13 Things People Found Inside Old Books, Handbags, and Shoes From Thrift Stores That Gave Them a Second Chance at Life

I’m homeless, and yesterday’s rain destroyed my only shoes. I went to a thrift store looking for the cheapest pair. I spotted some worn-out boots for $1.

I noticed the left heel felt loose. I twisted the bottom rubber heel plate; it clicked open, and my hands started shaking when I pulled out a crumpled roll of bills. I smoothed them out on the floor with shaking hands.

One thousand dollars. All hundreds.

Underneath the cash was a small gold ring and a folded note in careful block letters: “Found money is a gift. Use it well. Pass it on someday if you can.”

I bought the boots. They were still only $1.

I used most of the cash for two months of rent on a single room. I kept the ring. I kept the note.

I still have the note in my wallet. I’ve read it more times than I can count.

I don’t know who put it there or how long it had been waiting. But I think about them sometimes — whoever they were — and whether they knew it would end up exactly where it needed to go.

It did.

I collect old cookbooks. Not valuable ones. The stained church and community cookbooks where six different women apparently submitted the same casserole.

At a charity shop in Madison, Wisconsin, I bought one for $3.

When I got home, a folded sheet fell out.

It was a handwritten knitting pattern for a baby cardigan. At the top: “For Eleanor’s first grandbaby.”

My grandmother’s name was Eleanor.

Obviously, there are a million Eleanors. Then I noticed the handwriting.

I called Mom.

She came over, looked at it for maybe 5 seconds, and said, “That’s Grandma.”

The cookbook had been donated after my aunt cleared out boxes from Grandma’s basement years earlier. Somehow it had traveled across town and sat on a thrift-store shelf until I picked it up.

Grandma taught me knitting when I was a teenager, although it never became much of a hobby for me. I kept one pair of her needles anyway.

I bought cream yarn and made a cardigan.

My sister was pregnant at the time.

Her daughter wore it home from the hospital.

The pattern is back inside the cookbook now, in a plastic sleeve because Mom does not trust me with anything important.

I bought the handbag because it was red.

That’s it.

No meaningful vintage collecting story. I saw it at a charity shop in Richmond, Virginia, liked the shape, and paid $12.

At home I found a flat zippered compartment behind the lining.

Inside was an unfinished piece of embroidery, still attached to a small hoop.

Blue flowers around the letter M.

There was also a paper packet containing the remaining thread and a handwritten note:

Mara, finish this before you start another one. Love, Mom.

As a person with 4 unfinished projects in my own apartment, I felt attacked by a stranger’s mother.

I posted a photo in the neighborhood Facebook group, mostly because the bag had come from a local donation center.

A woman named Mara Ellis messaged me that night.

Her mother had passed the previous year. During the house cleanout, several bags had been donated before Mara could go through them.

I met her outside a coffee shop and handed over the hoop.

She laughed when she read the note.

“She was still nagging me.”

Mara finished the craft herself. A month later she sent me a photo of the completed flowers framed beside a picture of her mother.

I still have the red bag.

I bought my hubby a $6 suit at a thrift store. That night, I found $700 sewn into the lining with a note: “For Danny. If he ever asks, tell him the truth.”

Then I checked the embroidered name inside the collar and immediately called my MIL. She gasped as I read it, “N-no... that can’t be. Where did you get that suit?”

Danny’s father, Robert, had left when Danny was 10. Danny grew up believing his dad had walked away and never looked back. He almost never talked about him.

My MIL started crying on the phone.

She told me Robert had lost his job and moved across the country for work, planning to bring the family over once he got settled. Before he left, though, they had a terrible argument. She told him not to come back.

Robert kept writing. He sent money too.

She returned the letters.

Then she told Danny his father had chosen another life.

“I was angry,” she said. “And after a while, I didn’t know how to undo what I’d told him.”

The next morning, I called the thrift store. The manager checked the donation tag and told me the suit had come from an assisted-living home a couple of towns away.

Robert lived there.

I told Danny that night. He sat at the kitchen table with the note in his hand and read it several times before asking me for the address.

That weekend, we drove there together.

Robert was sitting by a window when we arrived. The embroidered name in the suit had been his, and the money had been meant for Danny if the suit ever found its way back to the family.

When Robert saw him, he stood so fast he had to grab his cane.

Danny walked over.

Robert started apologizing.

Danny stopped him after a minute and said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say yet. But I came.”

They talked for nearly 3 hours.

My MIL went with us the following week.

