Upside down, in a stream… a 1908 PA License Plate. (I swear to God!)
About 12 years ago, I was out on the North Shore of Long Island. It was late June, and just beastly hot. It was even hotter in the strawberry patches. ( Any of you who have done Pick Yourself, know what I’m talking about. The plants are incredibly hot ).
I have my baby son on my back. He’s about 13 months old, and is asleep in the Gerry backpack. I’m picking away, and as I turn a few leaves aside in search of the pluperfect berry, I see laying on the dirt… a snub-nosed .44 revolver.
Without missing a beat, I picked it up and dropped it into my berry basked and walked over to the owner of the fields. I said, "I found something. If someone comes looking, I want you to give me the high sign, I want to look them over and talk to them, before I hand it back. It may be an illegal weapon ".
The guy wanted me to give it to him, but I refused, suggesting he call the State Police instead. He got grumpy, and waited it out. About 15 minutes later, the owner approached the field man, and was gesturing in a way that just told me it was him. I put the weapon in my car, locked it, and went to talk to the guy.
" So, you’ve lost something? I found something. Whadja lose?"
Sheepish look.
" I lost a gun"
" You a cop?"
"No. "
" You have a license to carry? "
" Yep, here you go ".
He was a P.I., and had the permit to carry. He’d had it stuffed into one of those hip holsters, the slender low profile ones and it had fallen out. Loaded.
He was SO scared that someone would have been hurt, he unloaded it in front of me, and carried it and the shells to his trunk, where he locked them.
I hate guns. I almost threw up, holding a loaded gun a foot from my body, with my son on my back. Ech.
Cartooniverse
Or, when Orange Skinner and I founda pair of underwear in a cattle stall in a barn.
One-half of a human brain.
On the side of the highway, right after a horrific accident.
Okay that’s a good one. 
MidnightRadio-What’s the name of the secondhand store? My best friend goes to school in Miami, OK and I used to work there.
The strangest thing I ever found? My now ex-husband!
He is the strangest person I know!
There was the time I found my older brother hitch hiking on the freeway. He’d been *missing for almost three years.
*Missing in this case meaning that he was of age and tended to just take off and not keep in touch. He has some mental illnesses and chooses to wander instead of stay where he has support and people remind him to take his meds and ask him to bathe regularly.
When I was 13, I was digging in our back yard (in Ohio), and unearthed an old tombstone, in perfect condition. It was a 10-year-old boy who died in 1809. We did some research at the Historical Society, and there were records of his whole family who were on their way to California when he died. But I have no idea whether he was actually buried where I found the stone, or if someone brought it there from somewhere else.
Most 13 year old boys I know would have kept on digging!
The field behind my house yielded many strange things in the years that we’ve lived here.
My friends and I were once wandering out on the back road late at night. We found a bunch of cryptic letters scratched into the ground. The only sensical arrangement of them were “Help Old Craft,” which was weird, as we were all getting into witchcraft at the time.
We also, independently of each other, found pieces of brownish red pottery, each shard about hand-sized. The curvature is such that these must have been from something fairly large, and they were spread out over at least half a mile. There is a glaze on them and they are about 3/4 of an inch thick. The last one I ever found had “Vincent” carved in it. My personal theory is that somebody created a golem. 
I also once found a pair of seagull’s wings. No blood, no body, just… the wings. Lying there on the rocks.
Now there are houses going up back there and the weird vibes have stopped.
Some of the strange things I’ve found…
A couple years back, I opened a ceiling panel to get at some wiring. A telephone punchdown tool fell out and hit me. Always in need of good tools, and in accordance with my “Drop a tool on me, and I’m keeping it!” policy, I kept it.
In one of my group’s spare cubes, someone stashed some storage cases full of floppy discs containing files and applications for Mac, dating back to the mid-80’s. The only known Mac computers in this company are half a dozen or so in the marketing/graphics group, and they’re not even in this city. I called the computer recyclers and asked if they wanted about 1,000 floppies. They did.
Last week, I found a present from a nut-case living in my complex who’s been dubbed the “Food Bandit” by management. On a second-floor landing, this character had filled a Burger King soda cup with corn and tipped it over so the cup’s on its side and corn has spilled out of it. Another day, they’d taken a potato and sliced it in half, then placed the halves on either side of the clear plastic dome that a supermarket roast chicken came in. The chicken had been placed on the stairs in another stairwell with some radishes next to it. Everything’s been so carefully arranged, it’s quite scary.
Cruktar, the name of the secondhand store was Grandma’s Attic. Do you know it? Pretty neat place.
I went to NEO, to (I’m assuming that’s where your friend goes). I was there from fall of 1995 though spring of 1997.
This two-page type-written letter was put the mail-slot of a company I used to work for. I think it’s special.
I found a liquid mouse in my socks & undies drawer when I came home from college last summer. Had to throw out the entire drawer and build a new one to fit the dresser - the stench of death was in the very wood.
Bump up the dead count, here’s another:
Second collegiate spring break in a row with friends and my roommate at his home in Prior, OK. We decided to go looking for arrowheads in the lake that used to be a river. Along the banks I found a bowl. I called the others over and we started to unearth what was not a bowl but instead the back of a skull and then the rib cage. IIRC, Oklahoma State University had done an archaeological dig there a year prior and found a whole tribe that had died there and the theory was suicide off of a cliff. We went back home before we found out more or OSU came back out.
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A pair of Sears binoculars, found underneath the seat of the Passat shortly after I bought it…
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A neat stack of gay porn magazines. I was 15 at the time, and the reaction among my friends and I when we found the stash at a local park was “ewwwwww.” Being teenagers, we fled the area ASAP.
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A bottle of Stoli, hidden way pack in a hard-to-reach part of a kitchen cabinet, shortly after I bought my house in Orlando. The previous homeowner had teenage daughters, so I suspect they might have been the source.
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Boxes and boxes and boxes of drug samples and pharmaceutical company schwag. Found it a few doors down, garbage picking when I was 10 or 11.
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A turtle in my backyard, when I was about 10 or 11. A backyard in a densely populated Buffalo neighborhood.
boy, i’d almost forgotten i once found a diamond ring
… while spreading sawdust in my horse’s stall.
it was stuck on the (then-clean) tines of the pitchfork.
just a teeny little stone, more like one of those “promise” rings. (ooo, now weird vibe kicks in. the horse i kept in that stall was named Bright Promise.) :eek:
no one ever claimed it when i asked if someone lost a ring, nor any sign posted about losing one around the barns. it could have come in with the sawdust, for all i know.
eventually traded it to an antiques dealer for a nice (fake) pearl hatpin.
One night, I was poking around the basement/storage/laundry area of my apartment building, looking for some shirts and jeans that had seemingly disappeared in the wash.
I found my laundry on the back of an extremely messy, possibly alcoholic homeless man who had taken up residence in a disused storage locker.
I moved out of that building not long after.
I found a message in a bottle on a beach near St. Michael’s, Maryland about twenty years ago.
Inside was a message written in French that asked the finder of the bottle to write to a man who gave his name and his address in France.
My mother saved the message for me. I learned French in high school, and have meant to write back to the man, but I never have. I sort of figure that he’s probably not there anymore.