My second year of university, my best buddy and I moved into a house together. We subleased from a guy who had accepted a job at a hospital in Birmingham and already moved to be closer to his job. Great guy who left all sorts of good stuff. Posts for hanging guitars on the walls (I’ve still got two holding up mine, three years later) and a lawnmower were the two big things I remember, but the best thing he left us was the Mystery Cabinet.
Yes, we had a Mystery Cabinet. If we ever needed something, we would look in the Mystery Cabinet, and there it would be. It was like the cabinet that granted really crappy wishes. I ran out of toilet paper one morning, ran to the Mystery Cabinet, and there was a spare roll. The same thing happened with drain cleaner, screwdrivers, garbage bags. If it was useful and not something you usually have lying around, it was in the Mystery Cabinet.
One afternoon, I found a wasp’s nest on the front porch. I called to my buddy to go check the Mystery Cabinet for wasp spray. Not believing such a thing existed (I wasn’t so sure, myself), he said “oh yeah, sure, let me just go find your magical “wasp spray”. I know, I’ll check the…son of a bitch, I love this cabinet!” There was wasp spray.
Then one afternoon he went on a cleaning fit and organized the Mystery Cabinet; the magic was lost, the Mystery Cabinet never produced another surprise.
Aside from the normal crap you expect to find (burned-out vaccuum, old TV), we found a bizarre assortment of magazines from the late 70’/early 80’s. Really bad porn interspersed with religious “guardian angel” magazines. DH thinks somebody was hoping for a merger - their guardian angel would look like a less-classy Playboy centerfold.
Oh, and half a bottle of Bicardi found when the plumber got into the shower pipes.
Wasn’t MY house…
Fixing the basement into an apartment for meself, I found some newspapers in the ceiling that had apparently been used for insulation. “Blondie” from the thirties, with Dagwood playing with one of those Gothic-arch-style radios. REAL fire safety in mind!
Oh, and the fun part. Condoms. Stashed VERY well. How old? Don’t ask me. Put 'em back, for some future adventurer.
The SOB left keys to our house with our new neighbors. The ones with the drug problem. The ones he was forced to evict from the house he was renting to them for non-payment of rent. I found out when said neighbor showed up in my house uninvited a day later!
We dialed a locksmith so fast I thought my fingers would fall off. His argument was they were watching the house for him and he forgot to ask for the key back.
My home’s previous owner actually left useful loot behind. Things like:
A tiff mower and weedeater, both in well maintained condition. A spreader, assorted small tools, drill bits, extension cords, landscaping items (sprinkler heads/new in the box irrigation timer & valves), a wet/dry vac, an air-conditioned doghouse in the backyard, and a working gameboy left in a bathroom drawer. Best of all, there was a fairly new 53" Mitsubishi rear projection tv still in the entertainment nook in the living room. It still works fine and apparently is HD capable.
This happened to our friends who heard the cat meowing…and pulled apart the ceiling. Then the walls. Then the flooring…before finding the cat trapped in the gap behind a desk drawer.
Last house I lived in was built in the 1920s - I discovered a big, dusty stack of old 78s up in the loft, underneath the insulation - I think they had probably been there pretty much from new. They’re probably still there - I never did get around to cleaning them up and taking a proper look.
We did find a real cannon ball - two in fact! We lived in a very old house in England near the ruins of three castles (little ones) and some previous owner must have found them and brought them home. Also in the course of digging the garden we found hundreds upon hundreds of bottles and pottery jars dating from the 17 and (mostly) 1800s. And HEAPS of limpet shells - must have been a monotous diet… Also found an extremely old corn grinding stone and dish (lived in Japan too long, can’t remember what the hell you call those!) And two very heavy flat irons that my mother uses as doorstops today.
That’s interesting - limpets are supposedly a ‘poverty food’ - i.e. something that people ate when there wasn’t much choice. How far was the house away from the sea?
About 30 metres! And yes, historically the people in that area were grindingly poor. Our house was originally two rooms that were stone built. The byre was a lean-to along the back of the house and was eventually made into a kitchen. When my parents pulled up the lino to replace it, there was a concreted-in dung channel down the middle of the floor! The bathroom was added on later again and was made of two outside stone walls and the two inner walls were made of salvaged wood from the beach. One bit of the wall was an old door!
