Caskets Stuffed with BIG Secrets (Season 25) | American Pickers

Mike: Jersey, check out this town, man.
Jersey Jon: What a cool town, man, yea.
Nice downtown. Mike: This is so cool.
God, I love this. Old brick buildings.
Mike: Maybe old courthouse. Jersey Jon: Yup.
Mike: Here we go. Jersey Jon: It’s right here.
Mike: Here, grab a flyer.
Jersey Jon: Oof. Mike: Alright.
It’s a great town.
Jersey Jon: Hello!
Mike: Wow, this is cool!
Hey, Barbara?
Barbara: Yea, can I help you?
Jersey Jon: Hello. Mike: What are you doing?
Jersey Jon: Hey, how are you? Barbara: I’m fine, thank you.
Mike: How are you doing? I’m Mike.
Barbara: Hi Mike, it’s nice to meet you.
Mike: That’s Jersey Jon. Jersey Jon: Hey, I’m Jon.
Barbara: Hi Jon. Jersey Jon: Nice to meet you.
Mike: Wow, this is cool.
Barbara: My dad collected everything.
He said once when he was young, he wanted one of everything in a Montgomery Wards catalogue.
Barbara: He collected over the years.
Mike: Yea, that’s great.
Barbara: Well, he bought out stores that were going out of business.
Mike: Okay.
Barbara: If a business was shutting down, closing, Dad would go in and purchase everything, you know, for a flat fee and uh, drag it home.
Barbara: After he passed in ’92, he had stuff in warehouses that he paid rent monthly for, you know, for twenty plus years.
Mike: Okay.
Barbara: So, we tried to consolidate stuff and quit paying rent to everyone in town.
Mike: Yea. Yea.
Well, 1992, that was a long time ago.
That was, what, 31 years ago.
Barbara: It was. Yeah.
Now we need to get rid of some stuff.
Mike: Her father obviously wore a lot of hats.
Buying out the inventory of any type of business.
Not just some of it, all of it, you have to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel and believe that you can pull it off.
Barbara: You all need to go downstairs.
We have a lot of neat things downstairs.
Mike: Okay.
Barbara: My husband’s down there, he’s cleaning up a little bit.
Mike: Wow, Jersey, look at this.
This is crazy.
Jersey Jon: Yeah!
Barbara: Hey Ed. Ed: Yeah?
Barbara: You down here somewhere?
Ed: Hey, yeah, how you all doing?
Mike: Looks like you got your work cut out for you.
Ed: Yeah, getting things organized.
Mike: How you doing man? Good to see you, I’m Mike.
This is Jersey Jon.
Do you feel overwhelmed?
Barbara: Yes. Ed: Always.
Mike: Always? Yeah? Barbara: Definitely.
Barbara: I believe it was 2019 or ’20, a business up the street caught on fire.
It was a huge building, and the water from the fire department, it was like a little river coming down, and the basement got flooded.
It ruined a lot of things.
Mike: Wow, you guys haven’t even been through these trunks?
Barbara: No. Jersey Jon: Look what I found.
Mike: Huh. Jersey Jon: Mike?
Mike: Oh wow. Lightning rod?
Jersey Jon: No, it’s a whimsy piece, it’s a glass cane.
Jersey Jon: We called these things whimsy pieces, or “end of the day” pieces, because the end of the day, in a glasshouse, the glass workers, they’re artists.
These guys are still pulling molten glass out of – out of the furnace, and they’re making these whimsical pieces.
This glass cane is one of those whimsical pieces.
Barbara: 20 bucks?
Jersey Jon: 50 bucks. Barbara: 50? 50 bucks?
Jersey Jon: Yep. Barbara: Okay.
Jersey Jon: I’m into it. Love it. Thank you.
Jersey Jon: There’s a glass community out there that loves these things.
Ed: Did you notice what you’re kneeling on?
Mike: Trunks? Wood trunks?
Jersey Jon: Ha! I know what they are.
Those are caskets, dude.
Mike: Oh, that’s a casket?
Jersey Jon: Those are caskets. Ed: Those are caskets.
Mike: Oh, they’re just… so, literally, a pine box.
Barbara: Those would’ve come from the state hospital.
Dad bought what was left over there, that’s what they buried the patients in, was a plain wooden pine box.
Mike: So, these are caskets. Can I walk on these?
Ed: Yeah, there’s stuff in them.
Jersey Jon: Be careful. Careful, buddy.
Mike: I don’t want to fall in.
Jersey Jon: Yeah, exactly. We’ll have to bury you.
