Talk about skeletons in your closet.
A Florida family recently discovered a box full of macabre objects in a relative's attic, WFLA reported. Among the objects were an old photograph, a weathered map, some odd coins and a severed hand decayed down to the bone.
Mike Lopez said his sister found the long wooden box while recently cleaning out their grandparents' attic. He said the sepia photograph showing a newly married couple is probably his great-grandparents Eve and Ernesto Lopez.
"It seems as though this belonged to my great-grandparents because there is a picture of them in there," Mike Lopez told the station.
He believes the coins and map, of downtown Tampa and the Hillsborough River, are connected to the fabled Spanish pirate Jose Gaspar who looted Florida's western coast from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. Lopez's grandfather used to tell him stories of how his dad Ernesto Lopez found the pirate's treasure long ago, he told WTSP-TV.
They also believe the severed hand - which has a ring on one the fingers - belonged to the pirate himself. The ring likely dates back to the 18th century.
But according to Rodney Kite-Powell, curator of the Tampa Bay History Center, the map is from the 1930s and the coins are too thin to be Spanish.
"It's fascinating, but I just don't know what to make of it aside from the fact that it's probably not Jose Gasper's hand, these probably aren't Spanish coins," he told WFLA.
Lopez and his sister Maria said they will likely keep the hand, as it's a part of their family now.
"Either my great-grandfather made the best, most elaborate pirate hoax ever and never shared it with anyone, or he really did find some treasure on the Hillsborough River," Maria Lopez told WTSP-TV.
"There's really no way to know which is the case."
