I recently found two sets of “War Gas Identification Kits” - it has the old Civil Defense logo on it and several vials inside which offer the scent of, but not the other effects of, Tear Gas, Mustard Gas, Phosgene, and others. I think they’re really cool, although somewhat dated.
They’re probably from the 1950s or 1960s.
What have you found?
I found a carpet tucking/stair tool buried in my backyard when I moved in.
I had no idea what it was until I saw it being used on an episode of This Old House in the middle of the night about a year after I’d found it.
My dad cleaned it up and “sharpened” it (it’s not meant to be sharp) and the only use I could find for it was chipping off the ice from my front stoop last winter.
I found a Florida State Trooper badge on the side of I-275 a few weeks ago. I know that I really should drop it off at the local station so it can be returned to the trooper, but it was just such a cool random thing to find that I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
Last week I found this, and now it lives here. 
My brother found the 5-year diary/date planner for a man who shipped out to the Aleutians during World War II. He apparently worked in a motorpool on an island out there. He only had about forty entries over the entire span of the diary, most of them coming in '44. There’s no name on it, but I’ve transcribed the entire thing. He names some of the other officers, so I might be able to track it down somehow.
I found a license plate from 1915 on our property here in Massachusetts. It is bent in places because it was uncovered by bulldozer work but the finish is baked enamel and looks perfect everywhere it isn’t bent. The year logo is pristine.
Gah! I love him.
I once found a blackjack in my high school parking lot. I’ve no actual need to go wanging anyone in the back of the head but it was an interesting find. Kind of a creepy location to find it though.
How about an authentic 80s Soviet Russian passport outside my high school? It was so dated we didn’t worry about returning it, but still pretty exciting.
I found 2 handguns in the crawl space of my house shortly after I moved in. I called the landlord, he didn’t want them so I called the sheriff’s office. A deputy picked them up and took my personal info. About 6 months later the sheriff’s office called and told me I could come get the guns, no one had claimed them. I didn’t want them so they were turned over to the property disposal unit and were destroyed.
I also found a 10,000 peso bill from Costa Rico at the Puyallup Fair. It was worth about $8 at the time.
When I was 13 I discovered a tombstone that had been used, face-down, as a step in our back yard. It was for a 10-year-old boy who had died in the 1830’s. According to the Historical Society, his family was on its way to the west, when he died here in Ohio.
Also . . . I recently found my late father’s high school yearbook, from 1931. I will never know why many of the graduates’ photos were cut out. I also found my father’s birth certificate, from 1913. His first and last names were different from what we knew him by.
