Inspired from this thread, has anyone moved into a house and found something curious that the previous owners never came back to claim.
Nothing odd like that has ever turned up for my parents. Dad might have left the owners of my parents house (if/when they sell up) his old canoe, hidden under the leylandii trees in the back garden, had it not become too rotten to keep.
Pepper Mill loves watching Treasures in the Attic, the show about exciting and interesting things left by the previous owners.
We should be so lucky. Any time the old guy who owned our house wanted to stick something up, he used a random nail or a piece of tape, always at exactly the same height. I still seem to find these, despite the fact that we’ve been in the house for 15 years. I still have to fingernail some invisible piece of tape off a finished wood surface, or yank out yet another hidden nail.
He did leave us at least one good thing, though – extra siding. This came in useful when we remodeled the kitchen, getting rid of one window. We were able to perfectly match the siding when we covered it over.
Unopened paint, new brushes, rollers and such like, no real surprise there.
Lots of toys for little kids by Fisher-Price. A huge wooden swing-set with sliding board.
Best of all: the realtor must have wanted to really wanted to set the stage, lots of fancy towels, baskets, soaps, lotions, candles on fancy shelves, also nice artwork on the walls in 2 of the bathrooms. I assumed they’d be removed once we closed but when I got the keys, still there! So they furnished my bathrooms, thanks.
When we bought our first house, we specifically told the owner (the heir of the woman who lived there) that she could leave it as it was. We were hoping for a few treasures but ended up with a houseful of trash. We found a few cool things but nothing worth anything or that we’d want to keep.
We were greatly amused by some of the trash, though. Anybody need a whole bag full of the rubber caps for walkers? How 'bout a bag full of drain plugs? The bag full of matchbooks was actually useful.
I have a, as in one, mag wheel from a Benz that was left in a closet. It has to be pretty old as well because it says made in West Germany. I have no idea what to do with it.
In our vacation house they left everything, two beds, a couch, some toys. I think they didn’t want to deal with moving it so they left it for us. That was nice of them.
My wife and I had been eyeing a place that looked abandoned for at least a decade. When we finally saw a For Sale Sign out front we went to take a look. It was a waterfront cottage on Fisher’s Island Sound in Connecticut. No Insulation, but wide open, nice great room, loft, two bedrooms down stairs and an open kitchen. We were given the keys by the realtor to check it out and see if we wanted t bid.
I walked in one of the rooms and realized the exposed beams between in the rooms allowed one to hear everything that was going on in the room next door. Ver common in old New England Summer Cottages. I said to my wife, now if I were a kid, that’s whre I’d stash my things…on top of the wall separating the two rooms.
I took one of the chairs from the room and put it up against the wall and stood on it to see if some kid from the 70’s hid something up there…I felt around and sure enough I pulled down two Playboys from 1976 and a snuff tin with some 30 year old Pot in it. 
It was the funniest thing, and my wife’s reaction was priceless! :eek:
We didn’t buy the house, but we told the realtor to make sure he checks in all the nooks and crannies for “interesting” stuff left from the old family. LOL!
Ya gotta open up some drywall to find the real treasures (I think this OK to post here? not starting a board war or anything):
And in the crawl space, they found buried bones, probably from animals, but still. :eek: The police were summoned, cold cases was looking into it.
So far, we’re leaving a butterknife for the next owners of our house. It slipped from my hand as I was fishing Moon Sand out of the bathroom sink.
We found a photo-booth picture of two guys in drag in a drawer, but neither one was the previous owner.
My parents bought the house I grew up in new build in 1973.
They didn’t, of course, have any surprises or gifts left by the previoues owners. They did have things left by the builders, though.
The kicker was after they’d moved out and sold the place. I had the opportunity to meet the new owners while I was visiting a neighbor. He explained why there had always been drainage problems in the upstairs water systems: during the remodel he and his wife did they had to replace some of the piping. When the plumber cut into the drain line to the sewer system, they found a 5 foot length of 2 by 4!
My parents knew they’d made a slight error within about a year of purchasing the house. That was when the builder moved to Argentina, IIRC.
The previous occupant of our townhouse was an elderly woman who was renting from the guy we bought from. She hid little notes and stickers and such about Jesus all over the house before she left. I have cleansed the house of all such things.
The previous owners of our house didn’t bother reaching into the back of deep shelves or looking behind doors when they were cleaning up, so we found the following:
A pair of 1970s-style boy’s shorts
One old-style kneepad (basically a piece of foam inside a stretchy tube)
A basketball worn smooth from use and in need of more air
One original Little People doll (the wooden ones that were small enough to swallow)
A first place ribbon from a horse show
A bottle of hair oil that promised to keep your hair from falling out. It must have been at least 40 years old, and was half empty. The previous owner was 70 and had a full head of hair, so the stuff may have worked.
I was disappointed that there wasn’t even a single Playboy stuffed away somewhere. I’ve torn apart every room, so if there’s anything else to be found it is inside the walls.
My first house, I bought from a lady who was about 2 days away from foreclosure. It was a mess, in that it wasn’t being foreclosed when she accepted the offer, but it was when we had the closing. That’s a whole mess I won’t get into.
