THE MONEY PIT VILLAGE
Riddle as £2k bundles of cash strewn around ex-mining area
IT is a humble former mining village – which may have a generous millionaire in its midst.
At least 13 bundles of cash totalling £26,000 have been left on the streets of Blackhall Colliery for passers-by to find over the past five years. Locals in the County Durham village are at a loss to explain the mystery packages and police have ruled out any criminal link. The bundles began to be left on pavements in 2014 and have always contained 100 £20 notes, totalling £2,000. Police had kept the discoveries quiet but revealed the trend after the latest bundle was found on Monday – the fourth this year. Two packages were discovered in two days over the summer. Forensic examinations trying to link the money to an individual or criminal conspiracy have drawn a blank. Lynn Pounder, county coundementia
‘Maybe there’s a secret billionaire?’
cillor for the seaside village which featured in Michael Caine’s 1971 hit film Get Carter, said: ‘It’s a very strange turn of events and until now I had no idea this has been happening.
‘The honesty of the people who have been handing this money is commendable. It would have been easy not to.
‘These are just envelopes filled with large amounts of cash and nothing to identify them but people are still taking them to the police. Maybe there is a secret billionaire living in Blackhall? But if there is, they’ve kept their secret very well. It’s completely baffling and very intriguing.’
Grandmother Sandra Pilkington, 67, one of the nearly 5,000 residents of Blackhall, said: ‘It is a mystery. If it’s a person who has too much money, why don’t they donate it to different charities? It could be someone who has and keeps leaving it.’ Durham Police believe even more money could have been dropped over the years, but not reported.
They praised Blackhall’s ‘honest’ residents for handing so much of it in.
Detective Constable John Forster said: ‘We have considered criminality or if it is a vulnerable person frittering it away. It could be a generous benefactor doing it out of the kindness of their heart.
‘There are 13 amounts of money that we know of. There may be more that have not been handed in. I want to commend the generosity of the people who have found it. The people I have spoken to were all in favour of the money going back to whoever it belonged to.
‘All of the money has been found in the central area of Blackhall. One lady who handed it in was shaking. I don’t think she had ever been in a police station before.
‘Whenever it has been found it has been on the pavement at the side of the road for people to pick up. At one point we thought we had a pattern, but that was blown out of the water.’
Blackhall appeared in Get Carter when Caine’s character gangster Jack Carter was involved in a chase across a coal-strewn beach. The colliery, which employed 2,445 people in 1930, closed in 1981 with a devastating impact on the local economy.