We moved into our new house when I was 13, and there were some crude marble steps going down from the patio to the back lawn. I discovered that one of them was a tombstone from the 1830s. It was for a 10-year-old boy named Madison Hurd, who died while his family was relocating to the west. There were records of the trip - and his death - in the Ohio Historical Society.
I still have the tombstone in my living room.
I have no idea where the body is actually buried.
When I was stationed at Ramstein Air Base in (then) West Germany, I found an unused plane ticket for a flight back to the United States (can’t remember what city) with the name “Richard Phelps” on it. It had been issued by American Express, so I took it to the on-base American Express office. It only occurred to me later that Richard Phelps was “Digger” Phelps, the then coach of the Notre Dame basketball team, who was touring West Germany giving basketball camps.
I find myself compelled now to link this very recent news item
(note to the uninitiate - a “ute” is what I believe in the US you would call a “truck”)
Was 10 or 11 years old. While playing outside I decided to crawl under a large pine tree in our yard. I found a leather purse. It was very worn and half-buried in the dirt. It looked like it had been there for a few years.
I took it inside the house and showed it to my parents. They opened it and found a woman’s driver’s license, various credit cards, etc. But no money. We figured someone had stolen her purse, taken the money, and stashed it under out tree. We tried looking up her info in the phone book (this was 1977), but I’m not sure if we found her. I think my parents gave it to the police soon afterwards.
Early Saturday morning, driving alone a rural highway in East Texas several years ago I spotted a golden disk in the ditchline. I stopped and found it was one of pair of marching band cymbals. Must have been a wild night on the band bus after the Friday night game… 
It’s a Zildjian, I still have it, might be good for something someday.
I was visiting a former Soviet country some years ago. I and one other traveller from same hostel met some local girls in a bar. They wanted to take us to see an old cold war era “vault”, I mean bunker for a moment when the nukes are approaching. Apparently very few of local population is aware of the place. I have since asked about it several people and none knew it so I guess I was quite lucky. It took some climbing to get there but wasn’t so hard after all.
The place was just as creepy as you can imagine. We only had dim lights from phones and with them we moved from one damb room to another. Who knows how big the complex was, we had courage to go relatively short way. Your imagination really starts to work in that enviroment!
The rooms were mostly empty but in the final room we found something. Pretty much only thing there was a family photo album. I’d estimate it was something like 40 years old and it was full of black and white photos of people. They were normal family shots but for some reason those people looked incredibly angry and unhappy in every picture. Some of the photos were torn away and spread around but most were on album.
I would really like to know whose photos those were and how in the Earth they ended up in such a place???
This one is particularly awesome.
You guys would enjoy this website:
In my Urban Exploration days I saw a number of interesting things, but our biggest rule is “take only photos, leave only footprints” so I never kept anything.
The grossest thing I can remember is finding some guy’s notebook filled with
handwritten p0rn stories about seeing his MOM in lingerie.
I was reading it out loud for laughs and when I got to that part I was like “EW!!” and threw the book across the room.
A couple of years ago I found a bat on the side of the road near my house. Took a close-up photo of it and everything. I think it was some kind of brown bat. Cute little thing. I remember moving it to the (soft) shoulder and then not seeing it a little while later. I’m hoping that it flew away (this was all during the day) but I suppose it’s just as possible that some other animal got it.
Not that strange around West Auckland, but I have a shelf full of kauri gum that I’ve picked up over the years. You sometimes find it on the beaches after heavy rain when chunks of it are washed down from the bush: most of the pieces are fairly small, but you occasionally get fist-sized chunks, and the biggest I’ve found was the size of my head: if they’re big enough I’ll polish them up for display; sometimes when they’re clear you can see inclusions like leaves and insects.
Back in my single days, I once went to a club in Windsor, Ontario, and came out to find a woman’s stretchy top (similar to this) sitting on the windshield of my car. I would happily have returned it, but I didn’t see any topless ladies wandering around the parking lot. So I kept it as a souvenir of sorts. Kept it for a while, but eventually I threw it away during a move.
Once, my mother found something unusual in a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. One of the kisses was unwrapped, and found to have a scary face carved in it. My mom shrieked like a little girl when she saw it. She kept it for a conversation piece for some time, until the chocolate started to oxidize.
