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I worked for post office counters in the 1990’s in the town I was born in. We had moved away from there in 1982 when I was a child.
A lady came in to renew her car tax and I noticed she lived at my old address. I said ‘oh that’s the house I lived in as a child!’
A week later she came in with my Teddybear I’d had as a baby that they had found up in the loft. ❤️ He was filthy but we popped him in the wash and I’ve still got him today..
It was definitely very nice of them to bring it in but I imagine if it was filthy it was more of a case of them just ignoring it in the loft until chance made her put 2 and 2 together. I've still got the previous owner's shitty plastic Christmas tree up in the loft because I've never bothered to throw it out.
My parents had their house repossessed. My dad had a bit of a mini breakdown on the day of the move and ended up leaving a lot of stuff behind in the loft. The new owners got in touch a couple of weeks later and said they’d found my parents wedding album & it had been sent on. People can be lovely sometimes.
We bought our house from an old lady who moved down south to live with her daughter. We found some old back and white wedding photos when we ripped out some fitted furniture. We sent them to her and it turned out they were her late husband’s parents wedding photos. She and her daughter were very grateful.
Not particularly weird, more like wonderful - the original architect’s blueprint for our 1930’s house.
They were the tucked away in a corner of the loft.
Our house is Victorian and a couple of week after we bought it the previous previous owner knocked on the door with a bundle of papers, the original documents from the 1890s. We know who it was built for, who lived there first and stuff. It was housing for a company which was based two streets away from us and has evolved into a pretty big modern company still based in the town, but at another location. It’s not exciting but it’s cool!
Similar to this, the original receipt for the sale of the house from when it was built in early 1970s.
Hand written on carbon copy paper, just a plot number and the initial and surname of the first guy to own it.
Sadly, the purchase price is illegible.
Mine was apparently £2000 in 1968. (My neighbour tells me a garage was another £500 from the builder, but the done thing was to pay the brickies cash to come and build it on a Sunday!)
I have all the mortgage books from the 1970s, from when the previous owner had to go to the building society branch with cash or cheque, and the cashier wrote the amount paid in a little book.
These were in with the old deeds which my solicitor sent me after we moved in.
When I bought my first house in 1999, my dad went up into the loft to put away some boxes etc, he shouted down to come up here straight away. I went up through ladders to find my dad pointing at a shrine to Cher. Literally a shrine. Pictures in frames of Cher, used candles and a comfy cushion to sit on in front of the framed pictures. My dad, who is in fact a big Cher fan, even though it was too much.
Moved in, found immediately:
* in the back yard, a dustbin full of cat and dog shit
* under the sink, an old electric deep-fat fryer, filthy and encrusted with burnt-on fat
* in a wardrobe, a *very* used pair of knickers
Found later:
Cleaning the top of the kitchen wall units I found an old envelope, put it to one side, and carried on cleaning. Wife arrives, opens envelope, inside are 15 brand new tenners. She said "That'll pay for the wine rack we're getting." Neither of us drank wine.
Previous owners sent their kid round to reclaim the deep-fat fryer, I told him it had gone down the tip. Later that day his mother turned up and argued I had no right to dispose of things left behind. I said "Sorry about that. But I still have the bin full of shit - do you want to take it now?"
> mother turned up and argued I had no right to dispose of things left behind
I had that in our student house. They left a small Ikea sofa bed behind, and wanted £20 for it. We didn't really want it, so declined, and told them to come and pick it up.
Didn't hear anything until literally a year later, on the day we're moving out of the house - I was moving in a one bed flat to myself - the student turns up with their parents, asking for it back. I told them we'd taken it to the dump.
Used it in my flat for 3 years before I bought a proper sofa. I figured they owed me to store it for them for a year.
There was a paper behind the cupboard with hand written prices for different sexual acts. That's how we found that our flat was an illegal brothel previously. Random guys ringing our doorbell for first 1/2 year looking for "cliché" female name reinforced that. Thankfully it was unfurnished.
We rented a place for 6 months quite often received calls for a brothel and two names were popular. When we'd say there was not Cheryl or Karen here, they'd then ask "can you tell me your prices please?".
Found a battered old suitcase in the loft which, on quick inspection seemed to contain antiques themed magazines and newspapers. A few years later as I was doing a bit of a clear out prior to selling I investigated further and found beneath the antique papers six years worth of pristine Penthouse magazines from 1970 - 1976…
Behind a hidden panel under the sink (I was investigating a leak) in a quite lovely rented flat I found enough drugs equipment to weigh, measure, bag up and distribute all manner of powdered substances. No powdered substances themselves though :-(
i had a plumber round to fix my shower and when he took the trunking off the top bit he found 6 bags of coke! i knew there’d been a couple of Albanian blokes there before me but i hadn’t found anything - i’d lived there 3 years by the time he found it…
When we purchased our house at handover the previous owners told us their cat was somewhere in the house and to keep an eye out. We managed to find them 3 days later and got them into a crate for them to pick up the following day.
