Ryan1979
Full Member
Since my wife and I moved into this old house here in St. Paul, we've been talking and thinking about where a previous owner may have stashed their valuables in the old days. We estimate the age of the house to the 1880's or 1890's. So far, we've found gold teeth in the old pantry and a handful of clad MD'ing in the yard. We also found about $11 worth of pesos in the garage. So, nothing too exciting or vastly valuable yet.
So yesterday we decided to finally metal detect the brick floor of the old coal room in the basement. We'd been talking about it for a long time, but had never done it for whatever reason. I swept it free of nails and junk like that to cut down on false signals. We were doing it just to see if we'd get any signals. We hadn't decided if we'd actually pull up the bricks and dig if we got a signal. That was about to change and fast!!
I got one really good strong signal in the northwest corner of the coal room. I had teh sensitivity on about 1/2 and the discrimination on about 3/4. Oh, I should describe the room for you. I estimate the room is about 8' by 8' or maybe just a little bit bigger. The floor is of original red firebrick and 3 of the interior walls are all brick as well. The 4th wall is the original flagstone rock foundation wall (south wall). When we moved in, the only thing in the room was some really old cobbled together shelving made of wood planks. The rest of the basement has a concrete floor and is about 3 or so inches below the grade of the coal room (meaning the coal room floor is 3" higher). I figure that whoever put the concrete in the rest of the basement must have taken out the original brick floor and for whatever reason, left this one room original.
So we got down to business and I swung the coil around the strong signal area to make sure that it wasn't some type of buried pipe or something like that. I figured if it was, then the signal should continue away from that area in some type of line. Well, it didn't so, we figured that there was most likely something buried under the bricks.
We then swept it away a little more and saw that there was what looked like newer mortar holding the bricks together in this spot. It was lighter in color than the rest of the mortared bricks.
Thinking we may be hitting the jackpot soon, I got my trusty crow bar and little shovel. There went the idea of not digging the floor up. :P I took out about 12 bricks with the crow bar and started digging with my wife swinging the coil over the fresh mounds of sandy dirt that I was taking out.
We weren't getting any signals at all on the fresh dirt mound, but we were still getting a really strong signal in the bottom of the hole.
I'd been digging little by little for about 5 minutes and then finally the shovel scraped on what sounded like metal. Not knowing if it was some kind of sewer line or some buried pipe we slowed down and took out little bits of dirt at a time. After getting a bunch more dirt out I tapped on the metal with the tip of the shovel and we both heard a very distinct 'hollow' sound all across the metal 'plate'. At this point the exposed flat metal was about a foot by a foot in dimension and was rusty and green in color.
This hollow sound obviously spiked our adrenaline!! We both had visions of metal boxes full of gold and jewels stashed away by some old homeowner, long fogotten after an untimely death and riches that he had failed to tell the location of to his family!!!
At this point I asked my wife to get the camera because if we did find something, I figured nobody would believe us and I wanted to be able to prove it without a doubt. So she ran upstairs and got the old digital 3.5" drive camera (our nice expensive camera was nowhere to be found, kids
).
She took a few pictures of the hole and the exposed metal and then I went back to work. I started trying to find the edge of the metal plate and eventually I started prying on what I thought was the edge.......UH OH!!!
At this point I was putting some weight on the shovel trying to 'pry' this 'plate' up from the dirt. Big mistake. The shovel point pierced through the rusty metal plate!!!
I started to panick and swear thinking that maybe I had broken a sewer pipe or other necessity of the house's function. I was really worried about sewer gas or something like that leaking up from this 'thing'. I told my wife that too and she was like, "Yeah whatever, DIG."
"Ok love."
When I pulled the shovel point out of the hole in the metal, we could see right away that there was definately a void below the plate and it appeared to be quite big. Come on big money!!!
So what did I do I destroyed the rusty metal plate with the shovel and made the hole huge!!! After breaking away the rust metal we found.........
A tunnel underneath our house!!! Kinda cool, but not the riches we'd hoped for.
I put on my headlamp and tried to look down there, but I couldn't quite fit. So my wife, bless her soul, says something like, "Idiot, I'll just put the camera down there and snap a picture with the flash on."
"Uh, ok."
So she did. What we saw on the first picture amazed us. The picture was taken at the hole looking to the south (or streetside). From this point, you could tell that the tunnel extended far past the foundation of our house towards the front lawn. The sides of the tunnel were of brick. The top of this tunnel had metal joists covered with some type of metal plate (maybe copper, hence the green rust). The floor of the tunnel was the same sandy reddish dirt that I had dug from the hole before finding the metal plate. I estimate the dimensions of the tunnel like this: 2 1/2 feet wide, 2 feet tall, and very long to both the north and south. If I wanted to, I could have easily been able to crawl through the tunnel if I had a big enough opening to get into it. That gives you an idea of how big it is because I'm 6'2" and about 220 lbs.
My wife then took a picture facing to the north (towards the alley). Same thing on this end, except you could see that the 'tunnel' was blocked off with a wall of bricks.
So, we didn't find anything valuable, but now we're wondering what this tunnel is/was for. I thought maybe it was for runoff if the basement had flooded or something like that. I also figured it could have been for sewer in the old days, but I thought they always had outhouses in those days, so that doesn't make sense to me either. Could it have been an escape tunnel for a gangster? The possibilities are endless.
