Thousands of…RATS!!!
A very large collection of various jams, jellies, and fruit preserves, which I was overwhelmingly warned by Dopers not to eat. We haven’t touched 'em and they’re still sitting in the far upper corner in the kitchen cabinets, which I can’t reach anyway. We’ll leave them for the next tenants 
In a house in Orlando that I bought: pool supplies, a cordless screwdriver, and a bottle of vodka.
What I left the person that bought the house from me: pool supplies, a five gallon bucket of Pratt and Lambert paint, a 12" Quasar color television (circa 1976), and several six packs of microbrewed beer.
A tuba at one place, along with a hexagonal end table that was incredibly heavy for its size.
Nother place, a ton of toenail clippings on the floor in one of the bedrooms, along with several centerfolds. Um.
My latest digs: a cable box that’s about three models out of date, and a bunch of owner’s manuals for appliances this place didn’t come with. Nothing else, thank God.
*A great many plastic tarpaulins, neatly rolled up and deposited beneath the house and left there for many years until mold pretty much fused the rolls into solid cylinders of furry gray dry rot.
*A wall full of ancient rusty razor blades.
*A great many used syringes, with needles, squirreled away in various locations throughout the house.
*A front deck which, while it looked nice, was very badly built.
*About a zillion rolls of Con-Tac paper. The previous Lady Of The House was very, very fond of Con-Tac paper, particularly with mushroom patterns and rooster patterns…
We bought our house from the son of the original owner. In the kitchen were the usual appliances, range, referigator, mangle. Yes, a mangle. To iron sheets and table clothes. It worked and it weighed a ton. We tried to sell it, got laughed at. tried to give it away, got laughed at. Finally found a B&B who needed it.
There was a couch and chair, top of the line furniture… in 1966. It looked brand new. We took that to a charity resale store. The woman who was checking stuff in, loaded it into her car before we even left!
There was a single twin bed with bedding. Hand made dishtowels and a small table cloth, all beautifully embroidered and looking like new. I came home one day and found my husband had used them for paint rags.
In the basement was a chest type freezer with the installation tags still attached dated 1954. We’re still using it. It works great.
The garage was full of hand gardening tools. The mother of the guy we bought it from was a master gardener.
About 6 months after we moved in I was doing laundry and looked up at the basement window I’d looked at for 6 months and noticed an agate heart balanced in the corner of the window. Its slab cut about 1/8th inch thick.
We also found plot maps of the local area and of Idaho.
Some people have all the luck. The only stuff left behind for us was some beat-up resin lawn furniture.
In the basement of my last house I found a shot put, that I tell everyone is a canonball - you’d be surprised how many people believe me!
Also a kettle, at least I think that’s what it’s called. Not the kind you boil water in but the very smooth rock kind. I don’t really know how else to describe it. It’s almost as big as the canonball.
This house had, beneath, wall-to-wall, 45 yr old broadloom, inlaid hardwood floors. Beautiful cherry banding, exquiste design, flawless condition !
The attic held an old iron bed, in pieces on the corner rafters, I almost didn’t see it, it’s like a 3/4 bed.
Right after we moved here, the lady who bought our old house called us to say that we’d forgotten to clean out the top shelf of one of our tall, narrow closets. So I went back over and retrieved a large duffel bag full of battery-operated children’s toys (all of which either barked, clucked, quacked or sang, which is why they got disappeared in the first place), a box of bullets and my wedding album. Oops.
Our new place came with the owner’s manuals for every appliance in the house, and paint , leftover wallpaper and carpet pieces to match every room. Also a very weird end table, a cheapie fibreboard “entertainment unit” shelving thingie, and, in the freezer, six D cell batteries, a bottle of red nail polish and a box of prunes.
We moved into my parent’s house when I was about 10. They left a pinball machine in the basement, and none of us knew how it got there. It was way too big to move in or out.
When we tore the ceiling out of the basement, we found a little stash of porno mags up there. My Mom freaked out. Pretty funny.
I also found a little magnetic earring behind the vent in my room. One of the guys who lived there probably wore it to school every day to trick his friends.
The house we moved into when I was little was full of crazy stuff the previous owners had left. Up in the attic, there was this little door, about 2’ x 2’, that had a padlock on it. The previous owners never mentioned it and never left a key. For years I tortured myself and my parents about what could be in there. Was it a treasure? A dead body? The gateway to hell and/or Narnia? No one knew. Finally one day my dad broke the lock off, and inside was this little crawlspace. It was empty. To this day I can’t figure out why anyone would bother to padlock a completely empty crawlspace.
The entire back of one of the bedroom doors was plastered over with KISS band stickers. They were impossible to remove completely, so my parents switched the door with the one to the laundry room in the basement because I was terrified of the painted faces. In that same basement we found 3 cases of Tastycake Butterscotch Krimpets that had to have been 15 years old. We also found all sorts of junk like broken radios, broken microwaves, car parts, spare lumber, and these sheets of plastic you were supposed to put on your wall to make it look like brick. Then there was the shed in the backyard that was full of very old fertilizer and potting soil, along with rusty gardening tools, 3 broken push mowers, and a gigantic wasp’s nest.
