I live in a student apartment at the moment, and the public basement just got cleaned out. For weeks, a notice has been posted on all doors saying where the cleaned out stuff and left-behind boxes of things can be reclaimed. Tomorrow, everything gets thrown out. So tonight, anybody can sneak down there and take whatever they want before it goes to the landfill.
We just dragged a huge box down to our storage locker. It seemed to be completely full of books - the ones we could see were Forgotten Realms and Star Wars novels. I also spotted a wooden plaque of Nefertiti (?).
We didn’t have time to go through it more throrougly, but I grabbed a large pencilcase before we locked the rest of it away. It contained:
-A glass (formerly containing jam?) filled with warhammer models (empire militia)
-A tie-pin with a christmas theme and a chain hanging from it.
-And a medalion with a picture of various washiongton buildings and people on one side. The other side reads “XIX’th CINP CONGRESS Washington D.C. June 27-July 1 1994” around a swirly-like logo
(Does anybody know what medalion this is BTW?)
If the rest of the box contains similar items, I’ve either found a treasure box or someone forgotten secret.
We’re going to call this person and see if he misses it (the papers contained his full name and date of birth). If not, well, I’ve got a box pure geek in my basement.
Just seem like such weird items to leave behind.
Has anybody else ever found something suprising that someone left behind or forgott about?
In one apartment we found a large box (a cubic foot or so) of various sized brass springs, and a cheque book for the local college radio station, with all the cheques pre-signed
My Poppa is a janitor at a school. Every year the kids leave behind anything they don’t feel like carrying home. He’s seen $200+ calculators, winter coats, computers, iPods, etc., that they just leave in the locker or throw in the pile to be discarded.
It’s amazing. I just wish I could rifle through it all!
In college, after I got hired as an RA, my roommate (buddy of several years prior) and I decided to peek up into the ceiling tiles in our dorm room.
We found a large bottle of butt-lube and a huge collection of gay porn. Needless to say we were most shocked, considering who had lived there prior to us.
In other rooms, we found copious quantities of liquor that residents had hoped to hide, and then forgotten about (guess that’s not so much left behind as forgotten).
In the cupboards over the refrigerator: Three colourful wooden Easter baskets. I assume they were easter, as the wood was stained a deep purple, pink, and yellow, and they were shaped like a traditional Easter basket. We left those behind when we moved.
In one of the sliding drawers: a small, neat, wooden box containing 4 out of 8 fancy serrated knives. They were all very dull. It looked like something from the 60s - it was certainly not modern. Possibly the weirdest thing about that is the fact that my husband decided we needed them, packed them, and now we have them here. Since he is the anti-packrat, I have to wonder if he just assumed they were ours. Why, I’m not sure.
In the storage closet: A huge old *wood frame * TV. If we had taken the time to hook it up, it seems like it might have worked. However, since it required the old coaxial cables, we didn’t bother. I did plug it in and turn it on once, and the snow came in clearly…
And, possibly the weirdest thing ever:
In the linen closet, on the bottom shelf, in the very back, I reached in and pulled out this: an exquisitely engraved picture frame, engraved with very detailed flowers that had jewels in them of different colours (this didn’t look like some cheapo dollar store fare, nor did it look like overpriced children’s room fare, this thing was real - I shipped the frame itself back home to my aunt who loved it) - and the picture inside was of… an ostrich. Nothing special about it, just an ostrich. It was signed in red marker: Pickle.
An old 1920’s farmhouse-type house we moved into had an attic (as far as we could guess), but no entrance to it. We checked all the closets, everywhere.
After we’d lived there 6 or 7 years we finally decided to make a hole in the ceiling to get up there. We of course were speculating what sort of cool stuff would be up there. What we found were a few ~1940’s Life magazines and a big flat cardboard box about the size of a mattress. Oh well.
In a house I rented about 15 years ago, I found three boxes of check books in different names and a huge gift box full of marijuana. The pot was mostly shake and seeds so didn’t have much value but I often wondered about the check book, pot connection.
One morning last week, at about 8:30 on the way to work. I saw a man exit a bar (yes, at 8:30am). He was clearly completely hammered. He staggered across the parking lot, walked out of 1 sandal and continued staggering. He then walked out the other sandal and kept right on going. As of this morning both sandals are still in the parking lot.
In the attic of a house my brother-in-law rented we found a box of song contracts, royalty payment records and Tom T. Hall’s parents’ family Bible. The family Bible has many family births and deaths recorded in it, plus Father’s Day cards from Tom T. and Dixie.
Not necessarily in a house, but behind a shopping mall:
Back in high school, a buddy and mine were basically looking for something to do. We were behind the local stip mall [sub]where all the cool kids hang out, I guess[/sub], when my buddy comes across this old suitcase next to a dumpster. We open it up to find an olive drab rain coat, a couple of old wool shirts, and some socks and things . . .
Then I find what ties it al together: It’s a WWII uniform of a Staff Sergeant from the 42nd Infantry Division, complete with a dress waistcoat (an “Eisenhower Jacket”, if you will) and a pair of slacks. He took the raincoat and one wool shirt, I took the other shirt and the full uniform. I got them home, looked in the pocket, and found a nickel from 1939. :eek: Immediately thereafter, I got the whole uniform dry-cleaned, and it’s still at my parent’s house in Jersey.
Tripler
I don’t know who would want to throw away such a good uniform, but I’m glad I ‘rescued’ it.
My FIL is the manager of a large apartment complex. When my wife and I were starting out together, the first weekend of each month was New Furniture Weekend for us. You wouldn’t believe the beautiful stuff people have no problem walking away from.
Some of it was understandable – it’s not worth it to move a so-so condition couch if you’re moving cross-county – but some of it was really nice stuff that people just didn’t feel like schlepping back down the stairs.
We bought our house from a couple in their 80s who were going to retire in Florida. We told them they could leave behind anything they didn’t want. They did leave us some good stuff, but we also found a plastic ice cream bucket full of packets of stuff from fast food restaurants - sauces, ketchup, mustard, honey, mayo, lemon juice… They also left a bunch of groceries that were waaaaaaaaaay past their freshness dates - like by years! And in the fridge in the garage was some beer. From 1997. We bought the house in 2004.
They took the frugal thing just a wee bit too far.
My dad used to run a real estate acquisitions company, and when I was 12 or 13 the company bought an old, disused textile factory a few towns away from ours. We found a huge, filthy, free-standing safe inside one of the offices and, for some reason, Dad got it into his head to break into the thing just to see what was inside. After weeks of working on it and cutting through two 1-inch thick steel panels and about 6 inches of concrete, we found a pile of contracts signed by Mickey Mantle! Apparently the textile company had been planning to create a Mantle clothing line, which later got scrapped. There were also a couple of bags of metal buttons with his signature stamped on them. It was fun to find our own little piece of celebrity history, and after all the work we put in to get into the safe it was nice to have some payoff!
Immediately thereafter, I got the whole uniform dry-cleaned, and it’s still at my parent’s house in Jersey.