The $700 is still in an envelope at home. Danny said he isn’t spending it until he decides what he wants it to mean.

The $6 suit is hanging in our closet, and he has worn it once since then, to have lunch with Robert.

This happened in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was 27.

I bought an old hardcover novel from a used-book shop because the cover looked good on my shelf.

I know. Excellent reason to buy literature.

Halfway through, I noticed the back cover was thicker than it should have been.

There was a bundle of Love Letters tucked between the dust jacket and the book.

Seventeen of them.

Same 2 names.

Daniel and Ruth.

The earliest was dated 1974. The last was in 1991.

I read enough of the first page to understand what they were, then stopped because suddenly it felt like I had opened somebody’s bedroom drawer.

One envelope had an old return address.

I mailed a letter there explaining what I had found and included my email.

Three weeks later, a woman named Claire wrote back.

Ruth was her mother.

Daniel was her father.

Both have passed.

Claire had no idea the letters existed.

We met when she came through Rhode Island that summer to visit family. She brought her sister. They sat in the bookstore café opening the envelopes one at a time while I drank coffee and tried very hard not to look over.

Claire let me keep the novel.

I finally read it.

I needed a decent coat for work and found one at a charity shop in Boston.

Navy wool. Good lining. Actual pockets.

I bought it.

At home, I discovered one pocket was packed with tiny folded origami cranes.

Twenty-three of them.

Different paper. Receipts. Magazine pages. One was made from what looked like part of a parking ticket.

There was a name written inside the coat: June A.

My roommate suggested throwing the cranes away.

Absolutely not.

Someone had spent time making those.

I posted a photo in a local thrift group. A woman named Caroline eventually replied that the coat had belonged to her grandmother, June, who folded paper whenever she was waiting somewhere.

Doctor’s offices. Airports. Restaurants.

Caroline’s family had donated a lot of June’s clothing after she moved into assisted living.

She did not want the coat back.

She wanted the cranes.

I mailed them to her in a little box.

A few weeks later she sent me a photo of them strung across her daughter’s bedroom window.

I still wear June’s coat.

My mother thinks every purse needs to contain tissues.

Apparently somebody else’s mother thought every purse needed a crochet hook.

I found a brown leather handbag at a thrift store in St. Paul, Minnesota. Inside the main compartment was a plastic bag holding 9 tiny granny squares, a hook, and several short lengths of yarn.

There was no pattern.

I crochet, so naturally I took this as a challenge rather than a warning.

The squares were all different. Some were tight, some loose, and one looked like the person making it had become angry halfway through.

I matched the closest yarn I could find and turned them into the front pocket of a tote bag.

My niece Lily saw it and wanted it.

She had recently started learning crochet as a hobby, so I told her she could have the bag if she made the back pocket herself.

She complained for 3 days.

Then she made one.

The stitches are completely different from the original squares and mine.

She uses the bag for school now.

I wanted to share this really wholesome story.

I live about 3 hours away from my hometown by car. I moved to my current city for grad school about 9 years ago and stayed.

About 6 years ago I learned that Facebook filters messages from unknown contacts and I went to see if I had any messages. To my surprise, I did! It was from a woman who lived even further away.

She told me she had received two Barney books as a gift for her children, and inside the cover of both were inscriptions from my dad.

My dad likes to use my whole name when he writes me cards and things, he’s a very sentimental guy, and he had written my full name inside the cover before his messages to me. That’s how she was able to find me.

These books were so old I don’t even remember ever having them. My parents are divorced so I imagine my mom donated the books at some point.

This sweet woman wanted to make sure I got them back because of how heartfelt my dad’s inscriptions were. I told her to keep them until her kids were done enjoying them and then I’d happily take them back.

A couple years later she messaged me again and she returned them to me. I love having this missing piece of my childhood back that I didn’t even know I was missing. Just a very wholesome thrift story that I love being a part of.

I’m an architect.

Which sounds relevant.

It is not.

I bought the book because I liked the drawings.

I found it at a used bookstore in Savannah, Georgia, and when I opened it at home, several cardboard shapes fell onto the floor.

Old quilting templates.

Hexagons mostly, cut from cereal boxes and greeting cards.

One had a date from 1963.

Another had a woman’s name: Beatrice Cole.

I mentioned it to my neighbor, Mrs. Dorsey, who is 82 and knows everyone who has ever lived within 10 miles of her house.

She knew the name.

Beatrice had been a friend of her mother.

Apparently craft was a huge part of their church group, and women traded fabric and patterns constantly.

