5 Janitors Who Hid Secrets All Their Lives

5 The Fantasy Nut

Henry Darger was a janitor at a hospital. That’s convenient, because you were expecting a Scrubs reference at some point in this article, and this just lets us get that out of the way right from the jump. In 1972, he moved to a nursing home (as a resident now, not an employee), and he had his landlord clear his stuff out from his old room. 

Along with piled-up trash, the landlord discovered In the Realms of the Unreal, a fantasy manuscript Darger had authored. It stretched for more than 15,000 pages. That’s more than three times the length of the Harry Potter series, for comparison, and In the Realms of the Unreal stuck it all into one single novel. Like so many future franchises, it was about a child leading a rebellion. The heroine appears to be based on a real girl who was murdered in Chicago in 1911 when she was five years old. 

A second book, measuring a slim 8,500 pages, serves as a sequel and was found in the same apartment. Also there was book called The History of My Life. It begins, as the title suggests, as an autobiography, but then it turns into another fantasy novel and goes on for 5,000 more pages.

Was Darger a genius? Possibly. Was he crazy? This is also very much possible. At the age of 12, he had been committed to an asylum. However, records say that he was only sent there for compulsive masturbation, which not only marked him as normal a 12-year-old but as a typical writer. 

4 The Millionaire

Our next janitor also grew old until the time came to examine what he was leaving behind. His name was Ronald Read, he cleaned the floors at a Vermont JCPenney’s and he didn’t come across as an especially wealthy man. One time, shortly before his death in 2014, some people at a coffee house paid his bill for him, thinking he might be having trouble paying it himself. 

When he died, he left behind $8 million. That was enough to gift a million bucks to the local library, give nearly $5 million to a local hospital and still have a couple million left over to will to his stepchildren. 

No one had known how much money Read squirreled away, not even those stepchildren. So, how’d he made it all? Was this the big score than he and the gang had stolen back in 1975? Had he written a 15,000-page fantasy novel and recently sold the film and TV rights? As far as we can tell, no. Instead, he just made a modest salary for several decades and put his savings into reliable stocks. 

The market crashed a few times over the years, but it always recovered in the end. Also, he never once withdrew a chunk for one crazy weekend in Berlin, though many experts refer to this as a mistake on his part. 

3 The Art Trolls

In 1960, a piece appeared one day at a California art exhibition, a piece that hadn’t been authorized by the curators. You’ve probably previously heard such tales of people who sneak their own art into museums to try to make a point. Sometimes, the interloper is caught and arrested. Sometimes, the public is fooled because the artist was actually an elephant or a monkey, but the installation itself was authorized by the museum.

In the case of 1960’s “Peterfied Tomcat,” the artists were a group of janitors who’d worked the previous year’s exhibition and found it unimpressive. This year, they decided to insert their own contribution. They picked out a bit of scrap metal, painted it black and stuck a $350 price tag on it. They figured the metal looked a bit like a cat, so they named it a variation on “petrified tomcat.” But they didn’t purposely craft it to look like anything. It only looked the way it did because machinists had previously punched out circles from it, for use in door parts. 

Judges assumed it was one piece of sanctioned modern art among many and awarded it a medal of merit. Sadly, however, no offered to buy it. Had they wanted to interest buyers, the janitors should have set the price at $3,500. 

2 The Film Hoarder

The Passion of Joan of Arc is one of the best films of all-time. At least, we read something once saying it is, and who are we to question that? If you doubt that assessment, well, we’ll just let you watch the whole thing and decide for yourself, since it was shot in 1928 and is in the public domain now.

In 1928 itself, a fire destroyed the movie’s original print. The director put together an alternate version using unused cuts, but that got destroyed in a fire as well. This is all sounding a lot like a curse since the original Joan was, of course, burned at the stake. Also like Joan, the film was accused of heresy, and what copies of it that survived after these fires were censored versions the director disowned.

Then, in 1981, a copy of the original just sort of turned up. People found it in a janitor’s closet — a janitor’s closet at a Norwegian mental institution. That copy is the basis for every restoration you’ll find of the film today.

How those film canisters found their way into that closet is a mystery for the ages. We can only attribute it to how, often, janitors are good at picking up discarded stuff. 

1 The Medal of Honor Recipient

One day in 1976, over at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a cadet named James Moschgat was reading a book on World War II. It talked about a division of the army that was fighting in Italy. “Pvt. Crawford, without orders and on his own initiative, moved over the hill under enemy fire,” said the book, “and single-handedly destroyed the machine gun and killed three of the crew with a hand grenade.” 

Then this William Crawford advanced farther, used a another grenade to take out a second gun and crew, advanced even farther and sent another crew fleeing. This gave him control of a German machine gun, which he now turned on even more Germans.

Crawford died in that battle. FDR awarded him the Medal of Honor posthumously, handing it to Crawford’s father.

At least, that’s what people thought at the time. In reality, Crawford had been captured, and late in 1945, soldiers sprang him from captivity. After the war, he reenlisted, and he served in the army for another 20 years.

Now, Moschgat (that’s the cadet reading about this guy) looked at the photo in the book and thought, “Hold on. Are they talking about Bill Crawford? The janitor here at USAF?” He went over to old Bill and asked him. Of course he knew about it. “That’s me,” said Bill. 

Having now been outed, Crawford received the Medal of Honor again, this time from Ronald Reagan, once people realized he’d never been handed it by a president before. As for why he chose to clean toilets at the Air Force Academy after retiring from the army, well, why not? It gave him an excuse to stay in the general vicinity of military folk and is hardly the hardest thing he’d done. It’s a peaceful life. 

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