Just let me preface this by saying that it is an absolutely true story — to the best of my knowledge — and I just thought I’d share it with you, my loving audience, for your educational and amusement-al pleasure.

My brother works at a car dealership, and one of the mechanics that works at the same place had an interesting story to tell him one day. The mechanic’s wife is a teacher at a private school where they lack their own gymnasium. As such, any time the students want (or are told to) do any kind of physical activity that requires a gym, they need to head out to the local community centre, rent out some space, or otherwise find somewhere else to play basketball, dodgeball, indoor soccer, or what have you


Well, the school got tired of all the extra hassle and expense required for renting out a gymnasium any time they wanted to do some indoor physical activity, so they started hunting around for some land for purchase.

The kindly old lady that lived next door to the school, well, she recently passed on (not in the home, as far as I know). In her will, she left her house to her two children, now all grown up and with families of their own. As such, the son and daughter did not require an additional home and put the real estate on the market for $450,000.

The school looked into buying and tearing down the house in order to build their own gymnasium, but decided that the price was too high after all the demolition and construction costs were factored into the equation. The person who did end up purchasing the house, he hired a team of contractors to clean up the home before he would move in. And this is where things got interesting.

You see, buried underneath a pile of junk in the old lady’s walk-in closet was a rather non-descript looking case. One of the cleanup crew stumbled across it, opened it up, and discovered cash inside. A lot of cash. To the tune of $400,000 (though he didn’t exactly count it at the time). The rest of the crew came crashing into the room, and they decided to split the money between the six of them. After all, no one knew about this money and if they took it, none would be the wiser.

The person who originally found the money, however, got greedy and took the whole case of cash himself. The other five workers were upset, of course, and went to the local authorities, saying that Joe Worker stole a pile of money from this house. Because they had his phone number, address, SIN, and all that (he was an employee, after all, so all of this kind of stuff would have been collected before he started working), the police had no problem apprehending the would-be crook. It’s a little ironic that the other five would have been “thieves” as well, had they gone with their original plan.

Here’s the kicker. The $400,000 belongs to the new owner of the house. Not to the contractors (obviously), but not to the two children of the kindly old lady either. You see, when you purchase a house, you not only take ownership of the land and the physical building, but also everything that it contains… in this instance, a case full of money. The net result? The person bought a house for $50,000.

Strange, but true.