# What is the strangest thing you've ever found? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 21, 2002, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293 "2002-06-21T16:42:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![Daoloth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/82dd89/32.png) [@Daoloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daoloth)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/121 "2002-06-30T07:03:53Z")
They’re called “geodes,” I believe. I have one somewhere; it’s something of an heirloom. ---
**Author:** ![Kipper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Kipper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kipper)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 8:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/122 "2002-06-30T08:24:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Dijon Warlock \* > \*\*A small wrench-looking device, found in my grandpa’s attic. I say “wrench-looking”, because one end has a(n) hexagonal ring on it, and the other end is long and rounded along all the edges like a handle. Still, there are a few parts on it that make no sense: running the length of the outside of one of the sides of the hexagon is a ridge, and on the handle just below the ring is a small raised rectangular area with a small peak at each end. The entire thing is about three inches long, and looks like it might fit about a 3/4" hexagonal nut. What the other parts are for and what the thing itself is, I have no idea. \*\* Hmmm… sounds like it could be a Torque Wrench, I use one for adjusting the tension on the king screws on my rifle. ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/123 "2002-06-30T15:29:54Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by delphica \* > \*\*An audio cassette tape with a woman making a noise on it – very weird, it was very faint in the background, and sounded like she was crying, or having an asthma attack. If I had to guess, I would say it sounded like a tape that someone put in a tape player and accidentally hit “record” instead of “play” and thus recorded whatever noise was going on in the room. At first it was funny, because the sighing noises sounded a little like porn, and we thought it was going to be a performance art sort of tape, but it wasn’t really like that. It was more depressing, because after a while, it was clear that it was more of a distressed, wheezing sound than anything else. It went on for the entire 45 minutes of the tape on one side (the other side was blank), but it was strange because the noise was constant – it never got louder, or softer, or less frequent, or anything that would identify it as anything in particular. > > I found it in MY APARTMENT, when my roommate and I were having one of those project nights, going through a huge carton of mostly unlabeled cassette tapes and sorting them out. It was right after college, and we had tons of tapes that probably really belonged to other people in the dorm. > > We became strangely fixated on this, and made all of our guests listen to it, hoping that someone would identify one of the background noises on the tape so we could figure out where it came from, but it remained a mystery. \*\* \*I hear dead people . . . \* I once got a can of Dr. Pepper from a vending machine that had a bunch of promotional stuff for a local water festival . . . dated five years before. ---
**Author:** ![Aceospades](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/848f3c/32.png) [@Aceospades](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aceospades)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/124 "2002-06-30T17:21:16Z")
I found a trail of blood. Back when I turned 21 my friends took me to AC so that I could blow $150 on blackjack and get drunk with the free drinks. I sit down at the table and about 5 minutes later I get up to leave. It was still early (11:00pm) and my friend said that he’d lend me $50 if we go to another casino. We head off down the street when I noticed a splotch of red stuff on the ground. I just knew it was blood and my friend, at the time a 3rd year med student, thought it was blood also. The splotch had a brother about 3 feet up. Then we saw another and another and another. This stuff was fresh (not turning brown or congealing at all). Like I said it was early and there were plenty of people out. We followed the trail for an amazing 4 blocks! all the wile looking ahead for a dark figure stumbling or stagering around from a gun or knife womb. The trail finally led off across the street and we thought it a good idea to just keep going on our side. It was quite wearied and something I’ll never forget. I always wondered how much blood this guy lost. Figure a quarter size sploch every 2 to 3 feet for 4 city blocks. ---
