Plumbers pull up floorboards and make discovery that creeps residents out

A couple who are in the process of renovating their home after a plumber they'd employed to carry out piping work stumbled upon a locked safe hidden beneath their floorboards. Josh Brooks and his wife Emily are documenting their home improvements on TikTok, which is where they showcased the unusual discovery.

"This just happened today whilst the main job was to fix the heating pipes under the floor," Josh explained in a caption alongside his first video. The clip began with a plumber dusting away rubble beneath the tiled flooring to unveil a round object just below the surface. 

The plumber added: "Twenty years I've been doing this and I've never seen that before." It quickly became apparent the circular object was indeed the dial of a safe.

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Asked by Josh how old it appeared, the plumber responded: "It's old, very old." Josh then explained: "It was the 40s or something that I think the house was built."

It prompted a second plumber to ponder whether previous owners of the property "couldn't be bothered" to pull the safe out and "covered it over".

"There's no record of the previous owners, I tried to look them up," Josh added as excitement amongst the plumbers grow over the potential of the safe's contents.

"I don't care about anything else now," one of them joked as he slammed the safe unsuccessfully with a hammer. "It might be six hours of pulling out this safe!"

Josh later shared a brief follow-up video, revealing he'd been told the safe resembled a World War II era manifoil contraption, which the inscription seemed to back up. No closer to discovering what was inside it, however, he began to tackle it once more with a drill.

After successfully piercing the safe 45mm from the dial, Josh then inserted a camera down the hole for a closer inspection, which only added to the confusion. 

"What is that?" he asked, spotting little more than a small bead-like item.

Next, it was the plumbers' turn. They began by chiselling away the dial and hammering a screwdriver into the surface where it once sat. 

After applying a variety of other tools to the metallic structure, the pair were eventually able to prise the safe open. "There you go, have a look," one of them told Josh.

"There is something in there," he exclaimed as he removed the remains of the dial's mechanism. "It's like a letter."

Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a neatly-folded newspaper, dated October 22, 1977 with a headline calling for late football manager Brian Clough to be "given the job".

Turning the newspaper over failed to offer any further clues as to why it had been locked away, meanwhile. 

"It's crazy that you would keep that in a safe," one of the plumbers added. They also pulled out another random item – a small, golden globe object akin to a jewellery piece.

The newspaper, which appeared stained in places and featured another story under the headline, 'How the sexy vicar seduced me'.

It prompted a variety of theories, as one TikTok user responded: "Should go to the police, could potentially help a cold case and be used as evidence, if it is in fact a trophy kept from a murder."

A second urged: "Look for a murder or missing person in the paper and then the gold thing is probably a keep sake from the person's necklace or something."

A third person added: "Time capsules were very popular in the 70s. Blue Peter did a famous times capsule and people just copied suit."

A fourth explained: "This looks like a 'Sealed Harmony Ball' - they were made for pregnant woman to symbolise protection."

Whilst a fifth TikTok user pointed out: "My grandad used to line the bottom of drawers with random newspapers, might not have any importance." Josh concurred: "Yes that makes sense. Let's just say I'm glad kids weren't here when I opened it up to Page 3."