Living in Total Squalor
When my great uncle passed in the late 90s, he had been living in total squalor in an apartment in the Bronx. His wife had really awful dementia, and had passed a year or so earlier.
All of our family offered to take him in, but he didn’t want to move. My mom would call him once per week and some of us tried to see him, but he didn’t want to be seen in person.
When we eventually found out that he had passed, his body had been in the apartment for some time. People in hazmat suits had to go in not just because of the decomposing body, but because of how bad the apartment was.
Entire boxes full of cockroaches, 40-year-old magazines stacked to the ceiling, the smell of decay and rot, and that sort of thing.
Well, they also found something other than refuse—and it was utterly bizarre. It turned out that despite these atrocious conditions, he had a huge stock portfolio of major companies, all of which had been issued in the 1940s and 1950s.
The man was sitting on a very comfortable amount of money—enough to have bought a nice apartment in Manhattan even at the time, in order to live out the rest of his days.
It’s too bad because he was a really lovely guy and we’d have loved to take care of him. We could’ve even used his own money to help him if he wanted to. But such is life, I suppose.
My grandfather wound up inheriting it all and eventually distributed it evenly to all of the family about six years later. Story credit: Reddit / kl0