A New York couple discovered more than 66 bottles of whiskey from the Prohibition-era stashed within the walls and floorboards of their 100-year-old home.
Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker were told that a notorious bootlegger built their home in 1915, but they passed it off as small town legend.
“Our walls are filled with bundles of booze!” said Drummond.
“I can’t believe the rumors are true! He was actually a bootlegger!”
The couple had been living in the house in Ames, about three hours away from New York City, when they decided to make some renovations about two months ago.
Drummond was removing outside skirting along the bottom of their mudroom when an unidentified package fell out.
“I’m like what is that? I’m very confused,” he shared. “I’m looking and there’s hay everywhere, there’s paper, and glass … I see another package and it’s this whiskey bottle.”
“I’m like holy crap. This is like a whiskey stash. And this is like, all of a sudden, the whole story of the bootlegger.”
A designer and historic preservationist, Drummond documented the unexpected find in a series of posts on Instagram.
As he went along the renovations, he found more packages of smuggled whiskey under the floorboards through an uncovered hatch inside the floor of the mudroom.
“Initially we found seven bundles of six in the wall and then at that point we found four more bundles and actually funny enough as of less than a week ago we just found more,” Drummond said.
According to him, the liquors were found wrapped in tissue paper and straw and bundled in a package of six.
The original owner of the house, a German man named Count Adolph Humpfner, was known to be a man of mystery in the town and took part in many scandals.
As per Drummond’s research, Humpfner died a sudden death and left behind the smuggled liquor, as well as a heavily disputed fortune