A 9-Year-Old Returns $1,000 Found Hidden in a Bag She Bought at a Blocksburg Auction

Teagan Clinton cleans the rolling travel bag she won during the Blocksburg Ice Cream Social auction, unaware that one of its pockets held a long-forgotten surprise. [Photo courtesy of Jeni Stevens]

Every July, much of tiny Blocksburg—where fewer than 250 people live across the entire zip code—gathers at the town hall for an old-fashioned ice cream social. There are potluck dishes, homemade ice cream, neighbors catching up over dessert, and a lively auction raising money for a local scholarship and the town hall.

It’s the kind of place where, as Jennifer “Jeni” Stevens puts it, “If you see your neighbor drop something out of their pocket… you just give it back to them.”

 Cleaning the dusty bag. [Photo courtesy of Jeni Stevens.]

So when she and her 9-year-old daughter, Teagan Clinton, discovered $1,000 hidden inside a dusty travel bag they’d just purchased at the auction, Jeni knew what should be done. The money would have helped them. But, Jennifer said, it was never really theirs.

The story began with a little girl who simply wanted a really big rolling bag and whose mom helped her bid on it. “I hadn’t saved [money] up because I forgot they had an an auction there. So Mom helped pay,” Teagan explained.

She made some bids on items, but then came the bag. “I liked how big it was,” Teagan said. “And I thought… it would be good for travel.”

The aspiring artist imagined filling it with “probably… clothes and sketching stuff.”

A tiny bit of bidding war started over it, but when the opposition, a friend of the family, saw that Teagan was her competitor, she stopped bidding and Teagan was the proud possessor–though it wasn’t exactly pristine.

“There was a kind of like half-eaten… acorns, like something was living in [it],” Teagan said.

“It was so dusty,” Jennifer added. “It was a real Blocksburg bag.”

As they cleaned it, Teagan needed to go to the bathroom and, while she was gone, Jeni discovered a bundle of twenties tucked into a pocket. Amazed, she counted out a $1000.

A dusty bundle of $20 bills totaling $1,000 was tucked inside a pocket of the donated travel bag. Teagan and her mother tracked down the owner and returned the money. [Photo courtesy of Jeni Stevens]

For a moment, Teagan had the same thought many people might have.

“My first thought, I was thinking I wanted to keep it,” she admitted. “But then I… thought some more and I thought that the original owner would be happy if we brought it back.”

Jennifer contacted the organizers of the auction, who eventually tracked down the donor. The bag had belonged to the donor’s mother. Unknown to anyone, she had apparently tucked away a bundle of cash years earlier.

“It was a very dusty little wad of money, and it’s probably been in there, I would guess maybe like 10 years,” Jennifer said.

Monday evening, the family came to Jennifer’s home, where Teagan placed the long-forgotten money back into its owner’s hands.

“She was really happy and really nice,” Teagan said.

The grateful woman thanked Teagan with a watermelon-scented body spray and a $100 reward, but Jennifer says that wasn’t why they returned it.

“We could definitely use $1,000,” she acknowledged. “But…you know, I thought not really our money. They didn’t intend to put it in the bag.”

Teagan explained, “If I get that $1,000 I wouldn’t have felt that good. I would have kind of felt a little bit icky, and… since I gave it back to them, I feel a lot better.”

Looking back, Jennifer says what mattered wasn’t the money…”This is a story we can tell and feel good about, and have a really good conscience,” she said.