Weirdest thing found in home you bought (apt. you rented)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

This was a long time ago, and it was the apartment I was helping a boyfriend move into, but it’s a pretty good story. The OP can skip it; anyone else can keep reading.

I lived, and more relevantly, went to high school, in Bloomington, IN. This was the last place that Emily Harris lived, holding a legitimate job, and a somewhat hippie, but still not-time-to-alert-911 life, before she tuned in, turned on, dropped out, moved to California, joined the Symbionese Liberation Army, and kidnapped Patty Hearst.

She taught English at the intermediate school that my cousins went to. My older cousin didn’t have her, but some of her friends’ older siblings did. A couple of my high school teachers had taught there when she was there. They said the only thing about her that stood out at the time, was that she rode a bicycle to work every day, back in the days when women teachers had to wear dresses or skirts. So she rode in, in jeans, and changed in the restroom every morning.

Anyway, the apartment my boyfriend was moving into was supposedly where she had lived. We found a lampshade in the back of a closet, with really evil-looking designs on it. They were the creepiest figures, and I think they were supposed to be zodiac symbols, but when he said he wanted to keep it, I said “Not in the bedroom, if you expect me to stay over.”

Seriously, it scared me, and I almost never react that way to inanimate objects. When I do, they are things like exhibits at Auschwitz. We don’t even know for sure the Harrises had lived there, let alone that it was their lampshade, but damm, that thing gave me the willies.

42

I know I’ve told this one before: A friend lived in a condo. One day she was cleaning the toilet and heard a :::clink::: as she used the brush.

She fished out a DIAMOND RING.

She had no way of contacting the former owners, and she had no idea how the thing wound up in the toilet anyway; working theory is that it got dropped, and hung up on a bend in a pipe somewhere, and finally got dislodged.

43

Why exactly would you kill them? Just asking. If it was daytime, they might have simply been sleeping.

Humans are really fucked up.

44

Was this hospital in Sioux Falls (that’s the only one of his medical job locations I know of where there were no confirmed victims)?*

Needless to say, if there were any medications, food or drink left over in a dwelling that had previously been occupied by Swango, they needed to go into the trash. Even if it was vintage wine. And I’d still feel creeped out by living in such a place.

*elsewhere, I worked closely with a surgeon who during training experienced grievous gastrointestinal symptoms after Swango brought in an “extra spicy” pizza to share with fellow surgical residents.

45

I don’t know why I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this thread, but it’s been an absolute delight from start to finish. :grin:

46

New Englander, I suspect. I date various things Just Because–because my dad did, and because it’s sometimes interesting. Not perishables (well, frozen stuff!), but, for example, a box of foil sheets from Costco is labeled with the date I opened it AND the date from the previous box, so I have some idea how long one lasts. I haven’t dated my show shovels, but that’s not a bad idea–they wear out and while I have a few spares of the one I like, they won’t last forever.

So while this person sounds a bit compulsive about it, it doesn’t strike me as totally bonkers.

47

I’m not quite sure, tho, why they (or I) should care that they bought the green garbage cans in October of 1991. I didn’t mention that they left us eleven garbage cans, some still full of garbage. And while I can understand putting dates on gas cans, I guess, I don’t understand why there were so many, why all were partially full (evaporation?) and why put the prices they paid for the gas.

Oh, and in the unfinished basement, they stacked the carpeting that had been removed from upstairs - at least three rooms of it just stacked in the middle of the floor. We had to pay to haul several loads of stuff to the dump.

And not New Englanders - they were natives of St Mary’s County, Maryland, living here till they moved to Florida in 2004 in their 80s.

48

Thank you for that.

Fucked up indeed :cry:

49

I bought my current house, in spite of the fact that a light switch on the kitchen wall did not turn on or off any lights. Nor did it start any ventilators, control current to any outlets or appliances, or do anything else. Flip it on and off; nothing happened. Okay, it’s not a dealbreaker, I bought the house.

A few years ago, I needed an electrician for something. When I called, I mentioned the switch that did nothing, and said if the electrician could wire it to turn on an outside light, over the back deck, that would be great.

Well, the electrician arrived, did the work I needed, and looked at the mystery switch. Oh, he could wire and install a light over the back deck controlled by the mystery switch (and he did), but he told me the story.

Looking at the wire that came out of the switch and ended under the sink, he deduced that it was for a garbage disposal that was never installed. I’d seen unused wires coming out of the wall under the sink, but never made the connection (no pun intended). And the mystery of the Mystery Switch was solved.

50

A house that a roommate and I rented in 1980 had a cat in it. We thought the previous tenants probably left her behind. She became ours.

51

Mine is pretty boring compared to some of the other stories in this thread. In my current house, the previous owner had balanced some plywood on the garage rafter as a shelf. When I looked up there I found a box containing a full length faux-fur coat.

