Elite Facts Presents 10 Amazing Cases Of Lucky People Finding A
Fortune 10. Every Sunday afternoon for the last seven
years, Mark Hannaby had gone for a walk with his metal detector. He'd never really found anything of value,
but he liked getting the exercise, so he kept at it. On one Sunday, his detector beeped, and he
bent down to dig up a postage stamp-sized gold pendant featuring an intricate carving
of the crucifixion of Jesus. Upon inspection by the British Museum, the
pendant was estimated to be around £4,000. Still, they decided not to purchase it for
their collection, so Mark took the pendant to Sotheby's. The experts at the auction house felt the
piece was much more valuable and their estimate was £250,000, but said it could easily sell
for as much as £2.5 million. Sotheby's put the pendant up for auction but
the best offer was only £38,000. 9. One day, a man spent $30 for a few pieces
of used furniture and an old painting of some flowers. When he got his new stuff home, he decided
to strategically hang the picture to cover up a hole in the wall that had been bugging
him. Some years later he was playing a board game
called Masterpiece and much to his surprise, one of the cards in the game featured a painting
of flowers that looked a lot like the one he had on his wall. So he went online and found that his painting
was similar in style to the work of Martin Johnson Heade. He found the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan,
which handles many of Heade's works, and asked them to take a look at his painting. They agreed and were able to verify that the
piece of artwork covering the hole in his wall was a previously unknown Heade painting,
since named Magnolias on Gold Velvet Cloth. In 1999, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston
purchased the painting for $1.25 million dollars. 8. Michael Sparks was visiting a Nashville thrift
store, where he bought a yellowed print of the Declaration of Independence. Sparks figured the document was a worthless,
modern reprint, so he paid and headed home. After looking over the document for a few
days, he wondered if it might be older than he initially thought. So he hopped on the internet to do some research
and soon realized he had purchased one of only 200 official copies of the Declaration
of Independence commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820. Of those 200, 35 had been found intact; he
had number 36. It took a year for Sparks to have the print
authenticated and preserved and then he put it up for auction, netting a final sale price
of $477,650. He paid $2 for it 7. In 1992, Teri Horton, a retired truck driver,
went to her local thrift store to buy a depressed friend a gag gift. She found a rather large painting -- 66" x
47" -- that she thought was pretty amusing because it was, in her opinion, so ugly. When she asked the thrift store employee the
price, they said $8. She haggled and only paid $5. In the end, her friend didn't want it (she,
too, thought it was ugly, plus it wouldn't fit through the door of her trailer), so Teri
took it home and tried to unload it at her garage sale. A local art teacher saw the painting and suggested
it could very well be a Jackson Pollock. In response, Teri famously asked the teacher,
"Who the f is Jackson Pollock?" Since that day, Teri Horton has been struggling
to prove that her thrift store treasure is a lost piece of artwork potentially worth
well over $100 million. However, due to the painting's lack of verifiable
history of ownership (called "provenance" ), the piece is disputed by many fine arts
experts as simply another artist's work inspired by Pollock. 6. All Jason Hyatt expected to do when he took
his son James on his very first expedition was find some old junk and have some fun but
just minutes after getting started, the detector buzzed and the father-son duo started digging. About 8 inches under the surface, they discovered
a gold locket with an image of the Virgin Mary clutching a cross. The pendant is what’s known as a reliquary,
and it dates back to the 16th century, during the reign of Henry VIII. Experts claim it may have even belonged to
a member of the royal family. There are only three other reliquaries of
this type known to exist. As a bonus (sort of), James will learn a valuable
lesson about sharing. Part of the reliquary's $4 million sale will
go to the owner of the property where it was discovered. 5. Sometimes valuable items can be hiding in
plain sight. Just ask the unnamed middle-aged couple living
in Milwaukee who happened to have an original van Gogh masterpiece hanging on their wall. They thought the painting was just a simple
reproduction, but when they invited an art appraiser to take a look at another painting
in their home, he noticed the van Gogh and realized it was the 1886 original. When “Still Life With Flowers” sold at
auction, the couple quickly ended up $1.4 million richer. 4. For years now, the second half of Mark Twain’s
manuscript for Huck Finn has been treasured and cared for in the Buffalo and Erie County
Public Library. But what about the first half? As it turns out, it’s been hidden away inside
of a trunk in the attic of the very book collector that convinced Mark Twain to donate the book
to the library in the first place. After Twain handed the manuscript over to
James Fraser Gluck, the collector managed to lose the first half before giving it to
the library. Finally, over 100 years later, Gluck’s granddaughters
discovered the manuscript, the library that has the other half pointed out that Twain
had promised the manuscript would go into their collection. Rather than making a legal battle out of the
matter, the sisters decided to sell the manuscript to the library for an undisclosed fee 3. In 1992, a farmer living in England, lost
a hammer in one of his fields, so he asked Eric Lawes to use his metal detector to search
for it. While looking for the hammer, Lawes happened
upon something else of interest -- 24 bronze coins, 565 gold coins, 14,191 silver coins,
plus hundreds of gold and silver spoons, jewelry, and statues, all dating back to the Roman
Empire. As required by British law, the so-called
"Hoxne Hoard" was reported to the local authorities, who declared it a "Treasure Trove," meaning
it was now legally the property of Britain. However, the government is required to pay
fair market value for a treasure trove, meaning the farmer and Lawes split a cool £1.75 million. 2. W.O. Basham found a 40.23 carat diamond and it
might surprise you to hear that he wasn't digging in one of the famous South African
diamond mines at the time, but Arkansas, at a site that is now the Crater of Diamonds
State Park. Bassum's big find, nicknamed "The Uncle Sam
Diamond," was the largest diamond ever discovered in North America. It was later cut down to 12.42 carats and
sold for $150,000 in 1971 (about $800,000 today). 1. When a pair of siblings set out to clean their
deceased uncle’s home, they certainly weren’t expecting find what they did. As they packed it up their attention returned
to the vase, and they realized it might be worth something, so they took it to an auctioneer
who told them the piece was from the 1740s and was almost certainly created specifically
for the Qianlong Emperor. Naturally, the pair put the vase up for auction,
where the piece ended up breaking the record for any Chinese artwork –closing at $69
million. Now that’s one heck of an unexpected inheritance. Don't forget to like us and subscribe
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