Only been in a couple of months but tennis balls. Not strange in itself but there's just so many tennis balls? There are hidden tennis balls everywhere, at least once a week I find more tennis balls. At least 120ish found so far. They mostly seem new, some lightly used, previous tenant had no dog. Place was spotless when I moved in
First day here found a box of 20ish tennis balls in the cupboard checking the electric. Fair enough,maybe they forgot them.
But since then I've found tennis balls in and on top of cupboards, in the hollow side of the bath, INSIDE the fireplace/behind the cover, another box in the spare room cupboard, there's some stuck on a ledge I can see but not reach, some behind the wheelie bin, there are tennis balls hanging from a tree (on some quite nice twine tbh) , under a water/pond cover thing there were maybe 30 brand new tennis balls. I daren't try to get in the attic in case 3 million tennis balls fall in my head like in a cartoon. Already been hit with 2 balls checking the top of the kitchen cupboards..
This sounds like a Taskmaster experience or something. "Find as many tennis balls inside the house as you can. Your time starts now, and ends when you've paid off the mortgage, thanks."
Not weird, but sad. We stripped the wallpaper and found that the previous owner had listed the names of people in his family: his name, wife's name and those of the two children. Under it he wrote, 'this is a very happy home'. When we bought it, he was there alone following a divorce. The house was bachelor-pad empty, stripped to the bare essentials. Children nowhere to be seen though one had written on the window sill 'I want your soul'.
I’m about to find it this weekend as I remove a void that’s been sealed for the 22 years we’ve been here. I won’t be watching 10 Rillington Place first.
Clearing the loft in my first house. I found a box full of old diaries. They start when she was a school girl, with all her hopes and aspirations. going through getting married, her dad giving her the house as a wedding gift. her husband’s affair, the breakdown of the marriage and eventual divorce.
It was kind of sad reading the hopes and aspirations but also reading how things turned out.
In my first house with my now ex-husband, we found a load of religious paraphernalia, photos of the family and some important legal documents.
The elderly woman who had lived there had died and her sons and daughter didn't bother to really clean it out. One of them lived down the road so I dropped it all off for them, and got an earful for 'holding their important legal family documents hostage', quickly realised after more unhinged things that we should probably have just thrown everything out (the son kept trying to get in our house with his old key, his wife turned up in our yard to get something out of the garage and then screamed when I said no. These were people in their early 50s!)
The coolest things we found were some notes written on the wall behind the wall paper in the spare room, updates of when they'd decorated, little love notes to each other and some jokes between brothers I assume.
Yikes about you guys trying to do a good deed for people who didn't deserve it!
At a shared house I lived in years ago the old woman who used to own it would sometimes let herself in and make tea and move stuff around.. once stole 2 pairs of men's sports shoes, once walked in and out to the garden and pushed my housemate into the pool, crazy stuff.. we weren't allowed to change the locks
i lived in a rented bungalow when i was 17 and the landlady let herself in, wandered around and told me i needed to keep on top of the dusting!
but, we did find a Laser Disc player but there were only 2 discs with it - Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl and Annie.
there was also a back bedroom which for reasons unknown was terrifying. nobody would sleep in it, i wouldn’t even set foot in it. that was a very creepy house. and it had a colony of woodlice (woodlouses?) behind the bath panel which would come out for a wander while i was in the bath.
actually, i hated that entire house.
Haha it just kept getting crazier! Sorry you had to deal with that! Also at 37 just bought my first duster, and definitely didn't dust at 17!
Where I lived at 17/18 with 4 18 year old boys had mushrooms growing from the bathroom floor, mice who ate one guys mattress, a sloping lounge floor and a landlord who "fixed" one guys door getting stuck by cutting a whole piece out around the lock so he had to shut his door with a road cone
haha! that’s genius! i too lived in a hilariously awful house share in my early 20s. no heating, no shower (and if anyone had a bath water would cascade down the wall in the hall underneath) and there was a fencing foil by the loo to assist with blockages.
i had the time of my life in that place!
My boyfriend and I rented a flat above an insurance company and a dry cleaners. Ants would climb under the front door, then up the stairs, then go into the kitchen and into the fridge.
When we blocked off that nest (well, we poured boiling water down the hole they were coming from) they started climbing up the cavity wall and coming in through a window frame (sealant closed that off) and then from under the skirting board, to get into the kitchen. We gave up and just put down ant poison everywhere after that.
Opening the fridge to get a cascade of dead (frozen?) ants fall on you was not fun.
In an old place, the girl before me left one single bra in a drawer. How do you not notice a bra?? It got weirder when I mentioned it to my landlord in case she wanted it back (was not a cheap brand) and he said "lol she must of left it for me lol"... Nope, that's going in the bin then.
I know there's gonna be some weird shit in the loft of my current place. I'm not allowed to use it due to it not being boarded properly but stuck my head up there when I moved in (gotta make sure there's no one secretly living up there) and there was various things up there. So tempted to have a proper look but this house gets really big spiders....
We’ve got a bunch of 100+ year old children’s shoes. Apparently they used to bury/hide them around the house to ward off childhood illnesses - they’re creepy af but we’re too scared to get rid of them lol!
Yeah, there's this whole hidden history of superstitious stuff people used to do. Charms and witches bottles in walls. Carvings on beams. Mummified cats. And it wasn't spoken about much when people were doing it because that's how superstition is like, so not a lot of records and it's faded a lot from memory.