**Author:** ![Qwertyasdfg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/ecc23a/32.png) [@Qwertyasdfg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qwertyasdfg)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/125 "2002-06-30T18:13:17Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by evilhanz \* > \*\*When I was about 7 years old, I sneezed up a piece of metal. I think it was an earring backing or possibly shrapnel from my tour in 'Nam. > \*\* That reminds me of a joke. A woman pregnant with twins (a male and a female) is walking down the street when she’s shot twice in the stomach. At the hospital, she lives and the doctor says that the babies are both fine. Fifteen years later the children are both fine. One day, the female twin says “Mom, something weird just happened: I peed a bullet!” Then the male twin walks in and says “Mom something weird just happened!” His sister says, “Did you pee a bullet too?” He says, “No, I was jerking off and I shot the dog.” ---
**Author:** ![Daoloth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/82dd89/32.png) [@Daoloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daoloth)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/126 "2002-06-30T18:25:16Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Doghouse Reilly \* > \*\* > > I once got a can of Dr. Pepper from a vending machine that had a bunch of promotional stuff for a local water festival . . . dated five years before. \*\* Was it for Schlitterbahn, by any chance? ---
**Author:** ![Stupendous\_man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a8b319/32.png) [@Stupendous\_man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stupendous_man)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2002, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/127 "2002-06-30T18:28:34Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Lady Venom \* > \*\* > > Scott, > > I live in Ottawa, have my whole life, and in front of the Rideau Centre is where I found “The Manual” :eek: > > Wonder what’s going on down in the market late at night. > > Now I’m scared 😃 \*\* Given the sorts that hang around outside the Rideau Centre, nothing could be found there that would surprise me… ---
**Author:** ![anewkindofpower](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a9adbd/32.png) [@anewkindofpower](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anewkindofpower)\ **Post date:** [July 1, 2002, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/128 "2002-07-01T00:49:13Z")
Scranton, PA. Posted to a stop sign in front of a high school. An 11x18 piece of paper, with the following drawn/written upon it in fairly neat block letters: RETARD MENTAEL MY WHOLE BODY [a large drawing of a UFO/stealth bomber/some sort of non-standard aircraft] THE SHIP OF BLACK SPACES Possibly even weirder is the fact that we had this thing hanging on our college apartment’s wall for a good year or two, and then it just plain disappeared one day. Any guesses? I also found several other written pieces of psychosis earlier this year in Miami Beach. There’s a homeless woman named Mrs. Maupin (we know this because she signs her works and also wears a “Hello My Name Is” nametag) that lives next door to a dive bar we frequented on our trip. She authors similar but much more detailed paranoid rants, posting them on a stop sign as well. One of them involved implicating “the trasure (sic) dept” in some sort of conspiracy with the local police and several military branches. Every one began with the date – always off by two or three days, and always with 20002 instead of 2002. I still have those, but they’re a bit long, and some of the effect is lost when you can’t see the insane chickenscratch handwriting and five different colors of marker. ---
**Author:** ![Pink\_Pussycat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Pink\_Pussycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pink_Pussycat)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/129 "2002-07-05T04:33:01Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Athena \* > \*\*A polaroid of a man’s hairy butt, up in the air, with a dildo stuck in it. Me and a friend found it on the side of the road. \*\* Similarly, I found a polaroid of a man’s fully erect nether-regions on a sidewalk when I was taking a walk. I threw it down FAST since I was sure that somewhere inside, someone was watching me and laughing their ass off. I can’t think of anything else that I’VE found but I once had a great dog who brought me a jean jacket that fit me perfectly, a set of antlers and an antique Mickey Mouse doll. The little scamp. -pinky ---
**Author:** ![Pink\_Pussycat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Pink\_Pussycat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pink_Pussycat)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/130 "2002-07-05T04:49:49Z")
Oops, I lied. When I was about 10-years-old, me and a neighbor-girl found a piece of metal sticking up out of the ground in her backyard. We dug around it and down until we found a jar full of half-dollars. The “metal-piece” sticking out of the ground was a license plate. -pinky ---
**Author:** ![Jessity](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c67d28/32.png) [@Jessity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jessity)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/131 "2002-07-05T05:16:50Z")
I found a gold and amethyst ring in the soy bean field behind my house when I was a kid. The ring itself wasn’t strange, but the fact that was in a soy bean field always made me wonder how it got there. ---
**Author:** ![tetsusaru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f14d63/32.png) [@tetsusaru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tetsusaru)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/132 "2002-07-05T14:31:12Z")
Pah! When it comes to finding stuff, you guys are just dabblers. I found an entire electron microscope, in pristine condition - one of those huge fuckers from the 60`s, that takes up an entire room - inside a boarded up wing of a derelict mental hospital in the middle of nowhere. ---
