Unbelievable: Family Discovers Hidden Treasure Inside World War I Torpedo
You never know what you’re going to find when you offer to help clean out someone’s home. It’s a terribly intimate thing to sift through an entire lifetime of belongings and observe the state things are kept in, but two…
You never know what you’re going to find when you offer to help clean out someone’s home. It’s a terribly intimate thing to sift through an entire lifetime of belongings and observe the state things are kept in, but two women got the surprise of their lives this month when they uncovered a torpedo in the back of a closet.
Melody Atwood and her sister were in Lansing, Michigan, cleaning out their aunt’s house on Saturday. Their aunt was now living in assisted care, and the two women were working hard to get her former house in order.
“My aunt has dementia and we’ve moved her into a nursing home where she will be from now on,” Melody told WTHR-TV. “The lady was a collector.”
Melody’s sister came face-to-face with one of those collected items and quickly called Melody to come and look.
“She called down, ‘Mel, we got a problem,'” Melody recalled. “Tucked way in the back was what looked like a torpedo.”
Not interested in taking any more risk than necessary, and not quite sure what their eclectic aunt might have stowed away, the sisters called the Lansing Police.
“The police didn’t know if the mortar shell was live or not so they called the bomb squad in and asked us to leave the home,” Melody continued.
The object was identified as a World War I-era torpedo, and the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad arrived to deal with the weapon of unknown status.