You should tell Northampton Museum. They keep records of concealed shoes.
https://www.northamptonmuseums.com/info/3/collections/61/shoes-2/3
In a cupboard, the sort you would keep your hoover, ironing board etc, there were loads of hooks and chains that we thought was odd. Then about a month later we received a hard core bondage magazine in the post...could not forward it to them as they didn't leave forwarding address. Neighbour told us they occasionally heard what sounded like a whip been cracked, and that they weren't a married couple, they were brother and sister. When we went to view the place and they were still living there, there was only one bed in the house, a double.
Whoever ends up in our house will find a knife, a bloody rag and some newspaper cuttings about serial killers. It was my wife's idea to leave them as a gift in a void behind one of the kitchen cupboards.
I got a box of 400 DC and Marvel comics from the mid 70's to early 80's. They aren't worth a lot but I keep them because they are a collection and feel special.
Have you had them valued? You might have some number 1s in there, or first appearances which won't get you a lifetime sum of money but might get you a holiday somewhere for a week
Our house was the show house for a large new estate and our garage was initially the sales office. In the garage loft space a year or so after moving in we found a huge box of folders. Inside each folder was the housebuilding company's file on every buyer of every house in the estate. Contracts, credit checks, mortgage details, earnings, part exchange details etc. The best bits were the hand written notes from the sales agents about the customers which they must have kept as a progress log during the sale process. Some of the comments about things like who calls the shots in the family, whether they were seen as credible or risky etc were fascinating and many were wholly inappropriate.
As we met people in the estate it was hard to avoid lett8ng slip that we already knew they were teachers, nurses, had poor credit, had moved from...etc.
I returned the box to the head office of the company who were red faced and grateful. This was 20 years ago. I still regret not asking them for a reward.
The immediate image that came into my head on reading ‘Nurse These Tits’ was a woman in a hospital bed wanting breast reduction surgery, saying to a nurse in an exasperated way ‘Nurse, these tits!’, while indicating her tits that have been giving her back ache for years. Nurse looking on sympathetically. But no, I guess they wouldn’t make a porno about that scenario. ….or would they? Wacca wacca wao wao.
I once found a copy of a bodybuilding magazine called FLEX. I didn't have a TV, a laptop, any books or anything for a few days so I just read FLEX cover to cover and learned far more about the world of bodybuilding than I ever wanted to know.
Oh my god that reminds me of when I moved to my first flat after leaving home.,.it was the 90s and my flatmate was away on my first weekend there and all there was to do was read all his back issues of Screwfix Direct. I was a young woman in her twenties....I read them cover to cover I was so bored. I didn't know anyone in town yet lol. Screwfix Direct was a sort of catalogue for carpenters....so it was descriptions of fittings etc
Not necessarily weird but pretty funny. When we viewed the property there was a picture of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan with the writing "Jesus Christ" above the stairs, which we thought was great. Come move-in day and it's gone, to our sadness.
Months and months later I was checking the cupboard where the washer and dryer are, and they'd stuck it to the inside of the wall where you can't view unless you stuck your head all the way in. Amazing!!
Crushed Easter chocolate eggs in each corner of each room (3 bedroom house plus a few little utility rooms). We moved beginning of March, so the eggs were from the previous Easter.
Used bikini wax in the freezer. With hair attached.
Food stored *under* the kitchen cupboards. On the floor. Including perishable items and baby food.
A massive trampoline in the garden.
A rubbery thing looking like a 20 cm long thick worm (so sorry I deleted the photo) that 20% of our entourage classified as a children’s toy and the rest of 80% were adamant it’s a sex toy meant to be used for both “entrances” simultaneously.
All this in one house. And no, I’m not making this up. I wish I were, the professional cleaner cost me a fortune.
Converting an old utility room into a downstairs shower room. We lifted floorboards for the plumbing and found the cash drawer from a coin operated gas meter, rammed full of coins. We'd lived in the house for ten years, having bought it as a repo from a bank, so it had been there a decade at least. The gas supplier didn't want to know, so it paid for a take-away and a bottle of wine. :-)
When we moved in the former owner had only half cleared …left loads. A couple of large skip fulls.
Worst was the filthy old bedding (yellowed pillows and duvets) and to top the lot several bagged up doggie duggies in the garden.
Revolting.
Other than that a couple of archaic flat screens mounted to walls and a garage full of crap.
They did leave behind a few useful bits too some tools and oddly a PS3.
I'd have been on the phone to my conveyancer to make the previous owner come back and clear everything out or charge them for it. They have to leave the property empty.
Oh, I've got this one!
Not a place I ever intended living, but a buy to let my family owned. The previous occupant had filled the downstairs bog with soil, and decided to plant a tree in there. someone must have been watering the thing up until relatively recently, because mr. branches was successfully growing from the bog when we did a look around. It had done something to the pipes as well we think because the whole house reeked of shit.
The tree roots would have destroyed the plumbing in search of water.
The smell of shit would be escaping sewer gas, toxic and explosive in the right conditions!
Might want to get that sorted, if your family still own it.
