# 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:** 8
**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 15, 2002, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/141 "2002-07-15T12:28:14Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by NinetyWt \* > \*\*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 > > \*\* [list=1] [li]Ditched to avoid being caught with it by a cop. In some states they’re illegal.[/li][li]Ditched by a parolee to avoid being accused of “possessing a weapon” during a pullover. Or by somebody carrying drugs, for the same reason. Or by some black guy, who -_maybe correctly_- figures he’s being “profiled” by the cop whose pulling him over.[/li][/list=1] Not strange at all. But sad. ☹ ---
**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, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/142 "2002-07-15T16:50:41Z")
uhhhhh… \ That’s a pretty good stretch of the imagination. Sounds like you been watchin’ too much tee wee there, chief. And … the wheel? ---
**Author:** ![EmbarrassingDad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/embarrassingdad/32/5441_2.png) [@EmbarrassingDad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EmbarrassingDad)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/143 "2002-07-15T19:16:54Z")
Ten years ago, my cousin and I found a really weird rock in the woods. It was about 15 inches and long shaped like an irregular watermelon. It was green/blue semi-translucent and looked like it had been melted. We spent a while trying to break it by throwing down hard onto other rocks and the street and such, but alas it wouldn’t break. It was heavy like glass but had kind of a plastic or polyurethane texture. We ended up heaving it at a road sign as we drove the road. Now I often wonder if it could have been a meteorite and what it might have been worth 😕 Fifteen years ago, my dad found a South African Krugerand (big ass gold coin) in a gold pendant, on a thick 24" gold chain, in a parking lot. He ended up selling it at a pawn shop and got well over a thousand dollars for it. ---
**Author:** ![Wonko\_The\_Sane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/258eb7/32.png) [@Wonko\_The\_Sane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wonko_The_Sane)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/144 "2002-07-15T20:06:19Z")
1. A list of all of the cars that Sculley and Mulder drove. Model, Make, and license plate were listed, as well as the phone numbers they dialed (all had real area codes, just had the usual 555 in them.) I found that in my new apartment’s attic. Weird people lived there I hear. 2. A mouse nest made from a car manual and sound insulation in the glovebox of a car I bought for a dollar. Small, flat dessicated mice were scattered throughout the car. 3. Grafitti that stated “Only idiots write grafitti”. Found inside the Paulinskill viaduct in Northwest NJ. Got a great pic of it too. ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2002, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/145 "2002-07-15T23:39:11Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tetsusaru \* > \*\*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. \*\* I’m sorry, but I have to ask (And I’m not doubting what you found, tetsusaru)…why did they need an electron microscope in a mental hospital? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by The Jabberwock \* > \*\*Also, my friends found what looked like a much-overgrown parking lot, with no buildings nearby, with a sign reading “Mental Hospital Parking.” It makes one wonder. \*\* It must have been “Hookhand’s” training camp. 😃 Ranchoth ---
**Author:** ![phreak107](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@phreak107](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phreak107)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2003, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/146 "2003-01-14T07:22:01Z")
Found: A big-ass frog in my backyard. Sitting under a lemon tree two feet away from my pool. I live in the middle of suburbia in the San Fernando Valley, miles away from any stream, river or other amphibious hideouts. It looked like it was about to die. Just kept hopping around sadly. A polariod of a friend of mine on the ground as I walking through a parking lot and talking shit about her. This big weird purple thing that looked like a cut off lizard tail but squirmed like a worm. I reburied it in the flowerbed I found it in. ---
**Author:** ![NurseCarmen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5daacb/32.png) [@NurseCarmen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NurseCarmen)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2003, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/147 "2003-01-14T18:20:57Z")
Count me among the dead finders. I found one in the mighty Mississippi. He had been missing 4 months. A plastic Richard Nixon shower head. A fully intact squirrel skeleton. When I travel to foreign lands, if I have spare coins leftover (you can’t exchange coins) I carry them with me and put them in coin returns when I’m home. A Life Sized Rudy Boschwitz (Former Senior Senator from the great state of Minnesota) mannequin. Next to a dumpster in an alley behind my girlfriends apartment. ---
