Mrs D was putting out Valentine’s Day decorations, when a photo slipped out from behind the fireplace mantel. A simple color headshot of a pleasant looking older woman. Has her name on the back, as well as the date - September 1977.
When I was a junior in high school, someone else was living in my current home. Perhaps the person in the picture, maybe a friend or relative.
Funny how such a simple thing can strike you as so weird. We have been in this house for 8 or 9 years. We have pretty much totally redone the inside and out, and while here our kids have grown from little kids to teenagers. We have a middle-aged dog who was not born when we moved here. This place really feels like our home. Where we belong.
But something as small as this clearly brings home the fact that we are but transient residents. People felt the same as we do about our home before we moved in, and undoubtedly will after we have moved on.
Any of you have similar encounters with your home’s previous tenants?
(Surely you didn’t think I was talking about THAT kind of ghost!)
Last November, we painted one of the bedrooms. It had been wallpapered, so we had to remove the trim to get all the old wallpaper off. Behind a piece of baseboard trim we found a picture of a group of young men. There was writing on the picture, it said “The Guys”. Judging from the clothes and hair, I guessed it was from the late '70s, early '80s.
The weirdest part of the whole thing was the strip of wallpaper under the trim. The previous owners had stripped older wallpaper and had skipped below the trim, and the stuff under the trim was so '70s style - it was greenish, and had big daisies. That was more odd to me than the picture. I can’t imagine anyone ever thinking that big green daisy wallpaper looked good.
My SO grew up in this town that our house is in, and knows the family that lived here previously. They built the house, so it isn’t random stranger weird. I’m sure we’ll find other odd stuff when we remodel the kitchen!
Mostly just the “What were they thinking?” thoughts during renovating the kitchen. We found evidence (in the grease stains on the paneling) that the previous owners had some sort of tiki-roof effect on the kitchen cabinets. Oh, and the Most Hideous psychodelic blue-green-yellow patterned linoleum. :eek:
We left some ghosts for someone to find someday. We owned a cinder block house some years back. We did a remodel that required us to remove the sheetrock and expose the block beneath. Our daughter was about 7 at the time, so we let her draw on the wall with chalk before we put up the new sheetrock and wallpaper. I think we may have written the date on the wall, too.
The place opened in '68 and I ran it (into the ground) in '92 - '94.
So of course I ran into many things from the previous years.
Once I was looking at the ‘old’ projector heads that were stored behind the screen. (ps this is a great place to look for cool stuff in old movie theatres) They had been wrapped in newspapers from '74. The papers had a story about a wildfire in California and it mention towns where my cousins lived. (still do and would have at the time of the original article)
They also had a GIANT Pinnochio back there. It was a flat that was about 9 feet tall. It was made out of the same ugly paneling that was in the lobby but the paint job matched the cartoon character perfectly. I’m sure who ever worked on it must have been so proud and worked very hard. I used it when the film was re-issued but nobody ever came by and claimed it.
My first house was a rental. There were rumors that the previous tenant had been a drug dealer. I did hear from the realtor that the previous tenant had gotten himself arrested for something and was in jail.
But, I was young and the house was cheap.
I was in the house about a week when a loud knock came on the door at 3am.
I went to the door with a 2x4 and my growing doberman. On the other side of the door was four angry looking hispanic men sporting colors of the local gang.
It turned out to be a Cheech and Chong moment.
“Hey, is Josh there meng?”
“No. He doesn’t live here now.”
“He owes me $10,000!!”
“Ummm…sorry. He’s not here.”
“Cho’ know Josh meng?”
“No.”
“If you don’t know Josh, then how you know Josh not here meng?!?!”
“Ummm…cause the landlord said he was in jail.”
“Oh, Why didn’t you say so meng?”
With that they turned and left and I never had anymore problems.
When my wife and I were first married we lived in a small house that was built in the 50’s. It was our first home and it needed a lot fo work. When we stripped off the wall paper in our master bed room we found a large painting, kama sutra style painting of some sort of diety. With suns and moons and such, it was really neat, we have pictures…
But the best part came when I noticed there was a missing vent really high up one of the ceilings in the spare room…Looked to me like a great hiding spot for just about anything…(hey I was a kid once too!!)
So I got our step ladder and reached up into the hold…lo and behold I pulled out a small bag of pot, and a stack of playboys from 1980! It was really funny, my wife and I had a great laugh…we looked at each other and said…You think it’s still good?? :eek:
After living in a small Hollywood apartment in the 70’s for a year, I noticed the ceiling in the tiny hallway was lower than the surrounding rooms. In the center was a trapdoor, which I always assumed was either decorative or to the attic. But opening it one day, I discovered a single, perimeter bookshelf with a row of 1940’s Reader’s Digests and Coronets (Coronet was a slightly racier version of Reader’s Digest with the same layout size). Apparently someone had secreted the mags away and subsequent tenants either left them or never knew they were there.
Fun to read. I guess the ghost of Rodney Drive was watching over them.
Come to think of it, our current house in CT has an old foundation out near our back field. And there’s a few midden’s lying around the property…does that count?
