I was doing a bit of landscaping work at our house when I was a kid, leveling a bank of earth. It turns out that it was originally a dumping ground for a load of old rubbish (circa mid 70s, as far as we could tell, looking at some of the stuff) that had been covered over with earth (apparently the previous owner was a bit of a slob).
Most of what we found in there was literally rubbish - old tin cans and the like - but in amongst it all was a Mason’s OK Sauce glass bottle, complete with cork and glass stopper and in perfect condition. As far as I can make out, it’s from around 1915 or so. 25 years later, I still have it in a display cabinet.
No idea what it was doing there in a pile of other rubbish 60 years newer.
Actually, my dad used to work on building sites and it was quite common to find old caches of rubbish like this, and he found a few gems like that, some even older - he ended up with quite a collection of weird and wonderful bottles, which he eventually passed on to me. Unfortunately, at some point, I managed to lose them all (they vanished somewhere in a move, I think). :mad:
I once found a gynecologist’s table and equipment (speculums, slide kits, KY jelly!) in a storage building at work. But here’s the deal: I have never worked for a health care provider; this was in an Atari storage building that I was browsing trying to find more 13-column accounting pads and a new stapler.
I wasn’t surprised to find medical equipment - we manufactured stuff in the Valley back then and there were nurses and clinics on site to take care of minor accidents. I’m just not sure what kind of industrial accident would have required a pelvic exam. :eek:
I also found a case of 24 huge tubes of conducting jelly for defibrillators. No defibrillators though.
My fathers great-aunt (I think) was quite the socialite in Melbourne in the 1920’s and had several husbands. One was a bit of a mystery man, apparently her family didn’t know much about him before they met and married.
A few years after she died we were cleaning out her country home and found a box with the mystery mans’ name on it. Inside were several items from China - cast brass Chinese letters - possibly signs from a wall, scrolls of Chinese writing, a silk wall hanging (again of calligraphy) and a mantle clock presented to the wife of the commander of a unit sent to lift the siege of the International Legations in Beijing.
Some more research revealed that mystery husband was indeed in the British army for a short time and must have brought home a few ‘souvenirs’ from his time in China. We wasn’t, as far as we can tell, the unit commander so he must have acquired the clock later in life.
A large rubber mallet, found during a walk out at Nashville International.
A second large rubber mallet, found during a walk out at Nashville International.
A large, taxidermically preserved stuffed alligator, stained a bizarre orange color, in an upstairs closet, in a house in Wisconsin.
I spent several months in Sydney, Australia back in the mid-80s. One weekend, some of my Aussie friends took me to visit Hill End , which is where Australia’s big gold rush was back in the 1860s. We were setting up our tents in the campground, and I kicked a big rock out of the way. I went back and picked the rock up later, and found that it was a chuck of quartz about the size of my two fists together and filled with gold.
Porn. It was stuck in a book in my high school’s library. 3 or 4 yellow flyers, advertising (and depicting the covers of) magazines and films. I hung on to it for a few years, because A, I was sixteen, and B, this was back before the Internet, when the only way to see a nekkid lady was to hang around the magazine rack at the bookstore and sneak glances at Playboy when no one was looking. It was hardcore porn, too, which I’d never seen before.
I was holding my breath reading this, thinking it was going to turn out like the story Cracked.com ran a few weeks ago: a couple find a Polaroid that has fallen out of a white van that has just pulled out of a c-store. The picture is of a pair of children, a girl of about 14 and a boy of about 8. Both are handcuffed, with duct tape over their mouths. The van is never seen again. I won’t link to the article, because Cracked published the photo, and viewing it killed a tiny part of my soul.
I once found a peanut in my bed. A single whole peanut, in the shell. I don’t eat peanuts. Not one of my roommates at the time ate peanuts, and my bed hadn’t hosted any guests. It still bothers me sometimes that I don’t know where it came from.
My wife’s an archaeologist. Stuff she’s found includes:
[ul]
[li]A complete cow skeleton, apparently buried in a proper grave[/li][li]A medieval gaming piece (just one - somewhere there’s a medieval checkers set with a thimble being used for one of the pieces)[/li][li]Fossilized sea urchins[/li][/ul]
My family once found a cache of pre-War coins in the garden when we were digging a new patio.
