OK so you know how every old house has a story? Well sometimes the story is literally inside the walls, and sometimes it's a comic book worth more than the house.

A roundup over at MSN collected some of the strangest things people have found while renovating old American homes, and the list is exactly the flavor of weird I need in my life. The headline item is a copy of Action Comics number one. THE number one. The one with Superman on the cover that basically invented superheroes as we know them, discovered inside a wall during a renovation. Someone, at some point in history, decided that was a good hiding spot, and I have to admit it kind of was, because it stayed hidden until someone finally opened that wall up.

And then there's the human skull.

Yeah. A skull. Inside a wall. That raises roughly nine hundred questions you will never get answered, and that's kind of the beauty of this whole genre of discovery. You find a skull in your wall and the wall does not come with a note.

Every renovator who pries open a wall in an old house is basically playing the world's slowest lottery, and the prizes range from a first-appearance Superman to, you know, a person. I cannot stop thinking about the sheer range there. Two finds, same category of hiding place, wildly different levels of "do I call a museum or do I call literally everyone else."

The Action Comics find is the one that lives in my head rent-free because of the math. That comic is one of the most valuable pieces of paper on Earth in good condition. Someone hid it in a wall. Was it a kid hiding it from a parent who threw comics away? Was it someone's savings plan? Was it just shoved somewhere and forgotten while nobody realized what it would someday be worth? We'll never know, and the not knowing is somehow better than any answer would be.

If you live in an old house, this is your sign to knock on a few walls today. Just... gently. And maybe be a little mentally prepared for a skull, just in case.

Unexplained doesn't mean unexplainable, but in this case I hope no one ever explains it. Some walls should keep their secrets.