Not your everyday washer, dryer, refrigerator, and tools in the shed. I’m talking about odd, unsettling, perhaps scary items left in the house – purposely or not – when you took possession of the joint.
We got an unopened can of Tropicana concentrated orange juice, circa 1975, tucked behind a utility sink. Thought it might be one of those safes made to resemble, well, a concentrated orange juice can. (I have the can o’ beans version.) Alas.
A German knife in a sheath - there’s an eagle head on the handle. I need to get it appraised. I’ve had it over 20 years.
Our last house had a ton of treasures in the basement. Lots of old books, some nice framed pictures. Lots of baby stuff.
The family that owned the house couldn’t move everything with them so they left it.
I moved a week and a half ago. After finally unpacking all my stuff, I put the boxes in the attic.
I found stacks upon stacks of old books and magazines covered in decades worth of dust. One is an old family bible dated 1864. There are old schoolbooks, National Geographics from 1961 to 1978, Times from 1949 to 1970, and old old newspapers. Also, I found an old teakettle, an old handmade broom, and an old wicker doll pram.
I’ll be spending plenty of time sorting out that attic this summer…
I’ve gotten a whole lot of stuff over the years …
The first apartment I ever rented all by myself without any parental financial assistance came complete with roach-infested furniture left behind by the evicted previous tenant. It also came with several homemade crack pipes and nocturnal visits from men who didn’t believe that the former occupant no longer lived there.
In subsequent apartments, I’ve found …
-A haunted chandelier in the basement. (Weird story available on request.)
-A gray tabby kitten stuck in the back of the stove. No, I have no idea how she got there. And you’re damn right I kept her! 
-A bowling ball with a beautifully airbrushed ninja on it. And no finger-holes.
-A complete tool kit, the exact duplicate of the one I’d bought the day before I moved in. mutter
The previous owner of my house lefts tons of junk. Lots of scrap lumber, some of it uncut 2X4 studs. An almost complete tail wing made of balsa wood for an RC airplane as well as enough balsa to finish the job and the blueprints. An old bathtup in the garage attic. A group of six lockers like the kind in a locker room. In the attic of the house I found four cane fishing poles and a huge stack of the plastic pots that annuals such as petunias come in.
throws down a request for you to place your weird story on
Seconds request for weird story
Nothing sinister, I’m afraid - in fact, quite the opposite.
The people before us skipped out on their rent and other debt obligations. When they left, their cat was outside, and they took off without him. He’d been alone for more than a month when we moved in. When he saw that there were people home, he started coming to the door wanting to be let in. Finally, a neighbor told us about him, so we took him in and got him fixed, and called him Simon. As I’ve said elsewhere, he has quite happily adopted us and our other two cats.
When we moved in the last people left a ton of junk in the garage attic. And a mess of junk in the crawlspace. In the attic was (among other things) a fishtank with a book on raising hamsters in it, a bix of ugly clothes, two bowling balls, a doll house, a 40 year old Coleman stove (that now works), a Coleman stove fueltank full of Coleman fuel (in the very hot garage attic!), a box of old 33 1/3 record albums, and an onion box that looks like a woodshop project that got a C- if the shop teacher was drunk and feeling generous. In the crawlspace there was a rusty twin bed frame and a wooden toybox full of dolls and stuffed animals.
We called them and left a message if they wanted their junk back. They never got back to us.
My parents found a still in their attic after they bought their house. Always wondered if it worked, but we never tried it out. It appeared to have been there for many years, and we never figured out how it got there, because the attic door was less than 3’ X 2’, and this still was much larger than that. Someone must have built the attic walls right around it.
I found a pitchfork in a closet when I moved in. It’s probably as old as the house, and maybe it was useful 100 years ago, but it freaked me out. I kept it, though. I have it leaning against a hallway wall, at the moment.
A 1950s International Harvester brand refrigerator (which still works), lots of scrap lumber and steel, an ancient corn planter, an ancient wheat drill planter, and several jugs of long since banned agricultural pesticides.
Nose-hair clippers - worse, what appears to be gold-plated nose hair clippers.
We moved into our first house in March. It is over 100 years old and the folks living there before us were there for 46 years or so. There are a couple weird floor vents that don’t seem to be hooked up to anything. Mr. Toes took the vent cover off of one and discovered some old love letters. The handwriting was horrible and they were very hard to read, but still really neat!
An artificial leg…really.
My very first apartment ($75 a month rent <sigh>), was the top floor of an elderly woman’s home. The leg belonged to her younger son.
I left it there when I moved as it seemed to go with the house…
Oh - I’ve got another one, tho not exactly a house story.
Shortly after we married, my husband and I bought an old wooden sailboat from a disabled vet. John lived aboard for a while, single-handedly sailing, unstopped by the prostetic leg. No he wasn’t a sailor with a pegleg exactly - just a regular fake leg below one knee.
Anyway, about a year or so after we bought it, we were preparing to move aboard ourselves. In an effort to maximize storage space, we started emptying all the lockers. In the large locker under the forward berth, we found a leg. :eek:
We called John and told him that we’d found it. His reply “Ah, just keep it. It’s my dancin’ leg but it doesn’t fit right!” 
A couple of years later, we found a use for it. I made my husband a shark costume for Halloween. He got some styrofoam and fashioned a “surfboard” with a huge bite taken out of it. He ran a strap from the board to the ankle of the leg. Then we filled the stump cavity with batting and painted it bright red. We even dripped red paint down the leg. He carried the props while in the shart suit.
He won 4 movie tickets in that outfit! We still have the leg, too.
A badly built bookshelf which we still use, various dishes and utensils, teabags and a used :eek: plunger.
I bought my grandparents house, so, basically, two sets of everything.
That was almost 3 years ago. We’re still going through the basement getting rid of and/or selling things. I guess you really do accumulate a lot of stuff in 50 years…
Well, rats, GraphicsGal - you stole my thunder!! 