Help us out, what is this tunnel for and why.
I'll have my wife post the pictures when she gets back from class. Every time I do it, it doesn't work.
Thanks,
Ryan1979
So yesterday we decided to finally metal detect the brick floor of the old coal room in the basement. We'd been talking about it for a long time, but had never done it for whatever reason. I swept it free of nails and junk like that to cut down on false signals. We were doing it just to see if we'd get any signals. We hadn't decided if we'd actually pull up the bricks and dig if we got a signal. That was about to change and fast!!
I got one really good strong signal in the northwest corner of the coal room. I had teh sensitivity on about 1/2 and the discrimination on about 3/4. Oh, I should describe the room for you. I estimate the room is about 8' by 8' or maybe just a little bit bigger. The floor is of original red firebrick and 3 of the interior walls are all brick as well. The 4th wall is the original flagstone rock foundation wall (south wall). When we moved in, the only thing in the room was some really old cobbled together shelving made of wood planks. The rest of the basement has a concrete floor and is about 3 or so inches below the grade of the coal room (meaning the coal room floor is 3" higher). I figure that whoever put the concrete in the rest of the basement must have taken out the original brick floor and for whatever reason, left this one room original.
So we got down to business and I swung the coil around the strong signal area to make sure that it wasn't some type of buried pipe or something like that. I figured if it was, then the signal should continue away from that area in some type of line. Well, it didn't so, we figured that there was most likely something buried under the bricks.
We then swept it away a little more and saw that there was what looked like newer mortar holding the bricks together in this spot. It was lighter in color than the rest of the mortared bricks.
Thinking we may be hitting the jackpot soon, I got my trusty crow bar and little shovel. There went the idea of not digging the floor up. :P I took out about 12 bricks with the crow bar and started digging with my wife swinging the coil over the fresh mounds of sandy dirt that I was taking out.
We weren't getting any signals at all on the fresh dirt mound, but we were still getting a really strong signal in the bottom of the hole.
I'd been digging little by little for about 5 minutes and then finally the shovel scraped on what sounded like metal. Not knowing if it was some kind of sewer line or some buried pipe we slowed down and took out little bits of dirt at a time. After getting a bunch more dirt out I tapped on the metal with the tip of the shovel and we both heard a very distinct 'hollow' sound all across the metal 'plate'. At this point the exposed flat metal was about a foot by a foot in dimension and was rusty and green in color.
This hollow sound obviously spiked our adrenaline!! We both had visions of metal boxes full of gold and jewels stashed away by some old homeowner, long fogotten after an untimely death and riches that he had failed to tell the location of to his family!!!
At this point I asked my wife to get the camera because if we did find something, I figured nobody would believe us and I wanted to be able to prove it without a doubt. So she ran upstairs and got the old digital 3.5" drive camera (our nice expensive camera was nowhere to be found, kids
).She took a few pictures of the hole and the exposed metal and then I went back to work. I started trying to find the edge of the metal plate and eventually I started prying on what I thought was the edge.......UH OH!!!
At this point I was putting some weight on the shovel trying to 'pry' this 'plate' up from the dirt. Big mistake. The shovel point pierced through the rusty metal plate!!!
I started to panick and swear thinking that maybe I had broken a sewer pipe or other necessity of the house's function. I was really worried about sewer gas or something like that leaking up from this 'thing'. I told my wife that too and she was like, "Yeah whatever, DIG."
"Ok love."
When I pulled the shovel point out of the hole in the metal, we could see right away that there was definately a void below the plate and it appeared to be quite big. Come on big money!!!
So what did I do
I destroyed the rusty metal plate with the shovel and made the hole huge!!! After breaking away the rust metal we found.........A tunnel underneath our house!!! Kinda cool, but not the riches we'd hoped for.
I put on my headlamp and tried to look down there, but I couldn't quite fit. So my wife, bless her soul, says something like, "Idiot, I'll just put the camera down there and snap a picture with the flash on."
"Uh, ok."
So she did. What we saw on the first picture amazed us. The picture was taken at the hole looking to the south (or streetside). From this point, you could tell that the tunnel extended far past the foundation of our house towards the front lawn. The sides of the tunnel were of brick. The top of this tunnel had metal joists covered with some type of metal plate (maybe copper, hence the green rust). The floor of the tunnel was the same sandy reddish dirt that I had dug from the hole before finding the metal plate. I estimate the dimensions of the tunnel like this: 2 1/2 feet wide, 2 feet tall, and very long to both the north and south. If I wanted to, I could have easily been able to crawl through the tunnel if I had a big enough opening to get into it. That gives you an idea of how big it is because I'm 6'2" and about 220 lbs.
My wife then took a picture facing to the north (towards the alley). Same thing on this end, except you could see that the 'tunnel' was blocked off with a wall of bricks.
So, we didn't find anything valuable, but now we're wondering what this tunnel is/was for. I thought maybe it was for runoff if the basement had flooded or something like that. I also figured it could have been for sewer in the old days, but I thought they always had outhouses in those days, so that doesn't make sense to me either. Could it have been an escape tunnel for a gangster? The possibilities are endless.
Help us out, what is this tunnel for and why.
I'll have my wife post the pictures when she gets back from class. Every time I do it, it doesn't work.
Thanks,
Ryan1979
AA
No tellin whats behind that wall.