The apartment I had in college was also crazy in this respect. We found two pairs of eyeglasses, one with missing lenses, behind the stove. We found a $10 bill taped inside a heating vent, which was cool. What was not cool were the mysterious brown stains underneath the bedroom carpet. We all tried hard not to think about what might have caused those stains. There was also very old crusted toothaste underneath the edge of the sink, and this utterly disgusting sponge in the bathroom cupboard.
The house I live in now is very old, built in the 1840’s. It was originally a farmhouse, so we’re always finding weird stuff whenever we do some DIY. There were about 7 layers of paint and wallpaper in the upstairs hallway. Down in the basement we found these big jars full of some Mysterious Horrible Shit, which I’m almost positive were once preserves. Those had to be carefully disposed of; I’m pretty sure by that point they constituted a biohazard. Another basement biohazard was the ancient urine-stained mattress we had to burn. Up in the attic we found tons and tons of pairs of old, mildewed pantyhose wrapped around the rafters. But we also found rotting leather horse harnesses, the heavy yoke collars that people put on wagon horses. They probably would have been worth something if they weren’t in such terrible condition. Into the trash with them. Then there were the spoons. We had to put new insulation in the attic and when they pulled out the old stuff, they found about 100 spoons in the wall. Some were almost oxidized into nothing, but some were in good condition which we cleaned and kept.
Outside, when we put the fence in, we dug up bones from what was once a pig, possibly more than one pig. We also found several badly rusted hand-made nails, about 5" long.
One house that we moved into when I was 7 the previous owners left nothing. and I mean nothing - they lifted the carpets, took out electrical fittings (sockets, switches etc), took down the curtain rails, and in more than one room stripped the wallpaper (the others were painted) …
The house my parents currently own had been occupied for 10-15 years by an elderly couple who’d taken great care of the (huge) garden. Sadly the house was rank with damp and mould, one of the en-suites had two carpets (one on top of the other), the bottom one was black with mould and there was a damp patch under it (the shower base was cracked) The shower curtain [in that bathroom] was covered in mould. There were venetian blinds at every window - but they’d been pulled up, when you let them down a tons of dirt, dust, cobwebs and dead insects rained down upon you <shudder>. In the kitchen were two layers of lino with a dank puddle sandwiched between them (the washing machine had been leaking). The fuse box was ancient, full of dust, cobwebs, dead insects, a dead mouse, and water had leaked into it, the wires coming out of it were substandard (the sort of wire you get on fairy lights) and had melted and fused together (a serious fire hazard). Oh and there was a bowl of sugar.
Oh and I forgot to mention - there was a bag of charcoal briquettes in the cubby hole (along with the requisite damp, dust, and dead insects) under the stairs, when used on the fire the whole lot when off like 4th of July fireworks (fortunately there was a fireguard)
In a drawer, there were two pictures from a photo-booth that was two guys in drag. And they were done up very well. If you looked quick, you couldn’t tell they were guys.
We still have it on our fridge.
The previous owners left a lot of junk in the garage: old cans of paint and spackle, general DIY items, jars filled with various small metal objects (screws, nails, etc.), and there is an old, faded pink kite still hanging on the wall, with a picture of a unicorn on it.
We also have a fully functioning darkroom that the daughter of the previous owner made herself; we know this because she left a lot of old pictures and projects in it, including the plan for the making of it. There are various old darkroom items in the cabinet, and an old camera, and the red light still works. We can tell that she only left the pictures she didn’t like; they all have a razor cut through the center and most of them are cut to shreds. And there’s one picture of her climbing out the basement window of what is now our computer room, but we know it was once her bedroom. It’s a little weird…
We kept all of the stuff and never moved any of it. Occasionally I look through it.
This is a cool idea for a thread!
We got a knitting needle, a few strips of metal cord covering (which actually came in handy), an infestation of indian meal moths (not so handy), a tiny wooden table about the size of an ottoman, a roll of toilet paper, about 50 tattered women’s magazines, and a purple, pink and gold shower curtain with saxophones on it.
In our first house we found a naked picture of the previous owner (the wife) under the carpet in the bedroom closet.
I found a bone in the crawlspace of this house. It wasn’t a rat bone either. It was something you’d see on a nice cut of meat or a human spinal cord. I wonder what that smell is in the basement.
After college, I moved into the third floor apartment in a three-family house owned by my father and my aunt. They had grown up in the first floor apartment. Various family members had lived in the other two apartments, but not for a number of years.
While my parents were helping me move in, my father opened the door to a very long and deep space under the eaves. Among other things, he found a mattress and four antique dining room chairs that had belonged to his parents. I used those chairs for the five years I lived there, then returned them to my parents when I moved to NYC.
The basement of that building was filled with things that had belonged to my grandparents: my grandfather’s old machining tools, broken appliances, clothes, food my grandmother had probably put up two decades ago or more.
Basement: Workbench and shelves full of old paint, tile adhesive, assorted cleaning and building supplies, electrical fixtures, and lumber. All of which actually had belonged to the owner before the one we bought the house from, since they had only had the place for a year or so.
Attic: more lumber, and a collection of doors and window screens.
Garage: several dressers, one of which was an exact match for one I’d had as a child and had taken with me when I moved out of my parent’s house.