There’s a particular thrill in knowing that history sometimes hides in plain sight. The watch in a thrift bin, the one buried in the mud, the one sitting in a box for decades until someone bothers to look, they’re all reminders that luck, timing, and a sharp eye can still change everything.
Here are ten true stories: unbelievable, but all documented, of timepieces that turned up where nobody expected them.
1. Six Bucks for a Miracle: The Jaeger-LeCoultre Deep Sea Alarm
In 2015, Zach Norris wandered into a Goodwill in Phoenix looking for a golf pushcart. What he found instead was history. There it was, tossed in a basket of broken quartz pieces and plastic straps, a watch face down, with a $5.99 tag stuck to it.
He turned it over. The words read: LeCoultre Deep Sea Alarm. Only a thousand or so of these were made in the late 1950s, and they never show up outside auctions. He handed over six bucks, took it to a watchmaker, and confirmed the impossible: it was the real thing.
He sold it soon after for $35,000 and an Omega Speedmaster. Six dollars in, thirty-five grand out. Stories like this keep every thrift-store watch bin full of dreamers.
2. Two Dollars for a Rolex
Tacoma, Washington. An estate sale. The kind of place where you expect to find mismatched china and tangled necklaces.
Alicia Williams was sifting through costume jewelry when she spotted it: a small Rolex Oyster Speedking, priced at $2. She didn’t know much about watches, but the name caught her eye. Two dollars felt like a safe gamble.
Later, a jeweler confirmed it was genuine. Not perfect, the dial had been refinished, which collectors frown on, but the movement was Rolex through and through. She’d turned a couple of coins into a thousand-dollar timepiece. Proof that sometimes, treasure hides in plain sight, right next to the plastic pearls.
3. The Submariner Lost at Sea
Most watches that fall into the ocean are gone forever. But not this one.
Off the coast of British Columbia, a fisherman’s Rolex Submariner slipped from his wrist and vanished into the depths. Rather than write it off, he marked the GPS coordinates, determined to get it back. He hired a dredging crew, paying $85 an hour, plus a $1,000 reward if they found it.
Months later, the dredger surfaced with something clutched in his glove. Salt-stained but intact, the Submariner had survived. You can’t make this up: a Rolex spent months in the ocean and lived to tick another day.
4. The Indian Ocean Wreck Diver’s Watch
Picture this: 175 feet down, among the twisted metal of a sunken ship in the Indian Ocean, a diver spots something small glinting near a propeller. A watch.
It was a Divex: a tool watch, the kind made for the job, and it had been there who knows how long. By some cosmic coincidence, it turned out to belong to another diver who had lost it years earlier on the very same wreck. The watch still functioning after being submerged 175 feet (53 meters) underwater was nothing short of proof of its remarkable resilience.
5. Forgotten in a Cellar: The Heuer Ref. 349
Rudolf Malina, an engineer and land surveyor born in the 1920s, likely received his Heuer watch from his wife, a Latin professor from a wealthy family. With no children and abandoned by relatives after her death, he spent his final years cared for by a colleague’s family, and when he passed in 2005, his belongings were left boxed in a cellar. The caretaker's daughter inherited the old house and began clearing out the cellar. Among the jars, dusty crates, and fading newspapers, she opened a box and froze. Inside was a watch: simple, a little rough, but clearly something special.
It was a Heuer Ref. 349, a 1940s chronograph, complete with aged lume and all the charm of wartime engineering. It had sat there untouched for decades. Today, it’s in the hands of collectors who understand exactly what it represents: a survivor, pulled from the shadows of history.
6. The Pocket Watch of the Lady Elgin
On September 8, 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin went down in Lake Michigan, taking over 300 souls with her. More than a century later, divers exploring the wreck recovered a purser’s safe. Inside: two gold pocket watches.
One bore the initials of Herbert Ingram, a British MP who perished in the disaster. Imagine the emotion of that discovery: a personal object frozen in time, carried to the bottom of the lake during one of America’s great maritime tragedies. In 2025, the watch was donated to a museum in Boston, finally home.
7. The Titanic Zenith
We all know the story of the Titanic. But not all of us know about the pocket watch that came up with the bodies.
Uruguayan passenger Ramón Artagaveytia carried a Zenith pocket watch when he boarded in 1912. After the disaster, his body was recovered, and with it, the watch: hands frozen at 4:43 a.m., about two hours after the collision.
Today, that watch survives as one of the most haunting horological artifacts in existence: a reminder that watches don’t just mark time. In 2024, the watch sold at auction for over $1.5 million setting a new record for Titanic memorabilia.
8. The $88,000 Longines at Goodwill Online
In 2014, someone browsing the Goodwill auction site came across a poorly photographed Longines chronograph listed as “watch for repair.” The bidding started low.
Collectors, though, spotted something the auctioneer hadn’t: inside was a legendary Longines 13ZN movement. The final price? $88,197.70.
All because someone at Goodwill uploaded a blurry picture without realizing what they had.
9. The Surfer’s Rolex
Australia, 2019. A surfer dove under a wave and spotted something glinting in the sand: a Rolex Submariner, its case scarred by salt and time. He picked it up, assuming it was scrap, but posted about it online.
On the back was an inscription, a clue to a life once lived with the watch strapped firmly to the wrist of its owner, Ric Outrim. Ric had worn it faithfully for nearly half a century before the sea claimed it. He’d made peace with the loss years ago, but fate had other ideas. Through Instagram, the dots were connected.
When Ric finally held it again, he wasn’t just holding a watch, he was holding decades of memory, a fragment of his story returned by the tide. Proof that sometimes, against the odds, the things we think are lost forever still find a way back to us.
10. The Rolex That Went Through a Cow
This one sounds like a pub tale, but it’s true.
In the early 1970s, Shropshire farmer James Steele lost his Rolex while tending cattle. He figured it had fallen into the mud, or maybe into a cow’s mouth. Either way, it was gone.
Nearly 50 years later, Liam King swept Steele’s farm and dug up a corroded Rolex. The assumption? A cow had eaten it with grass, passed it out the other end, and the watch spent decades entombed in manure and soil.
Incredibly, the case was still intact. At 95, Steele was reunited with the Rolex he’d last seen half a century earlier. A watch that literally survived a trip through a cow.
What ties all these together isn’t just luck: it’s the reminder that watches are more than gears and hands. They’re storytellers. They carry history, memory, and sometimes absurd journeys across oceans, barns, and thrift bins.
So the next time you’re at a garage sale or flea market, don’t ignore the box of “junk watches.” Because somewhere, waiting for another unlikely chapter, might be the next story on this list.
Discover more articles by Spiro Mandylor:
📎 Watchdna.com/Spiro-Mandylor
Discover the brands:
👉 Watchdna.com/Brands