Back in the '90s, I was in a hotel room in New York City, and as is my custom, I was checking under the bed to make sure there was no body under there. (Nobody, no body … same thing!) This was before it was common for hotel bed bases to be a solid-framed box.
Under the bed was a large, slightly rounded thing. I reached for it and pulled it out. It was some sort of “sex saddle”. High-density foam with a latex covering, I think, apparently molded in the form and shape of a porn actress’ backside. It appeared to be life sized.
I’m no expert, but I imagine that it must have cost upwards of $100, so I was puzzled as to why anyone would have left it in the hotel room. Then I started to think about it and realized that the person had probably bought it in the city and then decided it was too big to take home in his luggage.
So, then I had to figure out how I was going to get rid of it, because I certainly didn’t want to leave it in the room. The way my luck runs, the maid would have found it under the bed, turned it in to management, and then I get a package at home addressed to “Mr. BobArrgh” from the management of the hotel.
The darn thing was almost too big to fit into the wastebasket out by the vending machines.
I’m sure it has a different name, but I just call it a Sega pillar. It could also be called a demonstrator or tester, I suppose. It’s at least six feet tall and heavy as all get out. It’s decorated with Sonic the Hedgehog and blue neon. There’s a space for an old CRT screen and a Sega game system. The speakers and two controllers were still there.
It’s from the time when games were on cassettes. It would sit in the store, with games or demonstration versions of games locked inside it. Kids could play the games as they stood in front of it.
I found it in a building that the city was preparing to demolish, abandoned. I didn’t want to be accused of stealing anything, so I shuffled through the bureaucracy and found out who I could offer fifty bucks for it. For awhile, I had my TV and VCR in it. Now it’s in the garage. My son swiped the speakers from it, although they haven’t gone far. The controllers got put in a box that later suffered severe water damage.
It’s my version of an old car being kept because it could be worth something some day if it was ever fixed up. I’d say it’s likely to baffle my heirs, but they all know it’s there. Heck, I had to get them to unload it for me. I think it took all three of them. They know it’s lurking in their future.
While working construction, I walked down to the nearby creek to wash mud off my tools when I saw a metal handle sticking up out of the creek bed. Water was flowing very well past it so it was easy to dig around the handle and dig up an old metal milk can, badly rusted. It had a brass badge attached and since I had never seen that before, I decided to keep it.
After cleaning it up, the badge was readable. It said, “Claude Rader-Camden-on-Gauley, WV”. Everyone who knew about my find gave me tons of grief for trying to clean it up. Later, I learned that when my Maternal Great Grandmother was 9 years old, she rode on the back of a mule drawn wagon to Claude Rader’s dairy to get milk in a can just like this one. I still have it and will never part with it.
After I got it cleaned up and painted, the same people who put me down for trying to salvage it were just as adamant that I GIVE it to them! They can rot in hell.
When I first moved to the Twin Cities from Berkeley, I moved into a house in St. Paul. My first week there, as I was heading out to work, the little old lady across the street called out to me to come over and tell her what this thing was… there was a brown paper shopping bag sitting next to a tree in her front yard. I went over and looked into the bag, and it looked back at me…
years ago, in 1979, if I remember right, I bought a car. A very used and inexpensive car. It was a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.
It needed a lot of work. One thing it needed was a new battery. The battery in a '68 Beetle is located under the back seat, which has to be removed to access the battery. Kind of strange to have the battery actually inside the passenger cabin (and not the safest thing in the world), but there it was.
Also under the back seat was a large stash of porn. Printed porn magazines, dozens of them. And they all catered to one very specific fetish. I wouldn’t have thought enough people had this fetish to make it profitable to publish magazines devoted to it, but apparently they did. The magazines had stories, and professionally-taken photo layouts, and a section where readers would send in their own stories, and also pictures of their wives or girlfriends (and occasionally themselves) engaged in this particular activity.
Yeah, dropping sunglasses (and keys) overboard is so commonplace that in many mooring areas it’s become a vital part of the marine ecology and specialized crabs and shrimp live in reefs constructed solely of Maui Jims and Ray Bans. True fact.
