Published January 16, 2023
Hidden rooms and discovered treasure!
There are some very famous examples of homes with hidden rooms most of us have heard of, the most obvious might be the Winchester Mystery house in San Jose. Sarah Winchester attempted to escape the ghosts of many victims of Winchester rifles by continuously building a maze of layered rooms and stair cases that double back on themselves, doors that open to nothing, unexplained spaces that make no sense. This house is definitely a notable Bay Area landmark, of hidden rooms and passageways a person could get lost in.
Imagine if you were the recent new owner of an early 1900s San Francisco Victorian, and you began to come upon some little treasures left behind, old post cards, tram tickets from 1908. You start to suspect that there are signs of a hidden room behind your kitchen wall. This is exactly what happened to the husband of a Bay Area Bold Italic contributor who became convinced there was a walled off room in his new house. Upon further inspection they did discover a small room with shelving and a functioning light switch... a mysterious little inexplicable bonus space.
Now imagine your cruising around your backyard with your dog when you notice a weird looking old can tied to a tree above another old can sticking up out of the ground. The NorCal couple this happened to got real lucky. Forget about an extra few hundred square feet, these folks discovered genuine bonafide straight up gold coins in their weird old yard cans. The coins ended up selling for over ten million dollars and it is still the largest discovery of gold coins on record in the United States.
During a 2019 Embarcadero construction project, they found traces of a saloon and a sailors boarding house estimated to be from the year 1860. They dug up doll heads and hundreds of pieces of boots, buttons and ceramics, all over 100 years old.
The San Francisco Bay Area has so much rich history, both figuratively and literally, leading to the exciting possibilities of historically relevant discoveries, every time you buy a new home. Depending on where your property is located, even if your home its self is a new build, there are native American artifacts, pirate treasures, and weird stuff lurking underground, or in a dirty can in your backyard trees. If you stumble upon something interesting you can present it to a local heritage firm or an archeologist or history department at a local university.
The Monday Team is excited to help you get the keys to the site of your newly discovered dinosaur bone, or authentic pair of early 70s control top panties, as the case may be. The possibilities are endless.
