A woman attempting urgent repairs on her Tennessee home said she “cried a little” after making a shock discovery in the crawl space beneath her property.
Home repairs can often be a daunting prospect. One survey of 1,000 U.S. homeowners conducted by FinanceBuzz found 60 percent of respondents were putting off necessary home maintenance or repairs.
Beth H., who asked that her full name not be shared in this story, isn’t one for putting things off though, however daunting it might be. So, when her husband discovered a leak in their bathroom, she happily volunteered to get into the crawlspace under the floor to fix the issue.
TikTok/emgeehaitch
“It was some kind of faulty valve on the underside of the toilet in our half-bathroom,” she told Newsweek. “The crawl space makes my husband claustrophobic, but it doesn’t bother me. So he kind of just told me to ‘do this and do that’ while he stood safely outside.”
Crawling through that confined space with only a headlamp and her husband’s voice to guide her, Beth was, understandably, in no mood to hang around. Yet, as she gradually moved through the crawl space, she came across something that stopped her in her tracks.
.
“I looked up and saw something tucked into the floor joists,” Beth said. “It was folded up, and I thought that was odd. It was clear that it had been deliberately tucked away.”
Eager to find out what it was, Beth pulled what she quickly realized was a paper document from the joists and took it out with her. As soon as she opened it up, the words “last will and testament” were immediately visible.
“It kind of startled me to be honest,” she said. Beth considers herself a “very curious person” and said her head was immediately full of questions like ‘who is this?’, ‘why was this hidden here?’ and ‘why did they choose this as a hiding place?’
Yet, as she read the will, that sense of intrigue gave way to something else: sadness.
Among all the usual information regarding the division of assets, Beth saw the remnants of a life lived and someone once loved but now lost.
“I cried a little when I read the ‘my beloved wife’ part,” Beth said. “It brought tears to my eyes. I thought about this couple and how they must have loved each other and I wondered what their life together was like.”
Those three simple words had a wider impact. “It made me think of my own mortality and what it would be like for someone to find my or my husband’s will tucked away 44 years from now,” Beth said. “What it might reveal about us and our lives together.”
Beth has been unable to find out much about the man who wrote the will. “I figured out who to call in my county to ask for more information,” she said. “I found out that the couple owned this house from 1975 to 1996. The man in the will died in 1995, and the house was sold the following year.”
Regardless of that, Beth is planning on keeping hold of the document as a poignant reminder of the lives once lived in the place she now calls home. “Maybe I’ll frame it when we have some more money to do that. For now, I have it in a safe place where it won’t get damaged any more,” she said.
In the meantime, Beth shared a screenshot of the document to Reddit under the handle u/emgeehaitch. “I just wanted to see if anyone else was as fascinated by it as I was. Something about it was very touching to me. I don’t have a big social circle and I had already shown everyone I know,” she said.
Beth hasn’t given up hope of finding out more about the man behind the will either. “I’ve been thinking ever since I found it that I want to go back in the crawl space with the headlamp and see if there’s anything else hidden in there,” she said.
There could yet be more to this story than first thought.
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