My Dad bought a 100 year old house and remodeled it about 10 years ago. In the process, he found a huge sack of sugar - 50 or 100 pounds. All we could figure is that someone socked it away during WWII and forgot about it. The place that made the sugar was still in business, and he called them to see if it was still good. They said as long as rodents or insects hadn’t gotten to it, it was probably fine. He gave it to his sister - a baker and cake decorator - and she used it.
The same house used Finnish language newspapers for insulation in various places. There’s a large Finn population here. The people who built the house must have been immigrants.
When they redid the local movie theator, I remember that they found a big mural behind one of the walls. Don’t remember what it was of, though.
When redoing another local building, they found a signature on an old plaster wall from a guy dated sometime in the 40s. They looked him up and he was still around. There was a newspaper article about him; he remembered doing it.
Somewhere in town, there is a tuna sandwich decomposing in the middle of a wall. My brother is in construction, and was having trouble with a client he was building a buildgin for. One day after a particularly bad run in, he took the sandwich from his lunch, put it between the frame of a wall, and drywalled over it. I often wonder just what that must smell like…
My apartment was painted with white walls and carpeted with new tan rugs so I moved into a blank slate… but the wall inside the bathroom cabinet has this horrible HUGE floral print on it. I can’t imagine that was considered to look good in an apartment this small, even when this place was built in the '70s.
When I moved into my current place there was a drawer full of individually wrapped spoons. Not plastic ones; stainless. There were about 20 of them.
Who just leaves behind spoons?
Also when a couple I know moved into their condo the kitchen was painted this ugly bubble gum pink with sponge painted red dots on it.
While I was attending the University of Vermont, I supposedly lived in Trey’s (the lead singer/guitarist for Phish) dorm room. Unfortunately, the only “ghosts” we got were a couple of hippies that wanted to come in and “feel the vibe” of our crazy room. Of course, the entire building had been gutted and rebuilt about 2 years before I got there, but that didn’t really matter to them.
The next year at UVM, I moved into a house off campus with a bunch of friends. We were cleaning out the (unfinished) basement (ok, drinking heavily and playing ping-pong) when one of us noticed a small lunch box tucked up in the floorboards. We pulled it out and found a rather large amount of very old, dried out pot. We were more surprised that someone would leave that much pot behind than anything else.
While tearing up the floor of my (late) grandmother’s house during a remodelling effort, my father and I found a letter that my aunt had written him fifty years before, while he was in college. It was stuck between the tiles and the underlying plywood.
Back in high school, a buddy and me were tooling around the back of a fabric store, looking for hard cardboard tubes we could fight with. Instead, we found an old suitcase tied closed by a piece of rope.
We untied the rope, and found a WWII peacoat-style service dress uniform complete with trousers and two shirts, as well as a large olive drab rain slicker. I distinctly remember the patches on the uniform, it had Staff Sergeant’s rank, and a shoulder patch from the 42nd Infantry Division (I looked it up). IIRC, I don’t think it has anything else on it, no identification, no nothing.
But when I got it home and searched the pockets, I found a nickel from 1939.
I had it professionally cleaned, and it’s still in my old closet at home in NJ. It didn’t have any name or ID on it, and it makes me wonder about who it belonged to. Was it someone my age or maybe some kid? Did they make it back from the war in one piece? Lots of questions, but definitely a ghost from the past. . .
Tripler
I still have it, and I still wonder about it’s owner.
At first I didn’t think I had anything to add to this thread, but I guess I do.
When tearing up the carpet in my boys room we found an old floor vent that was no longer in use and covered up with newspapers.
Imagine my suprise to read the headlines stating that the Titanic had sunk! I darn near passed out! I have been a Titanic buff for as long as I can remember and this was a huge find.
My mistake was letting anyone know that I had found it. My father in law deemed that it needed to be tucked away in a ziplock baggie that he then stuffed between the matresses of his bed to be forever lost. By the time I lay eyes on it again it was a baggie full of yellow torn newspaper.
Somewhere in one of the interior walls is a small velvet bag of change that my brother in law told me my husband stored there for safe keeping as a child. Good thing it was an interior wall since the exterior walls go from roof to basement straight drop with no insulation and might never be found.
My contribution is the hamsters in said exterior walls. See, we had an escape and as far as we can tell all but two ended up in the walls. The mom met her demise by the over affection of a two year old and one of the little ones was found while hubby was getting the furnace ready for winter.
Oh, and I have a small hurricane lamp that my mom and dad found in the wall of their first place. They were trying to make more space in a garage turned “house” by tearing out part of a wall and putting in drawers and came acrossed the lamp.
When they got divorced mom gave it to me. It is very pretty. Milky white glass, the top part is smooth, but the bottom where the oil goes has knoby buttons on it and I think the base is brass.
I’ve burned it but it still has it’s original wick.
In the Blackberry Hills section of Brewster, NY, all the houses are pretty much the same: two floors with the front door on the landing between floors. Under the stairs is a tiny litlle room, like Harry Potter’s room but smaller and secured with wingnuts. We moved out in '83 and left behind a huge pile of Sundy funnies in that cubbyhole.
