6 Priceless Treasures Everybody Dismissed As Worthless Junk

At least, he thinks he might have. It also might have been stolen from the unlocked car while he was in the store. He's not really sure what happened. In any case, according to family lore, it ended up on the side of a road, where a woman initially mistook it for a baby. A tragically deformed, violin-shaped baby? Whatever. She eventually gifted the violin to her nephew, who lost it as part of a divorce settlement to Teresa Salvato, who decided this was as good a time as any to take up the violin. Her teacher, the first person to come across the Duke in 27 years who had any inkling of its value, took it to a dealer, who identified it from a photo in a book about its creator. It had the same scratches on the back. It was worth $800,000.

Salvato, who learned from the dealer that the violin was listed in a registry as stolen, took this information to UCLA in the spiritual, if not physical, form of letters cut out of magazines. After she refused to give it back to them, she was somehow surprised when campus police officers started paying her visits. This was 1994 Los Angeles, so frankly, she got off light. The question of who owned the violin was brought to court, but eventually Salvato settled, surrendering the violin in exchange for a payment of a fraction of its worth. We're talking about 1/70th of its worth. We don't know what they did to her to get her to accept that deal, but don't mess with classical musicians, people. They might not look threatening, but they're ruthless.

Indeed, it wasn't. Another local man, Kevin Donovan, claimed he bought every one of that particular variety of scratch-off ticket that store had that morning, so he knew the ticket in the trash was his. He brought his claim to the lottery commission, which ruled that possession, not purchase, was all that determined the winner, after which Donovan promptly died. Listen, we try not to speak ill of the dead, but a guy who buys an entire roll of scratch-off tickets and then doesn't even check them before he throws them away probably got what he deserved, so this still qualifies for Lifetime movie status at the very least, right?

Maybe, but it didn't end there. Donovan's family immediately began the process of suing St. John for what they claimed were their rightful winnings. The law was pretty clear on the matter, but according to St. John's lawyer, the family intended to drag out the proceedings for as long as they could, and St. John didn't exactly have a lot of time. In the end, he did the only thing he could to resolve the matter in an expedient fashion, agreeing to pay Donovan's family a settlement of $140,000 so he could enjoy his remaining $860,000 in his remaining years. We hope he bought a lot of suspenders and hard candy.

The man was insistent, however, that the 22-pound mini-boulder he had hauled over was "unique," and worth the time spent taking a look. And it turns out that it was. Worth it to the tune of 100 grand. What he had delivered was a bona fide meteorite that had been employed for decades at his Grand Rapids farm as a doorstop. The former owner of the farm had told him that it was found in a crater back in the 1930s, but he didn't really have any inkling as to its value. As for Professor Sirbescu, it was "the most valuable specimen I have ever held in my life, monetarily and scientifically."

The next step is to have the meteorite sent to a nuclear reactor for testing to help determine its origin. Or maybe that's just the story the professor gave the farmer while she frantically got in touch with her contacts in the space flotsam black market.

Once all the gold was collected, it totaled 5,000 pieces, 37 ingots, and two bars. The haul, weighing 200 pounds, was worth $3.7 million. Either no one knows or is unwilling to say where it came from, but it was allegedly legally purchased in the '50s and '60s, so we're going with "doo-wop pirates." The lucky owner might not end up so lucky, as France has some stiff taxes, which might be why another home in the same area of Normandy was found to have about $1 million of gold buried in the garden when developers started digging it up a few years before. We'll never know why the history books skipped the doo-wop pirate invasion of Normandy, because it sounds like a heck of a story.

But he took it to an auction house that specialized in Native artifacts, where it ended up selling for several orders of magnitude over his mother's estimate -- $1.5 million, to be exact. Here's the eerie part: It was sold to the same guy who appraised the blanket Krytzer saw on Antiques Roadshow. He's an expert in Native art, and apparently, a little birdie told him to check out a certain auction house. At this point, we're gonna assume it was benevolent ghosts.

E. Reid Ross has a book called BIZARRE WORLD that's due to be released in September. He's practically on his knees begging that you pre order it now from Amazon or Barnes & Noble and leave a scathing/glowing review.

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