Yesterday, I replaced the aluminum dryer vent and found a mummified sparrow in there. Perfectly preserved, feathers still shiny.
I used to work with a woman who had lived in Texas in 2003, and her husband had been in the National Guard. They were dispatched to help with the space shuttle crash, and as we all know, they were looking for 7 bodies.
They found 9. Two were people who hadn’t even been reported missing, and turned out to be victims of a serial killer that was in the area at the time. 
As for me, when I was a college freshman in the early 1980s, I had a roommate who in her mid-teens had had a serious drug problem. We were walking back from the nearby commercial area, and I saw a wad of aluminum foil and picked it up, assuming it was litter. She wanted to open it, and sure enough, there were several golfball-sized chunks of hashish in the foil. I had no use for it, but some of her, ahem, interesting friends did, so she pocketed it and took it home. :o
Last year, I was at the tail end of a church rummage sale, when they were doing the $5 a box sale, and found an old medical book from the 1890s. Not only do I collect old medical books, I also have a home-based book resale business, and I discovered that this book is worth at least $1,000, even in its very decrepit condition! :eek: 
It’s listed online; honestly, I really don’t even care if I ever sell it or not - I just think it’s cool that I have it.
This book starts with an 18-page chapter about typhoid fever, and devotes about the same amount of space to cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. At that time, few people lived long enough to get them (because of, among other things, typhoid fever) and if they did, not much could be done about them anyway.
Not me, but a friend:
My friend was gutting and refinishing the second floor of his house, an old 1840s victorian in Newport RI. In the process of gutting, he found a very old pair of kid’s shoes. He guessed the shoes were for a 4 or 5 year old, old leather, well worn, and dusty, but otherwise intact.
He tossed them in the trash, not thinking much about them beyond the wonder of it.
The next couple of days, he and his wife would occasionally hear a little kid running up and down the hall on the second floor. Both their kids were grown and moved out, and no one was visiting. The couple times he went up to look, no one was there.
He mentioned it to his neighbor, and it was suggested maybe the parents stuck the child’s shoes in there when he died, and now the kid was looking for them.
He dug through the trash, found the shoes, cut open the dry wall, stuck the shoes back in the wall, and repaired the hole.
They never heard that kid running up and down the halls again.
About ten years ago I was doing my taxes the night before deadline and really sweating it and looked up and found a ferret (!) looking at me.
I didn’t have a second to spare so grabbed up a box or towel or something & caught it and swooshed it out the back door. A few minutes later, another ferret. This time I took the ferret all the way to the meadow & chucked it well over the fence.
A few minutes later and a noise in the bath off the laundry room turned out to be–the ferret. By now I knew it by sight, same ferret each time. And could catch it by hand.
This time I grabbed a flashlight and let it loose in the yard. It took off like a shot and went right in the dryer vent.
Went in the house, caught the ferret and took it by car to a crossroads about a mile away & let it loose. I kind of wanted to help it but I had to do those taxes. Never heard a word about a lost or a found ferret. Anyway I did give the ferret a nice night’s entertainment.
In the woods near my house growing up, small square stones on the ground with a B or a G on them. I asked my dad and he told me they were grave markers for slaves. The phone book had slave cemetery on a map. I did not expect that in New Rochelle, NY, but I was 6 at the time.
I found a marble-size ball of amber on a beach in Sardinia. I googled and searched in a couple of books but couldn’t find any mention of amber in the Mediterranean.
Re-Installing piers a couple weeks after the ice went out at the end of a long Wisconsin winter we found several bank deposit bags sliced open. Turned out a video arcade had been robbed the previous fall and this is where the robber tossed the empty bank bags.
Same lake, different year. I was teaching a beginner’s sailing lesson when one of my students capsized his boat at the pier, losing his eyeglasses in the process. I got a dive mask and did a breath hold dive in the murky water. Amazingly I quickly found a pair of glasses and resurfaced holding them up triumphantly. Wrong pair. Not my student’s. Apparently he wasn’t the first to lose his glasses that way.
I saw something like this at the town cemetery on Mackinac Island, MI. The little lettered squares appeared to be marking the boundaries of grave plots. There were normal grave markers as well, and the little squares always had the first letter of the surname of the family buried there. (So, if the Smith family was buried in the plot, the little squares would be marked with ‘S’, the Jones family would get J squares, and so on.)