In college I was on the waiting list for the dorms. I got admitted toward the end of Christmas vacation. After moving in my stuff the first day the dorms reopened, I explored the empty floor and found someone had taken a shit in the laundry room sink. It was dried out, so it must have been deposited right before the dorms closed for the holidays.

52

Leaving out some portions of the electrical wiring, although some of the definitely weird ones were actually in the house and this wasn’t, though on the property –

Two quite large metal pontoons, rest of boat not included, sitting along a hedgerow; and shot full of holes, presumably by miscellaneous hunters passing through, though I wouldn’t rule out some of the previous owner’s family having decided to use them for target practice.

I was told they were WWII surplus, and had been hauled up there by a relative who’d originally intended to build a boat with them, but never got around to it. (Nearest suitable body of water is about a mile away.)

They’re still there. Chances that anybody’s ever going to pay to get them hauled away seem slim.

53

In my daughter and SIL’s first house, there were two mystery switches. Based on what the electrician found, it appears a previous owner wanted to add a couple of switches for something (we could tell by the type of box used) but not knowing much about electricity, the switches immediately popped breakers, so they were left in place but disconnected. So the electrician removed the switches, capped off the wires, and put blank-off plates over the boxes.

Several other weird and potentially dangerous electrical issues have since been addressed - honestly, I’m amazed the house didn’t burn down years ago.

54

[Steven Wright] Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Madagascar. She said, ‘Cut it out.’[/Steven Wright]
…
The strangest thing I ever found was a slot in the bathroom of an old house I rented, which was for the purpose of depositing razor blades. I wasn’t aware that this used to be a thing, and it still baffles me that there was an entire collection of old blades behind the wall.

55

I’ve got a “mystery switch” in my house. It’s located in my bedroom, on the opposite side of the room from the door and the switch that controls the ceiling light. My first thought was that it turned an outlet on and off, but no. It’s especially weird in light of the fact that the room is the newest part of the house. You don’t even see it because it’s behind the drapes, but I know it’s there.

56

Three years ago we found a bottle of Carnu in the wall. I posted a thread about it. In the thread, I posted SC Johnson’s reply to my query:

Please know Johnson’s Carnu with the specific label design shown in the picture you provided, was available in brown bottles until roughly 1944. We believe the red cap is original to your bottle of Carnu, as these caps were made from Bakelite - the first synthetic plastic commercially available.

57

Thirty-some years ago, my sister and her husband bought a lovely old house. The previous owners did a magnificent job cleaning everything out - there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere.
Except the massive attic. It was plumb full of treasures: a decade worth of Architecture magazines, a bunch of G.I. Joe dolls with accessories, women’s church hats, in hatboxes from a maker our mom remembered as being ‘fancy’ in the 40’s, artwork, old housewares, men’s and women’s shoes, lots of clothes and (to fulfill the topic) multiple sets of late 60’s/ early 70’s cheap quality kitchen and steak knives, still in original boxes. Like a few stacks of 20+ sets.
The previous owners weren’t in sales or anything like that. Dad thought they must have won them or something equally offbeat.

58

I bought my first house from the family who originally built it. The father died in the late 70s, mother in the late 80s and one of the 1 of the 2 daughters (who never married and never left home) in the mid-90s. Bought it through the surviving daughter. In talking to the neighbors the spinster sister and the mother did not get along even though they lived together.

A few years after purchasing I was in the basement running some electrical wires and discovered above the heating ducts and between the floor joists were full bottles and bottles of prescription medication in the mother’s name. Didn’t recognize the type of medicines (no internet to Google) so called the police to ask how to dispose. They said to call my pharmacy of choice and take it there. Must have not been a “controlled substance” as they never contacted me after I dropped them off.

Years later I realized that the daughter was probably trying to kill her mom by withholding her medicine. By then the only surviving person(s) would have been the grandchildren of the mother. I debated whether to call the police but the evidence was long gone and the people involved were dead.

59

While the OP’s actions, were, I agree, messed up and not necessary, they were typical of many people’s reaction to bats, for some reason. People who are not generally cruel to animals are very often hostile to bats in particular. I had a friend who was a hobbyist spelunker; many such people are great advocates for bats, and it’s a real uphill battle, apparently. Bat colonies are frequently vandalized and subject to cruelty, just because.

I’m not offering this as an excuse, just commenting. Bats need friends.

60

In the 70s, and I think going back to the 30s, or so, a lot of places used to give away parts of place settings as premiums. I remember in particular grocery stores doing it. Every time you spent $n you got that week’s piece. It was to try to get you to spend a certain amount in a week to complete the set.

My mother had three complete sets of good dishes, and no need of a cheap, full set from Kroger, or wherever, but if she happened to spend the right amount anyway, she’d get the piece so she had a few plates and things for serving us lunches.

I’ve read books in which movie theaters gave away dishes each week toward the same end-- to get people to come back every week, regardless of the film. People got compulsive about completing the set.

Maybe they made a very large purchase somewhere, like when they had a child getting married, and that happened to be the week that knives were the premium.