It was 1993, and a Realtor friend of mine called me up and said that he had an estate that I really needed to see. If I had not seen it, I would have never believed the story, or its ending….
Alice had inherited the farm in the 1950’s. It was several thousand acres and she was set for life. It was what she chose to do with the money that was unusual. Alice was a compulsive shopper!! When she went to town she would often buy $10,000 or $20,000 of clothes (the vast majority of which were never worn). However, Alice seldom went to town, instead she spent her days ordering from catalogs. I spoke with the postmaster of the small town that was a few miles from the farm, and he had a separate room for her purchases.
With this level of buying, Alice could fill up a house in a short period of time. When one house was full she would buy another and start filling it up. To my knowledge, she never opened any of the packages that she got in the mail. When I went to look there were four houses (two in town and two in the country) and fourteen outbuildings that had been filled with unopened packages.
Of course everyone in the small town knew the story, and as soon as she moved out of a house, they would break in and start stealing things. With the windows broken, the rodents and birds would move in, the roofs would leak, and the contents soon became a moldering mess. In 1993 the relatives had convinced the court that Alice was “not of sound mind” and had the property turned over to them by the court and Alice was moved to assisted living.
This is where I came in, as they needed the houses and buildings emptied so that they could be sold to pay off some of the debt that had accumulated over the years. The first two houses were in town. The first house had virtually nothing salvageable remaining; the second was mostly full of clothes. However, the third house was near the fourth one — out in the country — and was 75% intact. The fourth (where she had last lived) was a large three story home with six outbuildings full of unopened packages.
My offer to the relatives was that I would not only empty all the buildings, but I would also pay them the largest sum that I have ever paid for an estate. They accepted my offer and I hired a crew and went to work. It was 95 degrees and we were all having to wear full protective gear (coveralls, gloves, respirators, goggles, etc.). What I failed to anticipate was that as soon as the locals saw my trucks and crew, they realized that their moment of opportunity was waning and went into a frenzy. I would come to work in the morning to find doors kicked in and truckloads of the items I had purchased missing. To prevent this from happening, I had to hire guards to stay on the properties when I was not working.
After two weeks, and a tremendous amount of expense for labor and hauling, I got a call from the relatives. It seemed that word had gotten back to Alice that her treasured possessions were being removed and she had hired an attorney to stop the process. It turned out that the court had awarded possession of the land and buildings to the relatives, but the personal property (contents), still belonged to Alice. The relatives’ solution was to offer to return the amount that I had paid them!
When I brought up the fact that I had incurred many additional expenses in the two weeks I had been working (as well as my time) and that they were the ones that had sold me something that did not legally belong to them, they threatened to sue me. We finally settled out of court and I was reimbursed for my expenses, but made no profit for my efforts.
Postscript: Two weeks later Alice passed away and the relatives hired a contractor with a backhoe to dig a trench and dump all of the contents into it where they were burned (I heard later that his charges for hauling and equipment were over $10,000). After the contents were burned the locals spent days digging through the ashes, filling buckets with silver coins and jewelry. Eventually, the trench was filled in, the houses renovated and sold, and the whole story relegated to folklore.