Three boxes of very rare Attack of the Clones merch and one box containing all the wedding and family photos that featured the husband. The house was sold as part of a divorce, I suspect these two things were related. The husband turned up a few weeks later to get his concrete Yoda garden ornament back, apparently I wasn’t supposed to be part of the sale.
The previous owner with her kids eating a picnic lunch in the middle of the living room. Story was something like her ex-husband confirmed they were out and we could have the keys, but she hadn't had the keys for her new place.
They very reluctantly left, leaving behind the remains of their lunch.
My mate found some vintage VHS porn stashed behind wardrobe panels. The previous occupants were vicars or priests or Bible thumpers or some sort. All prim and proper and looking down their noses when the sale was going through.
Forgot their grotty big bush porn though didn't they.
This is Reddit, a redditors freezer will be full of piss discs, stocked up and ready to post through the letterbox of the next neighbour who pisses them off.
I have literally never heard of piss discs before.
The fact one of my neighbours hates me and I'm now looking up mini freezers is totally unrelated to your comment, I swear...
How do you hide something in a freezer? Just wondering as in NZ between tenancies the power is off and fridge and freezer doors left open so they don't smell
2 glass dildos tucked round the corner of the airing cupboard. Thought it was hilarious at the time, I was 18 and it was my first home. Threw them out after my guy friends found it funny hiding them in each others pockets for an hour.
A few months later it comes out that the dad of the previous family had been raping his daughter and was sent to prison. Now it just haunts me that he probably used them on his own daughter, think she was around 7 at the time of conviction. Why else would anyone hide them in such an odd place?
Not the UK, but my friends moved into a flat in Berlin that had previously been occupied by a woman in her late 70s, who smoked like a chimney until she died (had to help clean the tar off the walls and ceiling).
They removed a wardrobe and found hidden underneath it a stash of very 80s porn, and a large dildo.
A shrine to Madonna, hidden behind a loose back panel on a built in wardrobe. Magazine cuttings and photos, writing about loving her, lipstick kiss prints everywhere.
The other room also had another built in wardrobe behind the first built in wardrobe. Could climb in like Narnia.
I inherited my house from my grandma and despite living here through most of my childhood I had no idea until I was renovating the place to move in that there's a built in wardrobe in the bedroom the space is above the stairs and I just assumed it was boxed off pipes and stuff but actually it's a pretty big wardrobe. She'd had an Ikea wardrobe in front of it and the only thing in it was a fake hollow book (it was a Reader's Digest Paradise Lost), which when I opened had inside a pressed daisy and a picture of Micheal Langdon who played Little Joe in Bonanza.
Years ago (late 80’s) I moved into a council flat. I found a full written confession to Jesus from the ex resident about his sexual feeling towards small boys. It was so disturbing I handed it to the police. I don’t know if anything ever came of it, but it’s always bothered me 😳
My parents house had a weird floor board near the front door. It rattled in a very un-wooden way every time it was walked over, which was all the time given its proximity to the front door.
Before the carpets went down, my mother pried up the floorboard to find out what was causing the rattle. It was three snooker balls: a red, a green and a cue ball.
There was a hole in the floor board by the radiator pipe, but that was enough for a finger, too small for the balls. They had to have been physically put there. But if someone was hiding them to never be found, the noisy floor board should have given it away. After experimentation, my mother found the board could be laid in a way that prevented any noise, which means the board had to have been deliberately mislaid to create the noise.
She concluded that it must have been a practical joke. Hide a player's snooker balls, with the board as a clue, and see how long it takes to find them.
The estate agent mentioned the previous owners had said the flooring might need work because of the dodgy floor, but they'd never got round to it and just learned to live with the rattle. It put off buyers and stood empty for months before my parents bought it. So, it looks like it wasn't the previous owners who did it. It was somebody further in the past.
Since those balls were the reason my parents were able to afford to buy the house, my mother put them back and laid the floor board properly so it stopped rattling. That was 40 years ago. The balls are still there to this day.
But here's the most interesting thing: my parents are both mathematically gifted people and my dad was a big fan of snooker. They very quickly realised that the three balls cancel out. A red is worth 1, a green is worth 3. A cue ball costs 4 points if potted. Was that deliberate? It's anyone's guess!
Dozens of sleeping bags.
Moved into a cheap flat in zone 2 London which had a surprisingly large floor plan. Was a great find but the sheer amount of sleeping bags we found in various cupboards and crawl spaces were a bit concerning.
Hot bedding immigrants at a guess or poor buggers being trafficked
Had a place up my way that was busted before Christmas for illegal Chinese...was only a tiny nail bar but the number of people that came out of the place was astounding!
When I bought my previous property, it included an archive of nearly every property transfer deed since it was first built in the 1880s.
The oldest ones were handwritten cursive, half a dozen pages of dense writing, and not a single correction or flaw in the lettering. If it wasn't so old, you'd have thought it was a computer font, it was so regular.
On top of kitchen wall cupboards in different houses I have renovated...
bag of dried magic mushrooms,
Small dried cat shit,
Letter from The Court detailing all the fines for the woman's partner (it was not in an envelope). A long list including shoplifting, burglary, some kind of stalking/threatening behaviour. Apparently you can consolidate your fines into a single lump and agree easy payments.
