The builders (or renovators) installed the master bath louvered medicine cabinet upside down.
ETA: AND… all the ceiling fans were powered with extension cords.
When I walked through my apartment before renting it, I noticed the shower curtain rod had a fake wood finish, which I thought was sort of cool. But when I moved in I discovered that it was totally covered in rust. Yuck!
I told the manager and he said I should buy another one and he would reimburse me. Of course I got the most expensive one I could find…the manager frowned when I gave him the receipt, but he paid up.
Urine, in orange juice bottles, in a closet, upstairs. Lots of it.
A sanitary napkin belt wound around the pipe underneath the bathroom sink vanity.
We just redid our whole kitchen and we found a pencil drawing in one of the walls. It was pretty well done (though the face is a little rough) and had a woman in bra, panties, and fishnets holding a sponge. We have it framed and in the kitchen now.
Found the pic: http://images.yuku.com/image/jpg/d6e263f718f7a3ff9fc57016e4dac27382e3463e_r.jpg
I don’t think Reader’s Digest puts their old issues online. I’ve found individual articles posted by people who were interested in the topic for whatever reason, but nothing from their website.
My brother found some Watchtower magazines (Jehovah’s Witness literature) from the 1950s, and found out there was a market for them and sold them for about $700 total on the then-fledgling eBay.
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
This has to be the strangest one yet.
One house I lived in had been owned by a woman who loved wallpaper. She had wallpapered every wall in each bedroom (different paper in each room), both bathrooms, and the kitchen. The kicker was she"d also wallpapered the ceilings in of those rooms, too. Each room felt like the inside of a small box.
I found two strange things in my current house (three, if you count the textured paisley wallpaper that was painted burnt orange):
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A love letter, hidden in a wall, from a teenage girl to a teenage boy.
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A dog treat in the furnace.
My house was owned by a wallpaper freak. The closet doors had panels of wallpaper carefully placed in the middle - which did not match the wallpaper of the rooms. The bathroom had wallpaper - on the ceiling, covering a vent.
The master bedroom had that ‘grass’ wallpaper, gone very musty. Now that was a bastard to remove.
All of the wallpaper was painstakingly scraped off by yours truly, together with the rotting broadloom (that covered immaculate hardwood floors!) 
I never met the previous owner, who had been transferred to Toronto and left the house with a real estate agent. This meant we got it real cheap. We settled at the end of March and moved in gradually through April. Sometime in June or July a neighbor came by a bit sheepish to tell us about the rose trees. What is a rose tree? It is a rose that has been grafted on a wild rose base and holds the flowers well off the ground. The thing is that you had to dig them up and bury them horizontally in a trench in the fall and then replant them in the spring. By the time the guy remembered to tell us about this, the tops had died. I tried planting them but only one (of three or four) was still alive. We still have that wild rose in front, 44 years later.
Under wallpaper in a row house I was gutting, written in pencil:Albert Sprecher 1939, plus a swastika.
After about a year of living at my last apartment, I found small cache of about half a dozen pairs of panties for a small girl.
The actual find wasn’t super strange - they were behind the dryer, and had obviously been accidentally dropped back there by a previous tenant when they were doing their daughter’s laundry. But I couldn’t help thinking, “I’m an unmarried man in his thirties, living alone. If, for some reason, the cops had had a reason to search my apartment and they found these, they would put me in a deep, dark hole and never, ever, let me out.”
A green heart shaped toy mirror, under the stove. Took me a few years to run across it.
After purchasing my house I decided to remove the garden shed in the back yard because
the wood frame was full of termites plus there was no door to keep the shed secure.
Back in a dark corner of the shed were several beer bottles and several more were
hidden under the floor. While removing a shelf in the shed a sheet of paper fell
off the shelf and onto the floor. I picked up and found it was a 45 year old letter written
by a guy in prison to his girlfriend or wife.
Later I dug up the grass in the backyard and replaced it with plants that didn’t require
a lot of maintenance and water. I found some more beer bottles and a vodka bottle which
had a small amount of clear liquid in it. I didn’t try drinking it so I never learned if
it was just rain water that had seeped into the bottle or left over vodka. I also dug up
some 10 foot long steel pipes that were not attached to any of the house’s plumbing. It
looked like the previous owner disposed of the pipes by burying them under a couple of
inches of dirt.
A neighbor told me that a previous owner drank a lot and was a pack rat. While that explained
the bottles and pipes I still don’t know who the letter belongs to - the names on the letter
are not the same as the previous owners of the house.
Keep digging.
Less, um, disturbing but when I remodeled the front room in our CA house (built about 1960 by a noted developer), I found the developer’s signature and the date on the inside face of the top door trim. I carefully cut it to fit another location.
In a prior house, I was scooting around under an addition, and one of the support posts was painted a weathered brown and had the house number on it, upside down. Old porch post. Seemed solid. Did not put a waterbed in that room, though.
Wasn’t there a 1960s novel by one of the avant-gardes that involved hundreds of jars of “offal” from an old man, and they had to be kept to meet the terms of a will? I want to say Barth.
I am married to a woman who lusts with all her heart for wallpaper. Her house, when we met, had a huge living room/dining room combo in an ell with chunky separating beams and such, covered in green “grasscloth” paper. I let her do a little paper in our CA house but it all had to come out for the resell remodel. I don’t have to say “no” here because she knows how out of date it is. But.
The postwar house I grew up in had wallpaper on the kitchen/DR ceiling. And behind all the open shelves. Gray, black and dull red basketweave, about two inches across. Took most of a summer to remove when my mother decided she couldn’t stand it on the ceiling any more.
Found a small pistol (my dad called it Sat nite Special) that had never been fired, sold it. Couple hundred bucks in the bedroom closet.
A couple fake outlets that are used to store valuables, alas they were empty.
What was missing…before they carpeted they pulled out the hardwood floors, could have covered them, but nope, tore them out. 2 closets still have the hardwood flooring, but nowhere else.
Blood stains are problematic in wood.