Gold has been found in some wonderfully strange places over the years, including one bar worth $50,000, which was found by a plumber underneath a bathtub in Canada.
Plumber Alif Babul was dismantling a bathtub at a home in Calgary, Canada during a renovation when he and his apprentice, Dean Materi, found a gold bar beneath the tub.
Neither Babul nor Materi realized the one-kilogram, stamped gold brick was real and valued at more than $50,000. It almost ended up in the trash.
Materi, who was on his second day of work, told the Calgary Herald: “I saw a gold shimmery thing on the ground and I thought it was a copper light fixture. But when I went to shovel it up, it seemed kind of heavy. I picked it up and it was a gold brick.”
According to the Daily Mail, Babul, who owns Perfection Plumbing & Gas Ltd in Canada, said he and Materi had not expected to discover such an unusual thing like gold while tearing apart the home’s bathtub.
Speaking to CBC, Canada’s broadcasting corporation, Babul said, “Who stores gold bars underneath their bathtub, right? Kinda crazy.”
The pair’s investigation brought them to the conclusion that the gold brick was worth more than $50,000, and they soon reached out to the homeowner, who told them a gold bar was unaccounted for in the house, and so they returned it to the rightful owner.
Getting the Bathtub Gold Back to the Owners of the House in Canada
Babul told the Daily Mail that the owners of the home in Canada had lost track of the gold brick buried underneath the bathtub and were quite happy to have it back in their possession.
“We were pumped when we found it, of course,” they said.
“Seeing the economy the way it is right now, it kind of sucks that we had to give it back,” Babul told the Daily Mail. “Obviously we were going to do the right thing. Hopefully karma comes our way.”
He added, “My wife and I had a long chat about that. I said to my wife, ‘I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s the right thing to do.'”
The bar was marked with the letters JM and a pair of crossed hammers, which is the stamp of Johnson Matthey, a British multinational chemical company that began as a reputable precious metals refinery business in 1817, according to the Daily Mail.
This wasn’t the first time Babul had made such a remarkable discovery on the job. Previously, in Calgary, Canada, he had found several rare original Daredevil comics. Of course, this is a different kind of “gold.”
The newspaper’s article said, “The company produced gold and silver bars of 99.9 percent purity weighing one, ten, and one hundred troy ounces from its refineries in Salt Lake City, USA and Brampton in Canada. Also inscribed on each bar is the number of troy ounces and often a serial number.”
Aside from bathtubs in Canada, gold has been found in other strange places, too, of course.
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