Barbara: Of course, Dad stuffed them full of stuff.
Ed: There’s stuff in all – everything here…
Mike: The coffins have things in them?
Ed: Yes. Barbara: Oh yeah.
Mike: Oh [beep].
Mike: Over the years, I have picked a lot of strange places, I’ve met some very interesting people, but I have never met anyone that has stored stuff in caskets.
Jersey Jon: Anything gonna spring out of these coffins we aren’t aware of?
Jersey Jon: Our imaginations are going wild because you’re not gonna show us a bunch of caskets and tell us there’s a bunch of stuff in there without us looking in them.
Mike: It’s like mummy stuff, man.
Oh my God. Look at this.
Jersey Jon: Whoa. Mike: Holy crap.
Mike: I can honestly say I’ve never picked out of a casket before.
But I can’t speak for Jersey.
Mike: There, Jersey. Ed: Now what is that?
Jersey Jon: I think it’s a stone hammer, for cutting stone.
Ed: Yeah?
Jersey Jon: This is a very unusual tool to find.
It’s a very early stone axe.
Jersey Jon: For dressing stone down.
Ed: Yeah.
Jersey Jon: Yeah? These are all hardened.
Jersey Jon: It’s an early way to shape a piece of stone.
It would carefully cut a stone where it wouldn’t split it, but it would shear the stone off.
It would shape the surface so you can wear it down to what you needed.
Jersey Jon: How much? Ed: $5.
Jersey Jon: $5? Barbara: No!
Surely, it’s worth more than that.
[laughs] Yeah, let me do the- Jersey Jon: I’ll give you 20 bucks.
Barbara: Okay. 20 bucks. That’s a lot better.
Jersey Jon: Alright, yeah, I’ll take the stone hammer for 20 bucks.
Jersey Jon: What do you want for the embalming fluid crate?
Jersey Jon: So, believe it or not, it might seem morbid, but there’s actually a community of collectors out there that collect funeral parlor stuff.
Ed: What do you think?
Jersey Jon: Um, the crate itself is just cool because it says embalming fluid, and it’s got some paper label on it.
Jersey Jon: These embalming crates have advertising on them, and that makes them very desirable.
Jersey Jon: I’m thinking 40 bucks?
Ed: How about 50?
Jersey Jon: 45 bucks.
Barbara: It’s yours.
Jersey Jon: Yeah? Barbara: Yeah.
Jersey Jon: She says it’s mine. Thank you.
I like her.
[laughter] Mike: Her father Bill had no boundaries.
Mike: Wow, look at this one.
Ed: That’s a child’s one.
Mike: I’m opening casket after casket from a state hospital.
It’s crazy!
Jersey Jon: The last pine box.
Mike: Oh yeah!
Jersey Jon: Whoa…
Water got in this one real hard.
Mike: Oh, look at that, they were little stools, they’re like little milking stools.
Ed: Milking stools. Mike: Yeah.
Mike: And there’s stuff in them, but unfortunately water got in them during the flood and a lot of the things are ruined.
Mike: Yeah, moisture got in this one pretty bad.
Jersey Jon: Yeah.
Mike: This is the moonshine jug right here boy.
Jersey Jon: Any shine in it?
Barbara: Yeah, it’s a shame it got flooded down here.
Jersey Jon: Yeah.
it got pretty beat up down here didn’t it?
Barbara: Yeah.
Jersey Jon: What are you pulling out of there, Mike? Whoa!
Is it broken?
Mike: No.
Jersey Jon: Are the handles on it?
Mike: Yup.
Ed: I’m thinking $700. Mike: Woo!
Mike: We’re not in Egypt or South America…
we’re in West Virginia digging artifacts out of caskets.
Mike: There’s still water in these jars in here.
Barbara: Are you kidding? Mike: No.
Because all this was underwater.
Barbara: Yeah.
Mike: It’s unbelievable though, I mean just, like, this jug is a great jug, but to find it like this, it’s not on the table at a flea market, you know.
We’re pulling it out of a coffin!
Jersey Jon: Yeah.
[laughter] Barbara: It amazed me that they were in there.
I know some pieces are worth a lot, but I had no idea that it was there.
Mike: So, this has got what they call a couple flea bites in it, and it’s not that big a deal but it does – it takes a little bit off of it.
The retail on this one is like 350…
This, couple hundred bucks.
This one here, this is like 75 to 100.
So, like 350, 450, 550… 6…
$600 would be retail on this stuff.
Barbara: Four? 400? Ed: That’s what I was gonna say.
Mike: Okay, you know what?