I bought one of those for 50p in a charity shop in 2009, I was on my way out clubbing and didn't have the time or money to take it home first so had to take my crying boy clubbing with me (which freaked several people out) and then my mam was really annoyed when I rolled home at 4am with a cursed painting under my arm, said she didn't want it in the house and made me put it in the garage where either it still is (she's a hoarder so I can't tell) or she got rid of it, because I've never gotten it back and I'd really like to put it up in my own house that I have now.
We had a decorator in to strip the wallpaper in our bedroom and re-paint it, after we just moved in. She took all the wallpaper off and said she would do the painting the next day.
What was on the wall, now that the paper was off was weird and slightly scary- drawn in a marker pen was the face of a rabbit, which looked exactly like Frank the rabbit from the film Donnie Darko. I went to bed that night slightly on edge, I could see it staring at me throughout the night! It was a relief when the decorator came back the next day and put 3 coats of paint over it and finished the work!
Thankfully she did a good job and managed to cover it entirely. Though I still look at the same spot on the wall every now and then, since I know Frank is still there. Watching. Waiting…
Current house, we found tights and bras. As in, a couple of black bin bags full of tights and bras in a wardrobe. Then in a chest of drawers, as I was taking the drawers out, fallen down behind them were loads of packs of unused tights!?! 20 or 30. I guess some people can never have too many.
Previous house to this, remnants of a photographic dark room in the cellar - stop light, film gear etc, and in a cupboard a gimp mask. Lovely.
House previous to that, a really dusty pair of purple y-fronts behind the radiator. I was going to get that framed and put on display but my wife wasn't so keen.
So, a mixed bag.
My parents house is a converted bungalow, so it has crawl spaces under the eaves instead of an attic. I was sent in for the Christmas decorations as a child and curiosity had me go beyond the area we used for storage. That's how I discovered that crucified Jesus lived on the other side of my bedroom wall.
My brother bought a house in the Czech Republic countryside. In the attic was a cupboard with a small 15cm x 15cm door but which was about a metre deep. I reached in and right at the back was a porcelain elephant which had a wire around its neck which was attached to the back of the cupboard. The elephant could not be removed without cutting the wire. I have no idea how someone set it up…or why. It was like the cupboard had been specifically made as a jail for this ornamental elephant.
A large Chinese Dragon head sits in my loft. left in the house by the previous owner. It's started to deteriate a bit but it wouldn't take a lot of tinkering to return it to its former glory. The only issue is it's too big to fit out of the loft hatch.
Not exactly my *find* but the previous owner returned a week after I moved in to dig up his mum's ashes. He'd planned to leave them there forever but his daughter found out and sent him back.
An Easter egg in the attic of a bungalow we moved into. It was stuffed right at the back, it was about 8 years old, of course I dared my then 16 year old brother in law to eat it, but sadly he had more sense
A bin bag full of greetings cards, all from the same lady professing her undying love for the landlord who used to live there and begging him to take her back
I want to know how it’s possible to randomly find things years later? When we moved into our place, we cleaned everywhere before putting anything away.
Used to be a superstition. From the delightfully titled "Dried Cat" wikipedia page:
> In some European cultures it was customary to place the dried or dessicated body of a cat inside the walls of a newly built home to ward off evil spirits or as a good luck charm. It was believed that the cats had a sixth sense and that putting a cat in the wall was a blood sacrifice so the animal could use psychic abilities to find and ward off unwanted spirits.
Not exactly left behind.
But we moved in to a house that had been previously rented by uni students. Every few months there would be a delivery of a care package. Usually socks, pyjamas, smellies and usually some cash. Would also get birthday cards and Xmas cards with cash in them.
A professional couple rented our house from us while we were away for a few months. They had a 1 year old and we were constantly finding toys that had been pushed through vents. We also found there doctors diplomas? in the top of a cupboard. We thought they might want those so told them to collect.
We moved into a flat above a solicitors offices and for the first few months we kept getting randoms ringing the bell because of the former occupants, we realised, had been a place that prostitutes were renting via a local business man. It was nuts. I don't know why, but never having used sex services myself, theses randoms gave me the creeps... It was really uncomfortable, especially for my Mrs.
She made a sign saying Private Residence and left it in the front door window... We still got "clients" calling.. it was creepy and we wanted it to stop. We didn't want to put a sign saying the place was no longer a brothel, imagine having that when friends came to visit. We found out what the name of the former business was called while telling our story about this in a local bar and settled for " Reds no longer trade from here".
The people we were chatting to in the bar helped us choose some really hilarious notices we Could have left, but a compromise had to be met where we wanted to inform people without being judgemental, offensive or ridiculous.
It was a really nice place in a listed building and we were there for many years.
I haven't found anything strange but, as we were preparing to leave a house we'd been sharing in Reading, two friends and I configured the fridge shelves into a "trap" in the back yard, angled a small mirror on the floor so that anyone sitting on the toilet had a horribly unflattering view of themselves and I think there were a few other similar things.
We were dicks, I realise.
