A house in Des Plaines Illinois—the window in the bathroom was tall & peaked, like the big windows you see in churches. Mom had to use a shower curtain to cover the lower 80% of the window, so we could sit on the potty, unseen. Des Plaines is right next door to O’Hare International Airport. I remember one dark night in Winter, when I had to use the potty. I was 4 or 5. I was sitting on the porcelain throne, underoos around my ankles, when a 707, landing lights ablaze, came swooping in. The landing lights illuminated the whole damn bathroom. It was like being in a stage spotlight! On the potty!
I was convinced that the pilots & all the passengers saw me.
Mom & Dad told me to quit lying, & that it wasn’t that bad.
Until it happened to Mom.
We moved, shortly thereafter.
Another house, in Wisconsin–they left a taxidermist stuffed Alligator, dyed a vile Orange color. 3 feet long. My Dog, Billy, used to like to chew on it’s tail.
I built some pretty cool hidey-holes in various houses, mostly rentals, over the years. One was a room paneled in “rotten pine” boards with the wall painted black behind them. I removed one board and gave it magnetic mounts, then built a 3-foot tall narrow space behind it.
When I moved out, I left a handwritten receipt for 300 Kruggerands and a tag from an Uzi a friend had given me.
In the first house me and a few buddies rented after high school, we found a three foot tall graduated cylinder fashioned into a hooka/bong with a big rubber stopper on top, four tubes coming out, and a gigantic bowl. I think we left it behind when we moved, but it got a lot of use when we lived there.
Another house I lived in was plagued with lawn problems. The front lawn was no bigger than a parking space, but we couldn’t keep the grass alive no matter what we did. Right before our second attempt at reseeding, I was turning over the dirt and uncovered a small clay dragon head that looked like it fell off of a decorative planter or something. So I figured that must be the source of our lawn problems, some kind of curse or something. The lawn died again anyway.
“The Floating Opera” by John Barth was my favorite book when I was a teenager - I must’ve read it over 20 times.
Thanks for reminding me to dig it out of storage and read it again!
Oh, to keep on topic, when we cleaned out my dad’s house before we moved in we found a WWII Garand M1, and a Japanese Chrysanthemum rifle (also from the war).
-Wallet-
That’s funny- some friends of ours moved into a very old house in Lawrence, KS some years ago, and it had this one room, well into the first floor, with no windows, a floor drain, and a LOT of electrical outlets. From the house proper, the door to it looked for all the world like a broom closet or something like that.
As best any of us could guess, it was some guy’s pot-growing room that was set up to be invisible to IR viewers, and not obvious to anyone casually looking through the house.
I always dreamed of moving into Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s house. Her husband was an ex-pirate, and stashed copious quantities of pirate booty – which everyone knows is mostly gold Spanish doubloons – in secret locations all over his house. Whenever his widow (Mrs. P-W) ran out of cash, she would poke around until she found another cache. What a great house to live in!
The house my wife and I just bought has a full basement, not a walk-out. You can only get into the basement through a door in the kitchen. That door has a deadbolt that can only be operated from the kitchen. Not sure who or what the previous owners were locking down in the basement.
We bought a house which had linoleum instead of shelf paper in all the kitchen cabinets, glued in place with rubber cement. And when we began to take the wallpaper off in the living room (textured wallpaper, which had then been painted over!) we found a hole in the wall, up high in one room, not really in a place where you’d knock a hole by accident or cut one for access or anything. It had been “repaired” by wadding up some chicken wire and then spackling over it. Yes, with spackle. Yes, really chicken wire.
When we moved here we bought a brand new house. I have to say I have enjoyed finding nothing unusual here.
I’m not sure I’d put it in regular cabinets, but one of my regular DIY upgrades for houses is to clean out undersink areas and glue down inexpensive white lino, with sealed edges. It makes occasional cleanups easy, stays fresh-looking and prevents long-time damage from leaks and wet spills.
A valid technique for holes up to maybe four or five inches across - pack in a support base, chicken wire or hardware cloth being okay, and fill with drywall compound.
