Ryan1979
Full Member
MY BEST AND WORST FIND
YES, IT'S GOLD!!!.....BUT GROSS!!! UPDATED
Well, I haven't logged onto this site since about the end of April because my wife and I finally bought a house and I've had no time to do any MD'ing. We moved in around May 1st and I've been spending every waking moment fixing the house and cleaning everything up. This is our first house, so we had decided to buy an old, old, old fixer upper not far from downtown St. Paul with the intention of selling it again after a few years. The county records state that the house was built 1908, but we're thinking that the house is much older than that. Maybe 1880 - 1890 or even earlier. The dates on some of the gas light fixtures is 1880ish, so we're thinking around there sometime.
The story that we were told is that our fixer-upper was the original farm-house in this area before it was heavily populated. That makes sense since the house is by far the oldest in the neighborhood and it's built on the highest piece of ground in many blocks with most of the other land being fairly flat, like you'd find with farm fields.
So anyway, when we moved in at the beginning of May, I was checking things out and snooping around. I was in the old pantry off the kitchen and saw that there was a recess above the top cabinet shelf that was 1/2 covered with an old wood moulding. The pantry has 9 foot ceilings and I figured that when the lady got foreclosed on, she probably forgot to check up there.
So I got on the countertop, stood up, and reached up and over the moulding into the recess on the top shelf. Sure enough, there were a bunch of old newspapers in there. I tried pulling some down, but they were so brittle that they were just falling apart into little pieces. So my wife and I figured that we'd pull them out some other time when we didn't have anything going on (we were cleaning at the time and this was a low priority on my wife's to-be-done scale).
So a few weeks went by and we were soon settled into our new house. I was re-wiring a new light fixture and switch in the old pantry, when I remembered the old newspapers on the top shelf. Since I was already up on the stepladder I figured I would try to get some of the newspapers down to see how old they were or if there was anything interesting in them. My wife and kids were eating at the table just outside the door of the pantry. I told my wife to get a cookie sheet to put the newspapers on so that they wouldn't fall apart so bad and we could get a date off of them. So I tried pulling one of the top papers out and it again crumbled into tiny little bits. I thought something heavy was on top of the papers, so I reached up and started trying to find what it was.
The first thing I found was an old military uniform patch from a Minnesota regiment.
The next things were a few buttons, probably off of the same uniform.
And the last thing.............was a small manila-colored envelope about 3" tall by 2" wide......AND IT WAS HEAVY!!!
I pulled it down and realized that this was the heavy object that was sitting on the papers causing them to fall apart when I tried pulling them down.
I asked my wife what she thought would be inside and she jokingly said, "Teeth."
I said, "No way!!".
But, sure enough, the envelope had a number of gold teeth inside (6 total).
Now here's where it gets gross. Four of the teeth (big teeth too, molars??) were still connected by gold and had all of the roots attached!!!
And even grosser, the other two teeth inside were also attached......and had been charred by fire.
So, I thought it was most likely some type of battlefield war loot.....meaning that someone had pried them from a dead (hopefully) soldier or something to that effect.
Further backing up my little idea was the newspapers that we found. The one that was directly underneath the teeth was dated 1943 and had a front-page story about London being fire-bombed by the Nazis. I'm still trying to figure out if that is symbolic in some way, especially since two of the teeth were charred.
So, as my wife and I are broke after buying our first house, we were debating on what to do with the teeth. But, we decided to do the right thing and make a police report first before trying to sell the gold. Especially considering that I don't want to get in trouble for attempting to sell gold teeth that may or may not be war loot. Or, they could think that I'm some type of grave robber or something. I like to avoid those types of situations
I called St. Paul PD and they sent a nice officer out. She confiscated the whole works and said it would be referred to an investigator. She said to call in a month and we may or may not have the gold teeth returned to us, depending on the results of the investigation.
Weird, huh? And I made one big mistake. I didn't take any pictures of the teeth, patch, or anything. Now I'll probably not get them back and will have no proof of this wild tale.![:-\](https://www.treasurenet.com/smilies/undecided.gif "Undecided :-\")
But if I do get them back, you can be sure I'm going to post pictures on here right away. It's been almost a month now and I think I will give them a call after work to see what the results of the investigation are.
In regards to my old house's yard, I haven't found a thing with the metal detector except for one piece of copper wire. I couldn't believe it! I figure I'd find at least some old pennies, but low and behold.......nothing. This place must have been cleaned out by someone else with a MD. Oh well, there's lots of other places to go.
Take care,
Ryan1979
Well...I've left a message for every single investigator from this investigations department in the last few weeks. I'm going to call one more time to the property room and if they don't release it to me, then I'm going to give a call to Internal Affairs. I don't want to to do this, but if they can't at least give me a call back after all this time, then the He)) with them. One way or another, I'll be posting back here and letting everyone know what the outcome was.
Sunday August 24th, 2008 - I got a postcard in the mail yesterday from THE MAN (the police). The card says we can pick up the stuff within the next 30 days. I'm going down Wednesday. I'll take some photos and post them on here. Wow, it only took a full year to get this stuff back (sarcasm). Better than not getting it back I guess.
