We bought an older house two years ago. In the attic, we found two Minneapolis Tribunes from the day Nixon resigned and the day after. We’ve got them displayed now on our coffeetable/trunk with an antique typewriter.
I still have yet to read the articles, tho’.
Neat stuff.
Snicks
When we built our house ( We meaning my job during this venture was to ask, " Do you want your fries supersized?) and the basement had just been poured over Thanksgiving weekend, we needed to insulate the fresh cement with something so as it would not crack in the cold weather.
We trash-picked someones old ripped up rolls of carpeting to lay across the curing cement.
Mr. Ujest put a ladder down for me to climb down and he would toss ( more like trebuchet) carpet rolls at me to place on the cement to keep the heat in. (That was a comedy in itself. More like the blind newspaper man getting knocked in the head with another delivery of papers in Johnny Dangerously.)
It wasn’t until we removed the carpeting a few days later that I noticed my footie steps in the cement, now there permanently, in a crazy pattern of running amok in the basement that night.
It’s kinda cool that in 100 years, my prints will still be there and whomever owns the house will scratch their heads and go, " What in the hell is this all about?"
All things considered, I shoulda taken off my top and done a boobie print for posterity.
I think we can deduct the old resident WASN’T a junkie. 
We bought a fixer-upper on Capitol Hill in DC about 2 years ago, and one of the children of the previous owners had written the following on one of the bedroom walls in Magic Marker:
“Shereena wuz here
and I’ll be back
Ya better believe it
cuz that’s a fact!!!”
I have to admit that we found it a bit creepy and ominous.
A few
I’ll have to call my Mom for more details on this one- A wooden spoon. It’s about a foot long and covered in some kind of gold paint. The back is carved with the message “Done by Grandpa Sellers in 1907, with a pen knife” IIRC Mom and Dad found it while redoing the kitchen of either the house we moved out of when I was 1, or the house we moved out of when I was 7.
A metal bird. While doing some renovation, the workmen found this in the attic of the house we moved into when I was 7. I haven’t seen the thing in a while IIRC five inches high, with a footlong tail. I don’t recall what metal the statue is made of.
A desk. From the house we moved into when I was 16. The previous owner found the wall hatch to the attic to difficult to use. They added a tiny stairway and a new door. These are easy to use but made the opening too small to get the desk back out. Since we knew that the previous owners had knowingly left the desk behind(It’s not a nice enough desk to rip up the wall), we assumed they had emptied it. It was a year or two before I bothered to open the desk. Inside were medical records, including several chest x rays. There were also many newspaper articles, some from France, about government agents seizing a record amount of IIRC marijuana. Several clippings were mounted on thick posterboard. Apparently the previous owner was the agent responsible. We mailed all of this to him.
It is worth mentioning that the he had retired elsewhere and the last tenant was actually his son- until his arrest and conviction for dealing drugs and possessing illegal firearms.
Glass swan bowls-
My folks currently live in a condo in Florida. They got their first condo there cheap, becuase it required a lot of minor work- repainting, new carpeting, and a lot of cleaning. The swans and several other things were found in the kitchen ceiling. The design is common in Florida condos and goes by the name Florida Ceiling- a series of translucent go around the edge of the ceiling. They have flat bottoms. The sides curve upwards toward the center of the ceiling. Lighting is mounted inside the panels. The previous owner had placed the swans and a few other things inside the panels. The swans are about eighteen inches high, with long necks and rather small bodies. They are clear with ribbons of one or two colors running inside them. My folks knew that the previous owner had died, and asking around revealed he had no living relatives.
This isn’t mine - just a rip-off from the newspaper a couple of years back. However it’s so good, I can’t resist using it:
A guy who had just bought a flat was steaming off some dreadful early 1970s purple wallpaper. It seems likely that the first couple to live in the flat had disagreed about the wallpaper because the guy steaming it off found a note to the future written on the wall underneath: So you didn’t like it either? It’s shit, isn’t it?
My brother’s apartment years back in City of Industry, L.A., had a screen in the bathroom window which, when looked at from a certain angle, obviously had some kind of geometric symbols sketched into it, I think an array of diamonds & +'s in some formation that made me think it was either Hispanic or Native American magical glyphs. Made me as uneasy as hell to glimpse that, especially when I had to go to the bathroom late at night. As leery as my brother is about some occultic stuff, I’m surprised he didn’t have it replaced.
It’d be funny if I ever found out it was just a manufacturers mark.
This thread struck a chord…I have left several time capsules in our house. I want to communicate with the people of the future, so I left:
-a package of photographs and notes under the patio I put in last summer. It has a letter adressed to the future owners, and I give our names and dates, and an expression of good wishes.
-I buried a jar with some currency, a note, and a photo of the house. I’m hoping someone digs this up around 2500 AD (when I emerge from my 4-century coldsleep).
Anyway, I did find a ghost on our house-we took down a closet wall, and behind the wall was a note from a carpenter who had worked on the house-in 1955