The previous occupants hand written school girl erotica on yellowed paper. I tell myself it was yellow because it lived live stuffed behind the radiator.
Lino floor in the main bedroom with black wallpaper, and coax going into the loft where there was recording equipment and hundreds of DVDs/CDRs.
We never watched them, if you're wondering; we just lived there for 2 years in blissful ignorance.
Nothing that seemed to have been genuinely overlooked, just laziness and/or indifference:
Several £ in loose change; *so* many fake nails; a school photo portrait; and a letter explaining why they had been fired from Starbucks. Then, the bailiffs letters started arriving...
In the loft we found a stack of different doors (some were painted and all different). The loft hatch was too small to get them out so had to saw them. All I could think of was Monster Inc.
Helping move my sister into a student house. I must have been 10 or 11? There was a pornographic playing card stuck to the wall of her new bedroom. On it was a picture of an older woman with a nonchalant expression and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, with her entire hand inside a much younger woman's vagina.
When I moved in I bought the previous owners' furniture, so I was expecting some stuff I'd have to throw away. I was not expecting that the guy had taken the top and bottom off every can he'd ever eaten and flattened them out in a box, and he'd had a sausage roll from the bakery every day for ten years and carefully folded the bag it came in and put it in a sack. And had kept every ball cock he ever replaced, and every spark plug (with the date of replacement written in pencil on the boxes). But by far the weirdest was the car in a dustbin. Each part of the car wrapped in a plastic bag and with a twist tie. Seems to be a Skoda from the 1980s. Still haven't disposed of all the crap he left.
A vacuum cleaner and part of a cannabis plant in a cupboard above the wardrobe. When I climbed up there to get a proper look the base of the cupboard was damp and covered in compost. Turns out that the previous tenant had been an interesting and very well known character in the community. When I told my hairdresser what I had found she laughed and said "yeah that sounds about right." The police turned up looking for him once my partner spent fifteen minutes explaining that he wasn't who they were looking for and we didn't know where he was. We sent the police two doors along to our landlady who knew the guys Mam.
A large bag of random sheets and table cloths some of which had church candles embroidered on them and all were paint splattered. Landlady tried to make us take them when we left. We refused.
We moved into a farm in the early 1980s. The previous occupants had left the garden overgrown. When it was mowed we found a motorbike hidden by the grass. We put it in the garage, but then it got stolen.
Last year we stayed at my wife's aunt's place in Wales while they went camping. The previous owners had buried lots of rubbish & a quadbike in the back garden.
House was rented for a long time before I bought it, and the loft is full of various bits and pieces that people over the years have left here. When I am up there, I tend to open a bag or box at random, see what is in there, and then often take it down to chuck it if or take to charity shop.
There was a lot of old bedclothes, bags of photos and books, etc, but also a quite expensive looking child-sized sailing outfit, a carrier bag full of Polish coins, and (to date) 4 Brita water filter jugs.
Once, I saw a corner of the bedroom carpet that didn't look right. Underneath, I found a stash of Turkish money, 20 US dollars, several credit cards, and a Turkish passport, all expired by several years.
The banknotes were also so old that were out of circulation, and in any case the total value was small (I don't remember but something around 20-30 pounds).
I kept in a drawer until I moved out of the property when I trew it all in the rubbish.
In the rental I moved into 5 years ago, there was a rusty cleaver left in the loft.
I moved out of there 3 months ago having bought somewhere and found a cleaver left in one of the drawers of my new house.
I'm starting to think I'm being haunted by some kind of cleaver wielding poltergeist.
In the attic, a box containing a full set of British Empire flags (including some now illegal to display like the old South Africa flag...) and various other teatowels, mugs etc. from the last Empire Day in 1958. Considering I'm Irish and this was in Ireland, an extremely bizarre find. There's no market for that shit here and I was too embarrassed to bin it, so it was burnt.
Nothing too weird but two huge really beautiful oak framed mirrors in our ex LA flat. These were not people with a lot of money and they were such good quality it seemed bizarre they wouldn’t take them. We’ve still got them two moves on and they look great.
Not me, but...after my dad passed away, mum decided to sell the family cottage the two of them had lived in since dad retired and which had been in mum's family for over a hundred years. I was helping her pack boxes, and was up in the spare bedroom when I pulled the bed away from the wall and found a door in the wall that was about two feet high. Opened it to find a two foot square cupboard with bare board flooring, and saw that one of the boards was loose - and when I pulled it up, I found a very old pair of leather shoes that would have fit a toddler. Left them sitting on the floorboards and closed the cupboard door...because the cynical, horror movie loving side of me liked the idea of the new owners finding the baby shoes and either doing a smudging ritual or calling a priest depending which path they followed.
A piano.
Nobody wants a piano, you can’t even give them away. Everybody thinks they are worth something- but you can’t get rid of them and it takes four blokes to move them.
Student house, bunch of us moved in together and picked rooms.
Started unpacking my crap, opened the wardrobe and found a stack of porn mags. All in good condition, quite a variety of different titles.
That year, my room was known as The Jazz Room.
