You should have called Geraldo before you opened it. He might have wanted to be there.
This is a picture of the jumbo shrimp we found in the attic of this house when we moved in. Unfortunately we didn’t have any use for it, so had to throw it away.
In our previous house, we left behind a homemade* Mr. Hanky Christmas decoration, and a packet of vegemite.
* Made from wood.
When I moved into my house, there was a small box in a closet in the master bedroom. I figured that it was parts for the closet shelves, since other closets had spare parts too. Several months later, I finally looked in it and found a ball gag and a pair of handcuffs. I had questions, but I didn’t really want the answers.
Some really great stories here! Mine’s not that exciting.
When I bought my house 20 years ago, in the attic I found one of those creepy harlequin dolls hanging from a beam. Almost seemed deliberately left there to freak out the new owner. It worked; I had to ask one of my friends to get it the hell out of there.
I also found an old, locked trunk. Oh the things I imagined it contained! It took me another fifteen years before I took the time to bust it open. Empty as Al Capone’s vault 
Better reasons than I could have imagined. 
Pretty boring here: At one apartment, there were two bottles of “Dante’s Down the Hatch (dans le Underground)” wine. I later found out that there’s a place in Atlanta called the Underground, that has restaurants, and Dante’s was likely a restaurant there. IIRC, the wine was tasty.
And in our last hours, whenever we turned the furnace on, there was loud thumping coming from the thing. We had a repair company come out - and they found that there was a plastic drink jug inside - likely left by the construction crew as a joke. Not sure why the former owner (who’d bought the place new, and lived there a year or so) didn’t deal with it.
in our attic we found some homemade sex tapes from the previous owner, and a wallet and ID from someone who was not the previous owner.
Weird (in a different way) things in the house we have now. The previous owners put dates on everything!! The garbage cans were labeled inside the lids. There was an old clock radio with a piece of masking tape and a date on it. Snow shovels were dated. There were 8 or 9 cans of gasoline in the shed, most partially filled, all labeled with dates and the amount paid for the gas. And on the frame around the garage door, there’s a list of a couple of dozen random dates with temperatures, some indicating rain or snow.
The worst dated items were in the garage refrigerator - there were several cans of Coors Light with use-by dates in 1997. We bought the house in August, 2004.
Under my deck is a wood box attached to a support post. Inside the box is an old wood wall phone, like this one:
No, it’s not hooked up.
Not me but friends of mine. In the late 1970s they bought a house in Queens NY. A few years later they were re-doing the bathroom and pulled up the floor. Under the boards they found…
Bags of money. ~$80,000 (back in the '70s!)
They went through all of the proper step - contact previous owners, contact police, etc. Nope, nobody had any ideas. So, it was theirs to keep!
You are a braver man…er, walrus…than I.
We bought a house in 2001 from a nice little old lady who was pretty much a hoarder (some rooms were virtually impassable due to stacks of boxes and stuff). She and her family got most but not all of it moved out by the deadline we’d agreed to. She did leave behind, though, several ratty old wigs, a glass jar of homemade soup with a handwritten label dated 1986 (we threw it out, obvs) and, in the drains of two long-unused showers, small fern-looking plants growing there.
My wife found a batch of newspaper clippings about Michael Swango (serial killer) hidden in the floor of the closet of an apartment she rented, which had at one point been occupied by… Michael Swango.
My sister bought a house, and some years later had me re-wire parts of it. In the rafters above the basement room that had been the former owner’s teen-age son’s bedroom, I found a plaster casting of an intimate body part. (That boy was gifted!)
Since she had recently received an invitation to his upcoming wedding, I suggest it could be nicely wrapped and returned to him and his bride.
Only if you hand it to them at the rehearsal dinner and insist the bride open it on the spot.
Our story begins on the day the phone started ringing…
Having worked at a hospital where Dr. Swango, ahem, plied his trade (although he’s not believed to have killed anyone there), what city was this in? You can PM me if you don’t want to post it here.
Back in 1980 I rented an apartment. Shortly after moving in I found a Remington 22 rifle behind the water heater. It had a bent barrel and someone had cut a couple inches off the end of the stock. About 5 years ago a I went to a sporting goods store to look shoes. While wondering through the gun department, I asked the guy there if they had parts for old 22 rifles. They did and surprisingly, they had a new barrel and an unfinished stock for the old Remington. Bought the parts and a box of bullets, fixed the gun and fired one shot into the ground in my backyard. The rifle is now buried in the back of a closet, don’t know if I will ever shoot it again.
And someday, someone is going to buy that closet and dig it up and write about it in a message board and people will freak out…
“While wondering through the gun department” is an expression that freaks me out, but don’t worry, that is just me. I wonder too for sure.
After college I decided to move in with one of my friends. He was married but his house had a small additional “guest house” built onto the property he never used so he decided to rent it out to me since it had two rooms and a working bathroom.
As I was cleaning out the old junk (it has previously just been a glorified storage space) I found a bra hiding underneath a pullout couch that had been there. I looked at the tag and it said “36E” which if curious since my friend had been married for 4 years at this point and his wife was quite obviously small chested. I brought it up with him and he claimed ignorance not knowing where it came from, but knowing his personality I’m fairly positive he probably had been using that guest house for nefarious deeds at some point.