It's common to hide valuables or money in attics, in basements, under the stairs, and in many places around the house. It is sadly also common to die without telling anyone that you have hidden things, or where they are hidden. This is how it becomes lost treasure.



Where To Find Lost Treasures

I was helping to clean out an old house once, and I found a jar full of pennies in the attic. It was the usual story; the old man who had previously owned the house died shorty after selling it. He had no family, and had forgotten about many of the things he had hidden in the house. I might still have some of the old coins from that jar in my collection.

Some of the other things I found up in the attic brought me sixty dollars or so at a rummage sale. He had hidden things under the insulation, and between walls. I suspect there are still valuables buried on the property around the house.

As a young man I hid some magazines in the basement of my parent's house, a fact which I just remembered now. The house was sold, but most likely they are still there, up on top of the heating ducts, between the floor joists. While there isn't much value in that lost treasure yet, they could be worth something to the person who finds them eighty years from now. If you have an old home, this should make you wonder what was hidden in it before you were born. Take a look.

Don't limit the search to attics, basements and other obvious storage places. Look in spaces under stairs, garages, sheds, and under loose floorboards (this used to be a favorite place to hide cash). Above ceiling tiles is another good place to check. Lost treasures are a lot more common than you might think.

A good example is in an item I saw on the news one night. A couple from Chicago found a lost treasure that made big money for them. While tearing open the walls of their house during a remodeling project, they found them filled with thousands of movie posters which were old and valuable. Later they discovered that the home had once been owned by a theater operator in the twenties and thirties.

This previous owner had been taking home all the movie posters back to his house, and was either hiding them or, more likely, just using them to insulate. It used to be common to insulate houses with newspapers, magazines and other things. Time makes such things valuable. In fact, at the time the story ran, the couple had sold $200,000 worth of the posters. They still had half of what they found too.

Search for those valuables and stashes of money, starting in your own house. If it has none, poke around the basement at mom and dad's, or the old houses owned by other family members. Peek under the insulation in that attic (wear gloves and a mask). Shine a light into those crawl spaces, and anywhere else there might be hidden and lost treasures.