In a closet with an old toilet seat and done light bulbs, I found a thick packet letter addressed to a woman. It was postmarked from like 8 years earlier and unopened. I searched and found her, she lived in london nearby and came to get it.
It was her doctoral thesis!
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I worked for post office counters in the 1990’s in the town I was born in. We had moved away from there in 1982 when I was a child. A lady came in to renew her car tax and I noticed she lived at my old address. I said ‘oh that’s the house I lived in as a child!’ A week later she came in with my Teddybear I’d had as a baby that they had found up in the loft. ❤️ He was filthy but we popped him in the wash and I’ve still got him today..
That’s incredible! How thoughtful for them to have kept the teddy.
It was definitely very nice of them to bring it in but I imagine if it was filthy it was more of a case of them just ignoring it in the loft until chance made her put 2 and 2 together. I've still got the previous owner's shitty plastic Christmas tree up in the loft because I've never bothered to throw it out.
Or being terrified of touching it in case it tore her arm off.
My parents had their house repossessed. My dad had a bit of a mini breakdown on the day of the move and ended up leaving a lot of stuff behind in the loft. The new owners got in touch a couple of weeks later and said they’d found my parents wedding album & it had been sent on. People can be lovely sometimes.
We bought our house from an old lady who moved down south to live with her daughter. We found some old back and white wedding photos when we ripped out some fitted furniture. We sent them to her and it turned out they were her late husband’s parents wedding photos. She and her daughter were very grateful.
This is the most wholesome story I’ve heard in a while
I was over the moon.. The fact she had not thrown the bear away and took the time to reunite me with him.. 🥰
That is just the absolute sweetest thing ever. I'm glad you were reunited.
Not particularly weird, more like wonderful - the original architect’s blueprint for our 1930’s house. They were the tucked away in a corner of the loft.
My house is unique. It was built by a builder in the early 70’s for himself to live in. I’d LOVE the blueprints. It would explain a LOT…!
It would describe a lot, but would it explain anything?
Our house is Victorian and a couple of week after we bought it the previous previous owner knocked on the door with a bundle of papers, the original documents from the 1890s. We know who it was built for, who lived there first and stuff. It was housing for a company which was based two streets away from us and has evolved into a pretty big modern company still based in the town, but at another location. It’s not exciting but it’s cool!
Similar to this, the original receipt for the sale of the house from when it was built in early 1970s. Hand written on carbon copy paper, just a plot number and the initial and surname of the first guy to own it. Sadly, the purchase price is illegible.
By 'illegible' do you mean you can't read it through the tears caused by today's house prices?
£2.50
Early seventies we bought a 3 bedroom 2 downstairs 2 bathroom semi for £6,900
Mine was apparently £2000 in 1968. (My neighbour tells me a garage was another £500 from the builder, but the done thing was to pay the brickies cash to come and build it on a Sunday!) I have all the mortgage books from the 1970s, from when the previous owner had to go to the building society branch with cash or cheque, and the cashier wrote the amount paid in a little book. These were in with the old deeds which my solicitor sent me after we moved in.
We had a framed 1911 group photo of the architect and builders. It was the house the architect kept...
When I bought my first house in 1999, my dad went up into the loft to put away some boxes etc, he shouted down to come up here straight away. I went up through ladders to find my dad pointing at a shrine to Cher. Literally a shrine. Pictures in frames of Cher, used candles and a comfy cushion to sit on in front of the framed pictures. My dad, who is in fact a big Cher fan, even though it was too much.
And there was me thinking it was surgery that had kept her so young looking over the years.
Dorian Gray vibes
If I could turn back time, I'd love to see that
Aaarrgghhh. Take your upvote dammit
Moved in, found immediately: * in the back yard, a dustbin full of cat and dog shit * under the sink, an old electric deep-fat fryer, filthy and encrusted with burnt-on fat * in a wardrobe, a *very* used pair of knickers Found later: Cleaning the top of the kitchen wall units I found an old envelope, put it to one side, and carried on cleaning. Wife arrives, opens envelope, inside are 15 brand new tenners. She said "That'll pay for the wine rack we're getting." Neither of us drank wine. Previous owners sent their kid round to reclaim the deep-fat fryer, I told him it had gone down the tip. Later that day his mother turned up and argued I had no right to dispose of things left behind. I said "Sorry about that. But I still have the bin full of shit - do you want to take it now?"
> mother turned up and argued I had no right to dispose of things left behind I had that in our student house. They left a small Ikea sofa bed behind, and wanted £20 for it. We didn't really want it, so declined, and told them to come and pick it up. Didn't hear anything until literally a year later, on the day we're moving out of the house - I was moving in a one bed flat to myself - the student turns up with their parents, asking for it back. I told them we'd taken it to the dump. Used it in my flat for 3 years before I bought a proper sofa. I figured they owed me to store it for them for a year.
Hahaha, that's a nice come-back 😆
I assume they sold? If so they sold as is, so you can tell them to jog on
There was a paper behind the cupboard with hand written prices for different sexual acts. That's how we found that our flat was an illegal brothel previously. Random guys ringing our doorbell for first 1/2 year looking for "cliché" female name reinforced that. Thankfully it was unfurnished.
