Real estate purchase closing - share experiences where it didn't close?

As many of the posts have gone away from the direct request of the OP towards closing that just had surprises, my first closing had surprise boobs!

I was reading through and signing documents, looked up, and was confronted with a nipple. The seller had raised her shirt and taken one out. Moments later she started feeding her baby, so it was completely appropriate, it just caught me off guard, as a bare breast was very low down on the list of things I expected to run into at closing.

(To be clear, breast feeding is appropriate in almost any setting, and I’m glad she felt comfortable breast feeding around a conference table with 6 strangers. To the best of my knowledge I didn’t do anything to make her feel embarrassed, and I would have been offended if any of the other people had suggested what she was doing was inappropriate.)

The purchase I had which fell through never got to closing. After the inspection we ran away as quickly as we could. That inspection was probably the best $250 I’ve ever spent. The owners even came back with a 10% price reduction, but that wasn’t nearly enough to change our minds.

I knew someone who was a real estate agent, they had some closing horror stories. Mostly it seemed to be things like banks and title agencies who had weeks or months to prepare for the date of the closing but didn’t.