**Author:** ![Legomancer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/779978/32.png) [@Legomancer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Legomancer)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2003, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/148 "2003-01-14T18:39:05Z")
You might enjoy this site: [http://www.foundmagazine.com/](http://www.foundmagazine.com/) ---
**Author:** ![raz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/9f8e36/32.png) [@raz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raz)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2003, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/149 "2003-01-14T18:58:40Z")
Freshman year on a field trip to Saint Paul wildlife refuge, we found a condom with a duck head in it tied shut with a 3-foot piece of string. We hit people with it. ---
**Author:** ![MidnightRadio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@MidnightRadio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MidnightRadio)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/150 "2003-08-04T12:20:15Z")
When I was in college, my friends and I were browsing a secondhand shop in Miami, Oklahoma, and I found (and bought) what I now call my pursephone. It looks like it was made in the Seventies, maybe the late Sixties. It has a flap-over top and on the front of it, there’s a phone dial with the buttons arranged in a circle, as if the manufacturers were trying to pretend it was a rotary dial. Under the flap, there’s a phone cord that you can plug into a phone jack. The handle is really a phone receiver which is attached to the pursephone with a velcro strap which you can unfasten to release the receiver. As I said, the phone isn’t a real rotary dial, it’s got buttons, but it’s a pulse dialing phone, not a touch tone phone. I’m so awful at describing this thing. I wish I had a picture of it to post. It’s weird – the guy at the register at the shop where I bought it said that it was one of two they had in stock. I’ve always wondered: why would anyone need a purse (I thought it was a briefcase when I bought it) that doubles as a phone? I mean, if you’re a Seventies business woman on the go (or possibly a man, if it really was a briefcase) and you need to make a phone call, isn’t it pretty likely that any phone jack you find to plug the pursephone into is already going to have a phone plugged into it? All I can think is that it’s some sort of novelty item, but even for a novelty item, it’s just so _bizarre_. Any thoughts on this? Does anyone reading this know what I’m talking about? If so, maybe you could describe it a little better. Or better yet, is there anyone out there who _owns_ one of these things? ---
**Author:** ![flapcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@flapcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flapcats)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/151 "2003-08-04T13:26:53Z")
Legend has it that the purse-phone was so beautiful that the God of the underworld fell in love with it and spirited it down to Hades. The purse-phone is a somewhat melancholy Goddess, yearning to be free of the underworld, but doomed to spend half the year there. When it does escape, the world comes alive again. ---
**Author:** ![Uzi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/91b2a8/32.png) [@Uzi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uzi)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/152 "2003-08-04T13:35:32Z")
On the 47th floor of the office building where I worked in Calgary, I walked into the washroom and found strewn across the sink and floor what looked to be chicken feathers and bunched up cat fur!😕 ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/153 "2003-08-04T13:55:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by NurseCarmen \* > \*\*A plastic Richard Nixon shower head. > > \*\* \. I did find $100 bill once. And a 1940 dime. ---
**Author:** ![Waverly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/57b2e6/32.png) [@Waverly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Waverly)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/154 "2003-08-04T14:43:59Z")
I don’t think my finds will win any prizes, but: - A full goat skeleton ¾ buried in the sand. The tide must have helped uncover it, but I’ve no idea what it was doing buried on the shoreline. - A brown paper bag filled with Polaroids of a naked woman. This must be more common than I thought. What _isn’t_ common is the picture of her trying to shove a twinki up her ass. - Assorted streakers, flashers, and one woman who broke into my [unlocked] apartments and crawled naked into my bed Goldilocks style. - Entrails. No idea what they came from, but they looked fresh. Found in the middle of a relatively ordinary public park. ---
