a painting sold in a bazaar, with the intention of decorating his house. When he wanted to change the frame, he found a document stuck on the back: it was one of the 25 official copies of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, drawn up in 1776. Later, the document was sold at auction for 2.4 million of dollars.

A similar story happened to Michael Sparks from the city of Nashville. He bought a copy of the Declaration at a small thrift store just because he thought it was beautiful. For the object, the man paid $2.48, and only after a long time did he show it to specialists, who confirmed: it was one of the copies made 184 years before. The copy later sold for $125,000.

On one occasion, the archaeologist Terry Herbert asked a farmer friend from Staffordshire (England) to allow him to map the property with the help of a metal detector. His only hope was to find some coins. On the first day alone, they found 4,000 artifacts, weighing 4.5 kilograms.

Archaeologists concluded that the objects had belonged to British lords, military and religious commanders in the 12th century. The treasure is believed to have been given to the gods as an offering. Everything was valued at 5.3 million dollars