YES, IT'S GOLD!!!.....BUT GROSS!!! UPDATEDWell, I haven't logged onto this site since about the end of April because my wife and I finally bought a house and I've had no time to do any MD'ing. We moved in around May 1st and I've been spending every waking moment fixing the house and cleaning everything up. This is our first house, so we had decided to buy an old, old, old fixer upper not far from downtown St. Paul with the intention of selling it again after a few years. The county records state that the house was built 1908, but we're thinking that the house is much older than that. Maybe 1880 - 1890 or even earlier. The dates on some of the gas light fixtures is 1880ish, so we're thinking around there sometime.
The story that we were told is that our fixer-upper was the original farm-house in this area before it was heavily populated. That makes sense since the house is by far the oldest in the neighborhood and it's built on the highest piece of ground in many blocks with most of the other land being fairly flat, like you'd find with farm fields.
So anyway, when we moved in at the beginning of May, I was checking things out and snooping around. I was in the old pantry off the kitchen and saw that there was a recess above the top cabinet shelf that was 1/2 covered with an old wood moulding. The pantry has 9 foot ceilings and I figured that when the lady got foreclosed on, she probably forgot to check up there.
So I got on the countertop, stood up, and reached up and over the moulding into the recess on the top shelf. Sure enough, there were a bunch of old newspapers in there. I tried pulling some down, but they were so brittle that they were just falling apart into little pieces. So my wife and I figured that we'd pull them out some other time when we didn't have anything going on (we were cleaning at the time and this was a low priority on my wife's to-be-done scale).
So a few weeks went by and we were soon settled into our new house. I was re-wiring a new light fixture and switch in the old pantry, when I remembered the old newspapers on the top shelf. Since I was already up on the stepladder I figured I would try to get some of the newspapers down to see how old they were or if there was anything interesting in them. My wife and kids were eating at the table just outside the door of the pantry. I told my wife to get a cookie sheet to put the newspapers on so that they wouldn't fall apart so bad and we could get a date off of them. So I tried pulling one of the top papers out and it again crumbled into tiny little bits. I thought something heavy was on top of the papers, so I reached up and started trying to find what it was.
The first thing I found was an old military uniform patch from a Minnesota regiment.
The next things were a few buttons, probably off of the same uniform.
And the last thing.............was a small manila-colored envelope about 3" tall by 2" wide......AND IT WAS HEAVY!!!
I pulled it down and realized that this was the heavy object that was sitting on the papers causing them to fall apart when I tried pulling them down.
I asked my wife what she thought would be inside and she jokingly said, "Teeth."
I said, "No way!!".
But, sure enough, the envelope had a number of gold teeth inside (6 total).
Now here's where it gets gross. Four of the teeth (big teeth too, molars??) were still connected by gold and had all of the roots attached!!!
And even grosser, the other two teeth inside were also attached......and had been charred by fire.
So, I thought it was most likely some type of battlefield war loot.....meaning that someone had pried them from a dead (hopefully) soldier or something to that effect.
Further backing up my little idea was the newspapers that we found. The one that was directly underneath the teeth was dated 1943 and had a front-page story about London being fire-bombed by the Nazis. I'm still trying to figure out if that is symbolic in some way, especially since two of the teeth were charred.
So, as my wife and I are broke after buying our first house, we were debating on what to do with the teeth. But, we decided to do the right thing and make a police report first before trying to sell the gold. Especially considering that I don't want to get in trouble for attempting to sell gold teeth that may or may not be war loot. Or, they could think that I'm some type of grave robber or something. I like to avoid those types of situations
I called St. Paul PD and they sent a nice officer out. She confiscated the whole works and said it would be referred to an investigator. She said to call in a month and we may or may not have the gold teeth returned to us, depending on the results of the investigation.
Weird, huh? And I made one big mistake. I didn't take any pictures of the teeth, patch, or anything. Now I'll probably not get them back and will have no proof of this wild tale.
But if I do get them back, you can be sure I'm going to post pictures on here right away. It's been almost a month now and I think I will give them a call after work to see what the results of the investigation are.
In regards to my old house's yard, I haven't found a thing with the metal detector except for one piece of copper wire. I couldn't believe it! I figure I'd find at least some old pennies, but low and behold.......nothing. This place must have been cleaned out by someone else with a MD. Oh well, there's lots of other places to go.
Take care,
Ryan1979
Well...I've left a message for every single investigator from this investigations department in the last few weeks. I'm going to call one more time to the property room and if they don't release it to me, then I'm going to give a call to Internal Affairs. I don't want to to do this, but if they can't at least give me a call back after all this time, then the He)) with them. One way or another, I'll be posting back here and letting everyone know what the outcome was.
Sunday August 24th, 2008 - I got a postcard in the mail yesterday from THE MAN (the police). The card says we can pick up the stuff within the next 30 days. I'm going down Wednesday. I'll take some photos and post them on here. Wow, it only took a full year to get this stuff back (sarcasm). Better than not getting it back I guess.
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