**Author:** ![Mirror\_Image\_egamI\_rorriM](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e56c9b/32.png) [@Mirror\_Image\_egamI\_rorriM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mirror_Image_egamI_rorriM)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/155 "2003-08-04T21:16:47Z")
My mom once found a diamond ring in our front yard while planting sunflowers. She called the people who lived here before us, but it wasn’t theirs’. We still have it around here, somewhere. The diamond is a pretty nice one, about a carat, but the gold band is really tiny. It only fits on my pinky finger, and I have very small hands. Once I came across a lit roach just lying on the floor in the middle of the hall at school. I stepped on it and left it there. My friends and I were once just sitting around in English class, talking, when an unopened condom came flying through the air and landed right on the floor in the middle of us. No one else in the class was looking at us or anything, and there was no one in the direction from which it came. One of my friends picked it up and put it in his pocket. ---
**Author:** ![Orange\_Skinner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3be4f8/32.png) [@Orange\_Skinner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Orange_Skinner)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/156 "2003-08-04T22:15:02Z")
The strangest thing I’ve ever found was this past winter. **Mudshark** and I were hunting for old bottles (it’s a hobby) at this trash heap back in the woods, and on the way out, in a tractor turn around, we saw what looked like a small patch of fur or feathers. We didn’t really think anything of it. But then there was a second pile, and a third. Finally, right at the end of the path, where the tracktor enterance meets the road, there was a large wad of the milky-yellow fur, maybe a square foot, an inch or so thick, half frozen. There were maybe _five_ paws sticking up out of it a different angles. There was no discernable head, bones, or other body parts. We didn’t pick at it or anything, but we stood there for some time trying to figure out what in the hell it was. Horribly creepy. ---
**Author:** ![Trigonal\_Planar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/0ea827/32.png) [@Trigonal\_Planar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trigonal_Planar)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2003, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/157 "2003-08-04T23:06:57Z")
I found a moist towelette from 1959. I made a page about it: [http://www.geocities.com/transactoid/osr.html](http://www.geocities.com/transactoid/osr.html) ---
**Author:** ![Hyperelastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Hyperelastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hyperelastic)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2003, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/158 "2003-08-05T00:22:57Z")
> [@](#): > > \*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. \*\* He was probably hiding behind a tree whipping it while he watched your reactions. ---
**Author:** ![Hyperelastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Hyperelastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hyperelastic)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2003, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/159 "2003-08-05T00:24:45Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Ruffian \* > \*\*I’m not sure how strange this is, but about 12 years ago I was walking out of my parents’ house to get the mail. On the ground by the mailbox was a large (but lightly colored) amethyst. I watched the neighborhood for postings of a lost gemstone and never saw them. > > Years later I took it to a jewelry store to have it appraised. It was, indeed, amethyst, but the light coloring made it fairly inexpensive. It’s also so large that it has no practical use. It’s cut like it would be for a ring, but I can’t imagine anyone where a 3/4" x 1/2" stone on a finger! > > I’ve kept it around ever since. Not quite sure what to do with it–um, anyone have ideas? \*\* Maybe you could have cut into three pieces and made into a ring and a pair of earrings. Would a matching ring and earrings be considered fashionable? ---
**Author:** ![Soup\_Nazi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ad7895/32.png) [@Soup\_Nazi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Soup_Nazi)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2003, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293/160 "2003-08-05T00:38:05Z")
While helping my uncle remodel his house, we found a novelty token for a free beer at a local bar called Aggie’s. What made it cool was that it was dated during the 1950s. One day I was filling my truck’s gas tank and noticed what looked like shredded paper in the bed. It turned out to be a torn up picture. I assembled the pieces to discover it was a picture of a girl with her back to the camera and short blue shorts that said “Varsity” on them. No idea who the girl was or where the pic came from. But by far the funniest/strangest was when I stayed at a large college for a high school honors program. It was during the summer, so there were no regular students there, so we got to stay in the dorms. One of the guys down the hall had a top bunk bed and was poking around in the ceiling tiles and found a very large, peach colored dildo. It was a big veiny one, complete with simulated scrotum. Being the bunch of immature high schoolers we were, we threw it up and down the hall and wiped it on each other’s faces. Ah, the memories… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-strangest-thing-youve-ever-found/115293.md?page=9)