I found a gold-plated men’s grooming kit, including a gold-plated electric nose hair timmer.
My brother-in-law buys, renovates and sells houses for a living. He bought the house of an acquaintance who wound up leaving absolutely everything behind. Furniture, tools, clothes, dishes, even his car! It was all perfectly good stuff too, not just junk. In case the guy changed his mind and wanted the stuff back, brother-in-law kept everything for the amount of time required by law before selling it. However, he never heard from him again.
In another house he bought, he and my sister found a sealed cabinet in the basement with some strange old tools in it. They knew a doctor had lived there many decades before and had had his office down there so they figured that they were some of his medical instruments. Why they got left behind and why the cabinet got sealed up, they’ll never know.
Beadalin, thanks for the link!
When my ex and I bought our house in 1999, the former owner left a ton of stuff.
[ul]
[li]A box of old record albums - I sold them all on eBay and made a couple hundred bucks.[/li][li]Tons of old clothes and linens - I sold a a yard sale and made a few bucks.[/li][li]An armoire - my ex burned it in a bonfire. [/li][li]Several old dishes which had some eBay value.[/li][li]A refrigerator full of suspect foodstuffs.[/li][li]Lots of loose change.[/li][li]Various other junk that went to the dump[/li][/ul]
aaaaaaaand…[cue drumroll please]
[ul]
[li]A wedding dress with the tags still on in that fit me perfectly. I got married in it. Link! [/li][/ul]
Not only do I not ever throw anything away, I would probably “rescue” all the shit I’ve read about so far. 
I think its a character flaw. And I have a HUGE garage full of shit.
BUT! I always have what I need to “McGyver” whatever I need to have in any circumstance.
I’m still a sad MF.
You guys have found some awfully exciting stuff!!
I found a small white ice cream dish when I bought my house. I didn’t have an ashtray until I moved in, so I used it as an ashtray while i worked on the house. I still only have 2 other ashtrays, and my dish.
There’s also some rusty weight plates in the basement and a pile of pennies (just pennies!) on the ledge above the laundry area.
And they left me plenty of outdoor trash cans. Six, to be exact. They all suck as far as outdoor trash cans go.
Praise the Lord! It’s a miracle!
LOL…Yeah, maybe they were orgionally from people who went to Lourdes, and didn’t need them any more.
I would be surprised if they were the fancy kind (colors, custom seating etc) but …hmmmm still that’s bizarre.
The strangest such story I know happened to a friend in Cleveland back in the '80s. And the use he later found for it.
On Igor Stravinsky’s 100th birthday, I happened to be visiting my friend in Cleveland. There was a two-piano arrangement of The Rite of Spring being performed at the Music School Settlement that evening in honor of the Stravinsky centennial. I suggested we go, and explained the riot that broke out at its premier in Paris because the music’s shocking primitivism stripped away the polite veneer of civilization from the sophisticated European culture conoisseurs, and showed them their own savagery in the mirror. Classical music was never the same again.
This gave him an idea.
He went and brought out the… recreational items he’d just found when moving into the apartment: A black mask with eyeholes cut out. Sharp steel spikes embedded in hand-turned wooden handles. Various restraints made of the same tough, thick, stretchy black fabric as the mask. And I forget what other torture implements. He told how he had to wash the fabric three times to get all the blood out.
So his guerrilla art impulse was to attend the Rite of Spring dressed in formalwear — plus the executioner’s mask which covered his entire head. To pay homage to the savagery revealed in Le Sacre. It told a grim story of human sacrifice, after all. La danse de la vierge élue. The dance of the chosen virgin. He actually went into the recital hall, sat down, and politely listened to the entire musical program like that. I was dying with suppressed laughter, but he said no one in the audience betrayed a hint that they’d noticed anything unusual. (That’s what I find really weird about the whole prank. Clevelanders!)
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote a story titled “This Blessed House” (from The Interpreter of Maladies) about a Hindu newlywed couple who move into a house in Connecticut. They gradually find Christian devotional items and art in the weeks that follow. The wife likes this stuff, she remains Hindu but decorates the house with it. The husband is unhappy about all the saint pictures and Jesus statues on display when they have a party for the other Hindus he works with. But they get interested when she tells them the new house is a “treasure hunt” and the party takes a different turn…
Jackpot!
After about 2 years in this house I decided to hammer open a metal box which I’d found in the attic.
Inside was a complete set of butchers weights in brass ranging from 3lbs down to 1/4lb.
I still have them sitting on the kitchen windowsill.
Also in the box was a couple of WW2 British ration books and a tin of corned beef, this is in the garage and is still unopened 'cos I’m waiting for it to explode.
Finally…some gents collar studs (pearl) and 4 stiff as a board collars.
Thanks you, ASAKMOTSD. It would appear my mystery geek was a medical student, that is the same swirly logo.
Now thats just weirder. though. I mean, you’d think a visit to Washington in itself would be worth hanging on to the keepsake, and its a beatifull medalion, as they go.
And pimaspinner, that’s a lovely wedding-dress. What a lucky find.
I can beat that - our people left behind ELEVEN trash cans, 6 of them full, plus the great big square rolling can that the garbage company gives/sells you when you sign up for service. We kept and are using 4 or 5 of the cans - the ones with lids - gave one can with a lid to my mom, and the rest were crap and got tossed. And the big wheeled one sits outside my husband’s woodshop for all his hobby-related trash.
Oh, and to make it weirder, for some reason, they felt compelled to date everything. Inside the trash can lids are dates - I assume it’s when they bought the cans. We also found dates on rakes, a push broom, a dust pan, a radio, and other stuff I have forgotten.
Odd, odd people…
We moved into a Wisconsin home, in the Waukesha/Pewaukee area in the early 70s.
I was just a boy, then, & was quite startled to discover that the previous owner had left a 3 1/2 foot long, taxidermically preserved alligator in the room that was to be mine. It was covered in a horrible, International Orange glaze or laquer of some kind.
Nobody had noticed it, until I switched the light in the closet on…
Some of you on this Board regard me as a little “twitchy”. This was just one of many reasons why.
The World is Mad.
Mad, I tell you!!!
<goes to lie down, with a cold compress on his eyes>
That’s cool pimaspinner, how many people can say they found their wedding dress?
In Russia, wedding dress finds you!
I’ll bite. Who had lived there prior to you?
Hopefully that stuff was only used for consensual sex acts and not something more sinister.
All I found in my new apartment was kitty litter on the floor of my closet. :mad: I had to use a whole bottle of Febreeze to get the pet funk smell out of here. THe girl before us had at least one cat and one dog, because the dog ate our carpet and chewed our blinds.
I’m working on that one.
FairyChatMom, how exactly does one throw away a trash can?
One puts it in…a bigger trash can.