For Walter Castenado, X marked the spot of quite a treasure. That spot turned out to be under the floor of the basement of an east Toledo home he bought for cheap.
TOLEDO, Ohio — What started as a cleaning up an old home turned into quite the payout for one east Toledo resident.
“I just kind of felt like ‘woah’, like ‘huh,'” Walter Castanedo said. “Because you read about this stuff but you never actually see it. And then when it’s right there in front of you, it’s kind of hard to process.”
Castanedo bought the house at 220 Paine Avenue, near Front Street, in May of 2024 for $1,000, according to the Lucas County Auditor’s website.
But during the process of gutting its basement on New Year’s Eve, he found 10 times that in cash.
“That’s where I found the money. There were five envelopes,” Castanedo said, pointing to a pair of bricks in a corner of the basement.
He also found a handful of $100 bills underneath bricks where a potbelly stove once was.
“They were black, but you could just make out when I shined a light on it. There were 100s in the corners,” Castanedo said.
The latest bill is dated 1981. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, $10,000 in January of 1981 would be worth about $35,450 as of January 2024, accounting for inflation.
Castanedo suspects the money was stashed for decades, so he thought of the others who lived at the home before he bought it. He made some calls to hopefully find the right person, who ended up being Andrew Aranyosi.
-“I talked to him (Aranyosi) and I said ‘look, I found something in your basement,” Castanedo said. “I found some money in your basement and I’d like to split it with you. “
Aranyosi lived in the house from 1946-1967. He says his dad, Andrew Sr., bought it in 1937 and lived there until he died 30 years ago.
“My dad built parts of the home,” Aranyosi said. “He added a whole new bedroom on the back of the house above the kitchen, and that’s actually the bedroom I was in.”
But Aranyosi suspects most of the bills were hidden by his dad and he never knew it.
“The $10,000 I would say my father definitely tucked that somewhere in the bricks or wherever,” he said.
Castanedo decided to split the cash with Aranyosi 50/50.
“He (Castanedo) found it; it was his, but to have him call and everything was unbelievable,” Aranyosi said.
“You only live once, so it’s better to just help other people than go the other way,” Castanedo said.
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