Two French children , bored and looking for something to do during the coronavirus lockdown, found two gold bullion bars worth approximately $100,000 between them, BFMTV reports.
Back in March, when France instituted a nationwide coronavirus lockdown, the unidentified family went to stay with an older relative who lived in a family home in the country town of Vendome.
At some point after the family’s arrival, the two kids, each around the age of 10 years old, got bored and decided to build a fort. They were looking for materials to use, when the father directed them into an empty room in the grandmother’s home and pull sheets from the bed.
“But instead of finding sprigs of lavender between the sheets… two fairly heavy objects fell. The kids thought nothing of them and put them back,” said auctioneer Philippe Rouillac.
A few hours later, the kids told their dad about the heavy find. He initially thought that the children had found knife holders. Rouillac noted that this was a well-to-do family and that the grandmother enjoyed the finer things, like beautiful crystals.
Instead of turning up with knife holders or fancy crystals, however, the children instead produced two gold bars, each weighing one kilogram, or about 2.2 pounds.
The children’s father contacted an auctioneer to confirm that they were genuine. He took pictures of the inscriptions and serial numbers and sent them to an auction service. He later got confirmation that they are, in fact, gold bars.
Each bar is estimated to be worth about 43,000 euros ($46,864), based on the current price of gold. However, Rouillac anticipates that the price of gold is likely to go up in the coming weeks, so he intends to wait until June to auction them.
“We are going to wait for gold prices to rise a little more,” he said.
He predicted that, by the time the bars go up for auction, they could be valued at 54,000 euros each ($58,836), meaning that the kids might have stumbled upon a find worth over $100,000.
The evidence suggests that the grandmother purchased the gold bars in 1967, hid them away in an unused room, then forgot about them for 50 years.
As for the children, they had a typically child-like response to their six-figure find.
“The children said to their father ‘we’re going to be able to have a swimming pool,’” Rouillac said.
Two weeks ago, The Inquisitr reported on another recent example of how a family found long-lost treasure. A North Carolina man found a “Shoeless” Joe Jackson card buried under a bunch of other baseball cards in a forgotten-about lunch pail. The card sold at auction for $492,000.