For many of us, the loft can be a bit of a dumping zone, the place where the Christmas decorations go during the year, where the kids toys are stored just in case they want them again or where all those clothes we hope will fit one day are stashed. Sometimes the urge comes upon us to look in the loft and try to make sense of the disarray found there and in the back of our minds, to find some forgotten gem. A valuable bit of jewellery we had never realised was in that inherited bag or kids comic now worth lots of money. Because people really do find amazing things in their loft €“ and really weird things too!
Look Mummy!
When you hear the kids shouting €˜look mummy!' many of us think they are shouting of their parent. But in the case of a boy from Germany, he was shouting at the weird item he had found in his grandparent's attic €“ a real mummy brought back from a trip to North Africa in the 1950s.
Whether the mummy was real, a forgery or a bit of both seems to have been open to discussion based on the evidence. It seems that the cloth bandages used were machine made but that there was a real human skull inside and it did contain an arrowhead. Alongside the coffin, which was covered with hieroglyphs, was even a death mask and canopic jar, all the essential trappings of an Ancient Egyptian burial. Last anyone heard, the mummy had relocated to a hospital in Hamburg and was undergoing extensive tests.
Comical find
Remember we mentioned valuable comic books? Well one American bought a house in Minnesota for the knock down price of $10,000 and set about knocking out a wall to make the house more his style. While doing do, a comic book dropped out of the insulation €“ it was Action Comics #1, said to be the Holy Grail of comic books. This was the comic where Superman first put in an appearance and it sold at auction for $175,000. Had it not have had a tear in the back cover it might have been even better, a copy sold by actor Nicholas Cage in 2011 went for a cool $2.16 million!
Masterful discovery
Everyone has heard of Vincent Van Gogh and knows his paintings sell for millions of pounds but that there are also millions of forgeries out there as well. One Norwegian man came across a painting said to be by the great master painter but because he thought it was a fake, he left it in the attic for three years.
Finally, he decided to check out the painting, named The Sunset at Montmajour and experts also agreed it was a fake because it wasn't signed. But two years ago, further tests were conducted using new technology and it was realised that this was no fake €“ it was a genuine Van Gogh masterpiece.
A king's ransom
Having been sitting in a loft for 70 years, an executor for an art gallery owner decided to check out the small Russian figurine he discovered in the attic. It was in a simple wooden box and was beautifully made with sapphires in the eyes and real gold trimmings. But it turned out to have an illustrious past as well €“ it was made by Faberge under the omission of Russian Czar Nicolas II for his wife, the Empress Alexandra in 1912. The original bill was with the piece showing that owner had paid $2,250 for it in 1934 and a pre-sale price was put on it of $500,000-800,000. The real selling price - $5.2 million!
Getting ahead
We all know there are lost items decaying in the loft that have been stashed there by generations past but not many people will have the severed head of a former French king! One TV journalist was helping sort through the attic of a tax collector when he found the severed head and tests showed that it was indeed the skull of Henry IV who ruled France until he died in 1610. It was not entirely clear how the head ended up hidden in the attic but the king had been decapitated by revolutionaries some 180 years after he died and a French couple had later bought the head at auction.
Conclusion
So when you next decide to sort out the loft, go prepared for anything €“ you could be a millionaire, find a famous corpse or more than likely be terrified by a massive spider and end up with a lungful of dust!