But as a result, the owner had to leave in a big hurry, and she left a lot of goodies for me. She was an alcoholic, so the cabinets were packed with half-full bottles of booze. I tossed almost all of them, but there were a few still-sealed bottles I hung on to.
She had these organic boob growing pills in one of the cabinets I promptly threw out. She left a ton of furniture. As she was moving out, she kept trying to sell me stuff that I knew she’d simply leave behind anyway… my parents really liked one of her lamps and offered her $50 to leave it when she moved. She said she wouldn’t take less than $100, which my parents politely declined. She left it when she moved for nothing.
I sold a ton of her crappy knick-knacks and things on eBay and kept pretty good track of how much I’d made. It was something like $1,200 when all was said and done. But the best was an old rocking chair she left, which my mom was convinced was worth a fortune. I just gave it to her, and she took it to an antique shop to get it appraised. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I do remember the shop offered her something like $700 for it. She decided to just keep the chair. I thought it was ugly, personally.
I still have 2-3 pieces of her furniture even though I don’t live in that house anymore. She had some really cool stuff. It’s too bad she drank herself into poverty and insanity. She lost a lot in that rushed move.
She left a lot of really useful stuff, too. 10-12 boxes of trash bags, an entire box full of brand-new work gloves… There had to be 200 pairs in there, and I suspect she stole the box from a hardware store or something. The same could be said for the trash bags.
(And please don’t think I’m being cruel by keeping/selling it… I gave her half of the garage to store her stuff in for 3 months so she could pick it up at her leisure. After 6 months I started selling.)
It was obvious when I moved into my house that the previous owners liked to sign and date things they built, like the barn (1923) and the back sidewalk (1973), but it wasn’t until I pulled out the drawers of the hand-made kitchen cabinets to paint them that I found out how far the signing-and-dating mania went – one of the drawers had evidently been their favorite, and between 1942 and 1948 various members of the family and neighbors, I guess, pulled it out several times to record their names, the date and the day of the week on the bottom.
When I pulled off the fake paneling inside one of the bedrooms and starting taking down the two layers of drywall, I found an envelope postmarked 1945 and addressed to the ghost town I live in, which was never officially incorporated as a town and has since been absorbed into a larger town.
I wish I could stumble across some perverted photos or a scandalous diary or even an ancient skeleton out in the yard, but apparently these people were just too normal.
I’ve recounted this before, but it goes here … The worst, most disturbing porn I ever saw was not found off the Internet or a porn theatre - but in the attic of my friend’s grandparents.
Grandpaw had died some years ago; grandma was off to the home; the house was to be sold - so my friend and I, and some other friends, were helping to clear the junk out of the attic.
Hidden up there was one of those 8mm tapes. The reel was entitled “Anal Dwarf”, and featured … well, male dwarves (dwarfs?) having anal sex with (very ugly) normal-sized women.
Wierd, disturbing … and equally disturbing to think of grandparents sitting down to an exciting evening of watching “Anal Dwarf”.
My friend left a diamond ring in her first house. It’s her grandmother’s ring and very valuable, so she kept it hidden in the bathroom, tucked in a little nook under the sink, where she thought a thief would never look.
Then she forgot about it, and they moved. It was months before she went looking for it, and remembered where she had put it. She called up the new owners of her old house and asked to come look for something (not telling them what or where) and it was still there when she went to get it.
Apartment houses with storage cages don’t really count.
But last year, someone - surely a descendant of a deceased former resident - left 2 saxophones (alto and tenor) and a violin in our common recycling room. All were 1920s vintage, unplayable of course, but had obviously been well used and then not touched for decades.
Needless to say, I squirreled them away into my own storage cage immediately.
We built our house so there was no prior owner but that didn’t keep the builder from leaving us something, a cat. A live cat, drywalled into the tub surround in the master bath. Poor Tabby (yes that was his name) wandered in to the house when the drywallers were enclosing the tub surround. He was drywalled in and then tiled over and in there for a week!
The people doing the final cleaning her his meow and called the builder who called animal control who called the fired department who eventually cut through the siding to rescue poor Tabby.
1960 Playboy stuck under the wood ceiling in a downstairs bedroom
well I enjoyed it–funny thing though is that it really wasn’t that dirty, I seen worse things on the covers of magazines now then was exposed on the centerfold. I just can’t remember who the centerfold was now–it was someone famous I recall.
Back when The Boy and I were house-hunting, we found a listing for a lovely little old house in a neighbourhood we had both lived in previously and both wanted desperately to move back into.
Much to our dismay, someone made an offer almost immediately, before we even got a chance to look at the house (not that uncommon in the current market… another house we did offer for ended up going for $100K over asking in a 15-way bidding war). We figured it was for the best anyways… it was very much a fixer-upper and would have needed a few months’ worth of work. Fate must be telling us to buy something in better shape, we said.
Turns out, it was fate sparing us from a nasty surprise.
Thanks fate. I owe ya.
Nothing super awesome. Couple of old typewriters and an adding machine, 50’s-60’s vintage. Doubt they’re worth anything.
Oh, and more drinking glasses than I could possibly ever need.