That house was built in 1935 so the walls were plaster. The hole was in an outside wall, high up above a picture window. No idea what it was for but probably not a stove pipe hole as it vented out onto a courtyard.
A few years after they bought their house, I was helping my sister & brother-in-law do some rewiring in their house and re-doing furnace ductwork. In the ceiling or the semi-finished basement area that their teenage son had converted into his bedroom, we found … a detailed plaster casting of his erect penis! (And the kid was pretty well-endowed,)
They had been friends with the previous owners, and still were. In fact, their son was now in his early 20’s, and they had been invited to his wedding that fall.
So I suggested that they gift-wrap it, and leave it along with their other wedding gift, at the reception. Brother-in-law agreed with me … until he saw the reaction of my sister.
I don’t know what they did with it finally.
A couple of months after we moved into our current rental place, my mother came to visit and after she left, asked us to check if she’d forgotten her phone in our spare room. We didn’t find the phone (she found it later in her suitcase) but we did find, under the mattress, a cigarette lighter in the shape and colour of a penis. Cigarette lighter size, rather than average penis size, but still…
Everyone was rather surprised, to say the least. I’m not sure to what use this was put or how it ended up underneath a double mattress - right in the middle, too - but we got some gloves and quietly disposed of it. I wasn’t going to touch that with bare hands.
I rented a house a long time ago that included a 1-car garage, badly converted to a long room. The floor was carpeted over the original sloped garage floor. The cheap paneling nailed to the wall was mounted perpendicular to the slanted floor, instead of the usual vertical. I used to joke that some family had given Daddy a staple gun for Christmas, and it had driven him mad.
In my current house, at the back of a shelf in the front closet was a riding crop, covered in braided leather with a springy shaft and two flat leather flaps. :eek: This is not a neigh-borhood with enough space to keep horses, so maybe somebody was into B&D.
My kitchen has two built-in lazy susans under the cabinets on each side of the stove. One of them seemed to be blocked. You could spin it, but there was resistance. So I sent my son into one of them to get whatever was keeping the thing from turning.
It turned out to be an unopened box of Count Chocula cereal, with a coupon you could send in for free stuff. Deadline March 1973.
We found it in 2008.
A previous house, built in 1889, had its chimney stuffed with newspapers. I wanted to use the fireplace so I hired chimney sweeps to make sure it was all good for burning (in approximately 1977). Some of the newspapers it was crammed in were from the late 1940s. Guess it had been awhile since there was a fire in that fireplace! Years later, say 1990, we had some work done, which involved opening up a plastered-in crawl space, and there was a very old screwdriver. It might have been the screwdriver of a guy who built that house!
When we had to dig up a lot of the backyard of that house, we found a cache of old booze bottles and a couple of rings, sized to fit children. One of them was gold.
When I moved into my first apartment in Denver, there was a cabinet with about a hundred paperback romance and mystery novels. I did not know this when I rented the place. It would have been a plus. I read them, then traded them for more books at a used-book store that was popular at the time, called The Tattered Cover.
When I was a teen we moved into an old farmhouse-type house (4 rooms over 4 rooms, hall and stairs in middle) that was built in the early 1900’s.
It had what we called a snowmobile room, all the molding around the doors and windows were painted a vivid blue, and the walls were covered with bright actiony wallpaper that had snowmobile riders all over it.
The house also had a big attic but absolutely no access to it in any room or closet. One day with great anticipation we broke through the ceiling in one of the closets, but only found a 1940’s Life magazine and an old mattress box.
I have a basic electric stove with a separate exhaust hood over it. All very common stuff. I noticed some small black pellets on the stove top. They almost looked like insect or mouse droppings or something. Looking around, I found the source. They were falling from inside the hood, behind the metal screen part, and were piling up along a narrow edge along the back of the hood. The little pellets are hard and black, about the size of hamster poop. My first thought was that something living is producing these things, but after looking at them close up I don’t think so, but I can’t figure out what they could be or where they came from.
