She hoarded lots of junk, but when she had to go to assisted living, a big pile of gold was found in the house. They're mostly modern UK coins. See link. Cal link: https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/new...79/80k-gold-stash-uncovered-at-hoarders-home/
That's not a whole lot. I bet there are several members here who have more than that. When I saw the topic I was thinking seven figures, not five.
A good friend bought a one-room schoolhouse that had been home to a somewhat dotty old woman and her mentally disabled daughter for decades. If you Google "catenary curve", the shape a cable assumes when supported by its ends -- that's sort of the profile of the junk piled in the schoolhouse, and on the balcony they'd put in at some point around the room's periphery. It was nearly all the sort of stuff that you'd find in the "everything's a nickel" box at a yard sale. If he found any coins, I never heard about them (wasn't active in the hobby at the time). He fed a bonfire for weeks incinerating the stuff that had accumulated. But he went through every book and folder in the place, and that's where he found a birth certificate -- for his own great-uncle, born in the township around the turn of the century. Just another reinforcing brick in the "never shovel stuff into the dumpster" wall that keeps my own house looking the way it does.