I’m gonna pay that because I, I just…
I can’t believe that I’m digging this stuff out of a coffin, which is so fun for me.
It’s crazy incredible, and the things that we’re finding here.
Barbara: Yeah.
Mike: Okay. Thank you buddy. Ed: You’re welcome.
Mike: Appreciate it.
[rock music] Barbara: I have no idea what’s in there.
Mike: Whoa! Ed: Toys.
Mike: The reason antique toys are expensive is because kids played with them.
Mike: There’s Popeye on a high wheel.
What’s left of him.
Jersey Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mike: His handlebars – oh, his pipe’s gone.
He also would’ve had a pipe in his mouth.
Mike: They put them through the paces, so it’s very difficult to find something that’s in exceptional condition.
Jersey Jon: Oh, more Popeye. Look it.
Mike: Oh yeah. Jersey Jon: Is that part…
Mike: Oh that’s, that’s, that’s his arms.
This is the handlebars.
They actually pinch…
they pinch on here…
Jersey Jon: It’s incomplete, but anything Popeye is definitely desirable, and tin toys, I mean you just don’t see many Popeye’s out there.
Jersey Jon: Nice little Hubley car… more Auburn…
more Auburn.
Mike: On top of that, they weren’t made to last.
Something that’s tin that you wound up, and you hand it to a four-year-old…
what do you think he’s gonna do with it? So…
Jersey Jon: Oh, it’s a pull toy chicken.
It’s Fisher Price. It’s early Fisher Price.
It’s a bunch of little early Fisher Price.
Mike: Some of these toys are rubber, they’ve stood the test of time, but there’s faded paint, the wheels are jacked up on them.
Jersey Jon: Jack in the box.
No, he’s not in the box no more.
Mike: There’s a lot of stuff here, but not a lot of quality.
Jersey Jon: Ah! Ah!
Jersey Jon: They’re not mint, but it’s all about getting these toys back out in the collector’s community.
Jersey Jon: This stuff here, 175 bucks.
For all of this.
Barbara: I’m thinking 200.
Jersey Jon: 200?
Ed: Yeah, I think 200.
Jersey Jon: Alright, I’ll do the two.
Thanks buddy. Thank you. Yup. It’s a nice pile.
Mike: Oh here. Oh yeah, here we go.
So, what building did this come off of?
Was this something local?
Barbara: I would say…
Mike: Be like this, man.
That’s what he’d be like, right?
Jersey Jon: Barbara…
Barbara: Yeah? Find something you like?
Jersey Jon: Yeah!
Mike: It’s a great store display.
Especially like, you know, mercantile general store.
Whoa!
Barbara: Oh yeah, it works. Mike: She’s fired up.
Let’s see what happens.
Jersey Jon: Look it.
Barbara: There you go.
Jersey Jon: It’s a Herter’s Kodiak bear trap.
Mike: Oh man, I would love if this worked.
Oh my God, to wake my brother up or something, just…
BRR!
Oh, that’d be the best.
Jersey Jon: It’s a decorator piece, no one’s gonna be hunting with this thing anymore.
Barbara: Oh yeah.
Mike: And this is paper, so that’s amazing that that lasted as long as it has.
Mike: For the sign, and this, uh…
Ed: Hundred and a half?
Mike: No, I’m thinking more – way more than that.
I’m thinking uh, 750.
Ed: You are thinking a lot more, aren’t you?
Mike: Yeah. I’m thinking a lot more.
60 bucks.
Barbara: Oh gosh, 75 at least.
Mike: 70. Barbara: 75.
Jersey Jon: 350.
Mike: Hundred and a half.
Ed: Sold.
Mike: Thanks.
Ed: Yeah, sold.
Barbara: Yeah. Mike: Alright.
Alright, thanks.
Barbara: Okay. Jersey Jon: You’ll do 350?
Barbara: Yeah.
Jersey Jon: That was easy. Thank you, sweetheart.
Mike: There you go, Jersey.
Mike: There’s a lot of small town collectors that started preserving their communities’ past way before the local historical society or museum.
Jersey Jon: Oh yeah.
Mike: And it’s obvious that Bill was one of those guys.
Mike: Here’s my favorite.
Mike: He was a memory keeper.
He rescued stories and he understood that the smallest piece could have the biggest impact.
Ed: Alright, guys. Mike: Woo!
Ed: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Barbara: Appreciate it.
Mike: You guys wore me out. That’s not easy to do!
Jersey Jon: Thank you so much, sweetheart.
Barbara: Thank you.
Mike: Thank you, buddy.