**Author:** ![Ol\_Gaffer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Ol\_Gaffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ol_Gaffer)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/133 "2002-07-05T19:54:17Z")
When I was a kid we lived across the street from the local high school. On one occassion my brother and I found a polaroid of a middle-aged guy masturbating…in a dress with full make-up and heels. On another occassion we found a manual to a penis pump. The weird thing being that we associated these things with the high school and were a little nervous about riding our bikes there on the weekend! I currently have to work in some really remote locations and have started collecting weird stuff I come across: a license plate with current registration, a two-foot bong, lots of old construction/timber harvesting stuff, a stash of about 20 gay (male) pornographic magazines from the '70s, and a tombstone near an old homestead…and the person had died exactly 100 years before I was born. ---
**Author:** ![sidle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee59a6/32.png) [@sidle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sidle)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2002, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/134 "2002-07-05T20:51:24Z")
When my grandmother died, we were cleaning out her home and found a delicate, pink, satin rosebud studded lady’s bedroom slipper with a PISTOL inside of it. Still have no earthly where she got it. Once, digging in my front yard in Jacksonville, I found this old-timey, institutional looking rudimentary metal untensil with a fork on one end and a spoon on the other. Still no idea on that one, either… ---
**Author:** ![flapcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@flapcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flapcats)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2002, 10:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/135 "2002-07-14T10:56:33Z")
It could be a runcible spoon. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2002, 11:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/136 "2002-07-14T11:49:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by flapcats \* > \*\*It could be a runcible spoon. \*\*_underlining by **Bosda** _ OK. I’ll bite. Whatzit? 😕 ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2002, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/137 "2002-07-14T18:09:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor \* > \*\* > > OK. I’ll bite. > > Whatzit? 😕 \*\* [Runcible Spoon](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a961108a.html) ---
**Author:** ![NinetyWt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/cc9497/32.png) [@NinetyWt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NinetyWt)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/138 "2002-07-15T04:06:47Z")
Maybe not odd, things, but things found in odd places: 1. A radar detector, in the kudzu beneath a bridge in the Delta 2. A gerber folding knife in the middle of an I-55 overpass Something someone else will find: I’ll never forget the look on my first husbands’ face when I told him I’d sold the trailer we used to live in. He said, “You know I hid all them x rated movies behind the bathroom cabinet!!!” :smack: I used to work for the city here, in the Public Works Department. The water crew was trying to close a valve on one of the bigger water lines, but something was keeping it from opening. They cut the valve out to find a wheel lodged beneath it. It was a small wheel, kind of like what you would find on an industrial dolly. It was almost as large in diameter as the water line. The superintendent told me that he had found many things in the water lines over the years; pop cans, bricks, even a bird skeleton once (ew). My first husband and I were found an old house place out in the woods one time. There was a little graveyard, with headstones for the man and wife; they had died on the same day in the 1800’s. Our nephew said “golly !! Reckon they died in a car wreck ??” 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Ripple](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b2d939/32.png) [@Ripple](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ripple)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/139 "2002-07-15T05:41:24Z")
I bought a 1967 Cadillac and found a pretty nice gold watch inbetween the cushions of the back seat. I think it’s sitting in a drawer somewhere, Hmmm, maybe I’ll go dig it out. ---
**Author:** ![misstee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/958977/32.png) [@misstee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/misstee)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/140 "2002-07-15T06:16:42Z")
while remodeling our house, we found three layers of newspaper between the linoleum and the original hardwood floors-- cheap insulation i guess– also we found a pack of cigarettes in one of the wall ( unopened, camels, i believe ) in another wall we found various bank documents – from the 1930’s and finally, we found some pot in a used car that we had purchased 6 months before. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293.md?page=6) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293.md?page=8)