Mrs. Dorsey called Beatrice’s granddaughter.

That woman, Nicole, came over the next weekend with an old quilt.

Same hexagon shape.

She laid one of the cardboard templates over the pieces.

Perfect match.

Nicole took the templates home.

I kept the architecture book, which was probably relieved to stop storing quilting supplies.

I flip vintage bags online as a side hobby.

Before anyone judges me, I have a spreadsheet.

That makes it a business.

I bought a box of handbags at an estate sale near Cleveland, Ohio. One had a tiny knitted sweater stuffed into the bottom.

Doll-size, maybe.

Blue wool. Four little buttons.

The workmanship was ridiculous.

I listed the handbag on Marketplace but kept the sweater on my desk because I liked it.

A buyer named Tasha came to pick up another bag and noticed it.

Her mother did miniature knitting for dollhouses.

Tasha asked where I got it.

Long story short, the estate belonged to a woman who had been part of the same miniature club as Tasha’s mother.

Her mother recognized the sweater from the stitching.

It had been made by her friend Joanne, who had passed away several years earlier.

I handed it to Tasha.

She offered me money.

I said no because I had paid roughly 80 cents per bag in the box and I am not a monster.

A week later, she sent me a picture of the sweater hanging inside her mother’s dollhouse bedroom.

Yes, on a tiny hanger.

Apparently they sell those.

I bought black dress shoes at a flea market in Nashville because I had a wedding that weekend and very little money.

When I got home, I pulled out the tissue paper stuffed into the toes.

One piece was not tissue paper.

It was a folded drawing.

A stick-figure man wearing a purple tie.

Underneath: DAD AT MY CONCERT

Signed Mia, age 7.

The shoes had a dry cleaner’s tag inside with a surname and phone number.

I called.

A man named Eric answered.

This was awkward.

“Hi. Did you donate a pair of size 11 black shoes?”

Long silence.

Then laughter.

His wife had cleared out several boxes before the move. The drawing was from his daughter’s first school concert, about 12 years earlier. He had apparently stuffed it into his shoe because he had nowhere else to put it that night.

Mia was 19 now.

Eric asked if I could send him a photo.

I mailed him the original instead.

I wore the shoes to the wedding.

I found the book in Portland, Maine.

Old mystery novel. Six dollars.

Inside were pages and pages of handwritten knitting notes.

Not tucked in randomly. The owner had apparently used the novel as storage.

Sweater measurements.

Yarn brands.

Little sketches.

Names of people followed by sizes:

Anna — 6
Michael — 10
Baby Ruth — newborn

There were notes going back decades.

I do textile craft work myself, mostly weaving, so I understood enough to know somebody had built an entire hobby inside those pages.

One entry gave a surname.

I searched it.

Eventually I found Marianne, whose grandmother had owned the book. The family had donated boxes after she passed.

Marianne lived about 40 minutes away.

She came to get the notebook pages and brought her mother with her.

Her mother recognized several projects immediately.

“That green sweater was mine.”

She pointed to another entry.

“That was your uncle’s.”

They spent half an hour reading through measurements from people in their family who were now adults, grandparents, or gone.

Marianne left me the mystery novel.

There is still one piece of blue yarn caught in the spine.

My name is Derek, I’m 34, and I buy used hiking boots because new ones cost stupid money.

There. That’s my financial philosophy.

I found a pair at a thrift store outside Boise, Idaho. Good soles, barely used, $18.

First hike, something kept poking the top of my foot.

I took the boot off and pulled out a folded index card somebody had shoved under the tongue.

It was a camping checklist.

Not a generic one either.

“Ben’s inhaler.”
“Extra socks for Tyler.”
“Mom’s awful instant coffee.”
“Do NOT forget the cards again.”

On the back was a list of trails with dates beside them.

I hike a lot, so I recognized several places. Most were local outdoor activity spots my dad used to take me to when I was younger.

I started checking them off.

Not because of anything profound. I already needed ideas for weekend hikes, and some stranger had left me a pretty decent list.

I’ve done 8 so far.

The boots finally split near the heel last month.

I moved the card into my backpack.

I thrifted a pair of black boots for $8 and to my surprise they had a bag of rings hidden in the toe. This thrift store doesn’t sell jewelry in store so I know someone didn’t hide them. The boots ended up being trash, the soles were split, so I don’t feel as bad.

Most are stamped 14k! I’m guessing a family donated grandma’s old boots.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have seen this coming!! I paid $8 for the bag and found $118.