That flooring is awesome!! What a lucky find for you!
When my mom and I (and brothers) moved into the second house I lived in after my dad died, there was this ginormous desk in a small room in the basement.
It took up most of the room there and could not be removed through the door. We couldn’t figure out how they got it down stairs to begin with, it was that huge.
The previous owners left us a letter, which they found in the walls, written by the first owner of the house. The house was built in 1940.
The letter was from the father, addressed to his grown son. It looks like the letter never made it to the son, or maybe it did and he’s the one that put it into the walls.
At any rate, the letter is long and chronicles the wife’s decent into mental illness. The man goes on to explain and defend himself regarding the one time he struck his wife. I gleaned from the letter that the father and son were estranged, probably due to the issues with mom. The man talks about her violent outbursts and mad rantings, and the time he struck her was the time she tried to kill him with a butcher knife.
When I sell the house, the letter will stay with the house.
In our last house, built in 1908 we found a stash of clear and blue medicinal bottles in the crawl space, a lead pipe wrapped with mens longjohns with the name Jim written on them and under that was wrapped a 1917 edition of a now defunct newspaper. neato headlines on that one. Also found a buffalo nickel, a silver St Teresa’s medal and behind the wallboard a pastel drawing of a youngster in what we determined was a baseball outfit. I hunted up old 1930’s aerial photos of the neighborhood (at the local ag office) and saw that there was once a sandlot baseball field across the street. I imagined a previous owner (Jim?) sitting on his stoop watching the kids playing ball and sketching.
There were a few houses where neighbors disovered old cisterns full of old but interesting junk.
A house in Gordonsville VA that we moved into when I was in my teens had an interesting quirk. It was a big square 2-story house built in the 1920’s, but it had no way to get into the attic. No pulldown stairs, no panel or hole of any sort. We looked through the whole upstairs, in closets and everything. We knew the attic was big by looking at the roof from outside. Somehow we never got around to it for a few years but we broke through a closet ceiling and entered the attic. We had all kinds of expectations of what might be up there, it could be full of stuff forgotten for decades. Reality turned out to be a lot more tame, just an old mattress box and a couple Life magazines from the 1940s. They were interesting at least.
This is totally a thread in and of itself. Make one when you open it! I wouldn’t be able to resist something like that.
So how 'bout a human skull? A family friend found one when the inspector pulled up a board in the attic to inspect wiring. A human skull and a bunch of letters to a doctor. We’re hoping it’s only a medical specimen- right? Please?
We have a couple of things that were handed over and some that were found. The previous owners of our house had been here their whole married lives and he was a bit of an amateur local historian. The things we got that were handed over all related to the house itself and include some of the original deeds of sale for the land, documents relating to various rebuilds that have gone on and a locket which appears to have belonged to the original owner. They’ll all stay with the house when we leave here.
Much more interesting was the stuff that was found. We’ve been here 4 years now, but not long after we moved in we remodelled the bathroom. When we removed the old fixtures we found a whole set of stuff relating to the First World War. It included letters exchanged between a serving husband and wife, a very heavy and old gold necklace and some sort of old tobacco tin containing several medals. The tin itself was identified as part of a Christmas care package type arrangement sent to all the troops on behalf one of the royal family in the early part of the war, if I remember rightly. We live in a very strongly military area and we planned vaguely to speak to the local regiments and ask if we could hand the lot over to their safekeeping. It was quite lovely, very moving and very human as a collection.
We never got round to doing anything, and about six months ago, out of the blue, I got a letter from the previous owners, specifically asking if we had found anything. They described the contents to a T, and it turned out they were items the husband had inherited from his father and grandfather. For some reason, we’d never even considered that the items might have belonged to them, even though we knew well they were a military family. Anyway, I was delighted to be able to return them to their rightful owners, and just glad that we’d never got round to handing them on.
On a completely different scale, a house I rented in Yorskhire as a student did contain a whole set of books and papers which strongly suggested that it had been the UK headquarters of the ‘Dianetics’ movement although it didn’t mention Scientology that I remember.