A Warehouse in His Name
My grandfather was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. It got worse in his later years and he would often isolate himself from the rest of the family, often hiding out in his bedroom when visitors were over.
My grandmother would often tell us stories about how he had inherited a significant amount of money from his father way back when. She said that in their younger years he spent the money on luxurious dates and trips.
After returning from Vietnam, he spent the rest on the house where he and my grandmother raised their children. A couple of months before he passed, we found out that he had written a will. Even my grandmother didn’t know about it.
We all assumed that he wouldn’t have much to leave since most of the money he had saved was being used to take care of him because he had been placed in a care facility as his PTSD worsened.
His will told of a warehouse in Township, Michigan that held a large collection of vintage cars. He said that the warehouse was passed down from his father, and he had all the documents to prove that he was the owner of some type of warehouse.
His will estimated that the cars be worth an excess of two million dollars in total. The money from his collection would be split between his four children. We had no idea this collection ever existed. It just made no sense. My father and his three brothers had all grown up in Plano, Texas.
None of us had ever been to Michigan before. Even our mother couldn’t recall a time of our father ever having even gone to visit Michigan. After a long debate, my father and I, the only ones who could manage to find some time off from work, agreed to fly out to Michigan to see this collection first hand.
After a few thousand dollars spent on plane tickets, hotels, etc. we finally arrived at the warehouse my grandfather owned. It was a rundown warehouse, but it was tucked away within a compound of other warehouses that seemed to be otherwise well taken care of.
Finally, code in hand, my father punched the numbers into the keypad and the giant door began to rise. What was inside is beyond words. There was absolutely nothing.
There were a few homeless people that managed to sneak in through a hole in the corrugated metal around back, but there certainly was no car collection.
We were able to contact a few owners of the neighboring warehouses and to their knowledge, no one and nothing had ever been inside of those warehouses in the years they had been there.
To this day we don’t know what happened. We all just assume that the PTSD caused him to create some kind of fantasy in his mind. That maybe he purchased the warehouse believing it was a safe house for him if he ever needed to get out of Plano.