Faggiano initially kept his little excavation project a secret from his wife, thinking she might object to the whole "lowering their 12-year-old son into unreachable spaces with a rope" part. Eventually, the massive amounts of debris he was hauling away in the family car became too obvious, and the authorities got involved. This means that the family unfortunately couldn't keep most of the treasure to themselves, due to a technicality called "the Italian government calls dibs."

Davide Monteleone / New York Times

Still, in the end, it was all worth it. After years of digging, they were finally able to find the pipe that caused the toilet to malfunction in the first place. So if you ever visit the archaeological museum they opened in the building, at least you're guaranteed a pleasant pooping experience.

Museum Faggiano

Bats -- the sporting equipment, not the animal -- are a popular choice for home protection, since they won't shoot you in the face or bite you in the crotch if you touch them the wrong way. That's why for 30 years, a New York family kept their trusty anti-home invasion bat right behind their front door ... without realizing that it once belonged to Lou "my name is easier to pronounce than 'amyotrophic lateral sclerosis'" Gehrig. In retrospect, perhaps they should have paid more attention to the clues -- like the fact that they got the bat from a relative of a Yankees Stadium groundskeeper, or that it freaking says "Lou Gehrig" on it.

Love Of The Game Auctions

When someone finally pointed out that this thing could be worth something, the family showed the bat to an expert and discovered that Gehrig had played with it during one of his best seasons. Which is to say, someone was planning to beat the shit out of a burglar with a very rare piece of baseball memorabilia. And a very expensive one, too -- when the bat went to auction, it ended up selling for $436,970. The exorbitant price is probably due its rarity, since fewer than 20 game-used bats belonging to the sports legend remain in existence; the rest presumably disintegrated from hitting baseballs too hard.

The miraculous part is that the family managed to hold on to the bat for three whole decades despite clearly not giving the slightest shit about baseball. In fact, they almost left the bat behind when they moved to a new house 15 years ago, before finding out that crime exists in other parts of New York. At one point, they nearly gave the bat to a neighbor's kid, which surely would have sent him on a magical adventure involving a talking baseball-playing dog.

Love Of The Game Auctions

The identity of the family hasn't been disclosed, which is probably for the best, since they suddenly have a lot more money laying around and no means of protecting it.

He contacted a museum about it, and they soon confirmed that it was Magnolias On Gold Velvet Cloth, a little-known work by 19th-century painter Martin Johnson Heade. The painting was so valuable that the museum's director called an emergency meeting, and within an hour and a half, they'd secured $1.25 million to buy it before its current owner started using it as a doormat or something. Heade's favorite artistic motifs were apparently "pretty flowers" and "shit that looks way cheaper than it really is," because another lost painting of his, Two Magnolias On Blue Plush, was bought at a garage sale for $29 and eventually sold for $882,500 in an auction.

Martin Johnson Heade

It's unknown what happened to the man from Indiana, but it's safe to assume that he either covered that hole with solid gold, or stopped giving a crap about having ugly walls.

In 2006, contractor Bob Kitts tore down the bathroom wall of the 83-year-old house, and instead of being greeted by his old friend asbestos, he found two green lockboxes and some envelopes suspended by a wire. When he realized what was in them, Kitts contacted the home's owner, Amanda Reece, and the two proceeded to freak out and take pictures with the cash. It was presumably at this point that they both said "Well, thanks for helping me count my money!" at the same time, followed by "What do you mean, your money?"

Associated Press

The contractor and the homeowner couldn't decide on how to split the half-million. Kitts wanted 40 percent of the loot, but Reece thought that he only deserved 10. Naturally, they resolved their dispute like adults, which is to say by suing the shit out of each other. Due to the media attention their story got, Patrick Dunne's heirs found out about the money, and also wanted to get a piece of the increasingly shrinking pie.

By the time the case got resolved, Reece had lost her home and filed for bankruptcy (she says a good chunk of the money was stolen), Kitts got $2,700 after fees, and the 21 heirs walked away with a cool $1,586 they didn't have before. The real winners, of course, were the lawyers, who admitted that no one would have ever found out about this if Kitts and Dunne had simply split the money and kept their mouths shut.

Bob Kitts

When you buy a piece of furniture at your local Salvation Army, all you can hope for is that those suspicious stains are from a yogurt someone dropped, and not a 30-person orgy in the '70s. That's why three college students in New York didn't even notice the weird lumps on the armrests of their new $20 couch until a few weeks after buying it, when they sat down to watch a movie on it.

CBS-2 News

So what was inside the armrest? An actual arm left by a mobster? An old lasagna someone forgot? Nope, even better: It was an envelope stuffed with bills adding up to $700 (or "two years of food" in college student currency). They were already freaking out about the discovery when they noticed there was another envelope with even more money ... and another, and another, for a total of $41,000. At this point, they followed the customs of our culture, and did what, let's face it, we'd all do in this situation:

The Little Rebellion

The celebration stopped when they came across a deposit slip with a woman's name in it -- meaning that the money belonged to someone, and hadn't been left there by magical fairies, as they'd presumably assumed. And then, unlike the rest of us, the students tracked down the couch's previous owner, a 91-year-old widow in desperate need of the money, and returned it. As it turned out, her family had taken the opportunity to donate her ugly old couch while she was ill, unaware that she'd been using it as a comfy vault.

The woman was immensely grateful at the return of her life savings, and rewarded the roommates with $1,000, which they presumably invested in 50 Salvation Army couches.

The Little Rebellion