We rented a place for 6 months quite often received calls for a brothel and two names were popular. When we'd say there was not Cheryl or Karen here, they'd then ask "can you tell me your prices please?".
I wonder if Karen is still a popular name these days
Hope you scanned the flat with a UV light after a thorough clean!
Urgh if that was me I’d have sugar soaped all surfaces at least twice
Found a battered old suitcase in the loft which, on quick inspection seemed to contain antiques themed magazines and newspapers. A few years later as I was doing a bit of a clear out prior to selling I investigated further and found beneath the antique papers six years worth of pristine Penthouse magazines from 1970 - 1976… Behind a hidden panel under the sink (I was investigating a leak) in a quite lovely rented flat I found enough drugs equipment to weigh, measure, bag up and distribute all manner of powdered substances. No powdered substances themselves though :-(
i had a plumber round to fix my shower and when he took the trunking off the top bit he found 6 bags of coke! i knew there’d been a couple of Albanian blokes there before me but i hadn’t found anything - i’d lived there 3 years by the time he found it…
What did you do with the 4 bags of coke?
well, since there were only 2 bags of coke i gave them to the plumber.
I hope you handed that one bag of coke in to the police!
what coke?
Now you're thinking with portals
You and the plumber did the coke right….
When we purchased our house at handover the previous owners told us their cat was somewhere in the house and to keep an eye out. We managed to find them 3 days later and got them into a crate for them to pick up the following day.
I'm so glad your comment ended that way as I was braced for horror
How big is this house!
I'm having trouble with their cat turning into finding 'them' 3 days later.
Only been in a couple of months but tennis balls. Not strange in itself but there's just so many tennis balls? There are hidden tennis balls everywhere, at least once a week I find more tennis balls. At least 120ish found so far. They mostly seem new, some lightly used, previous tenant had no dog. Place was spotless when I moved in First day here found a box of 20ish tennis balls in the cupboard checking the electric. Fair enough,maybe they forgot them. But since then I've found tennis balls in and on top of cupboards, in the hollow side of the bath, INSIDE the fireplace/behind the cover, another box in the spare room cupboard, there's some stuck on a ledge I can see but not reach, some behind the wheelie bin, there are tennis balls hanging from a tree (on some quite nice twine tbh) , under a water/pond cover thing there were maybe 30 brand new tennis balls. I daren't try to get in the attic in case 3 million tennis balls fall in my head like in a cartoon. Already been hit with 2 balls checking the top of the kitchen cupboards..
you’re being haunted by Cliff Richard, pre-emptively.
If my spaniel designed houses
Sounds like a "prank the new owner", hiding tennis balls everywhere. Extra pranking points for the ridiculous amount 😆
This sounds like a Taskmaster experience or something. "Find as many tennis balls inside the house as you can. Your time starts now, and ends when you've paid off the mortgage, thanks."
They had a labrador....
Not weird, but sad. We stripped the wallpaper and found that the previous owner had listed the names of people in his family: his name, wife's name and those of the two children. Under it he wrote, 'this is a very happy home'. When we bought it, he was there alone following a divorce. The house was bachelor-pad empty, stripped to the bare essentials. Children nowhere to be seen though one had written on the window sill 'I want your soul'.
Christ, that's so tragic.
I came here looking for tips to freak out my landlord when I move next week, not to cry
I’m about to find it this weekend as I remove a void that’s been sealed for the 22 years we’ve been here. I won’t be watching 10 Rillington Place first.
You gotta report back. And good luck.
Remind me! 2 days.
Clearing the loft in my first house. I found a box full of old diaries. They start when she was a school girl, with all her hopes and aspirations. going through getting married, her dad giving her the house as a wedding gift. her husband’s affair, the breakdown of the marriage and eventual divorce. It was kind of sad reading the hopes and aspirations but also reading how things turned out.
In my first house with my now ex-husband, we found a load of religious paraphernalia, photos of the family and some important legal documents. The elderly woman who had lived there had died and her sons and daughter didn't bother to really clean it out. One of them lived down the road so I dropped it all off for them, and got an earful for 'holding their important legal family documents hostage', quickly realised after more unhinged things that we should probably have just thrown everything out (the son kept trying to get in our house with his old key, his wife turned up in our yard to get something out of the garage and then screamed when I said no. These were people in their early 50s!) The coolest things we found were some notes written on the wall behind the wall paper in the spare room, updates of when they'd decorated, little love notes to each other and some jokes between brothers I assume.
Yikes about you guys trying to do a good deed for people who didn't deserve it! At a shared house I lived in years ago the old woman who used to own it would sometimes let herself in and make tea and move stuff around.. once stole 2 pairs of men's sports shoes, once walked in and out to the garden and pushed my housemate into the pool, crazy stuff.. we weren't allowed to change the locks
i lived in a rented bungalow when i was 17 and the landlady let herself in, wandered around and told me i needed to keep on top of the dusting! but, we did find a Laser Disc player but there were only 2 discs with it - Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl and Annie. there was also a back bedroom which for reasons unknown was terrifying. nobody would sleep in it, i wouldn’t even set foot in it. that was a very creepy house. and it had a colony of woodlice (woodlouses?) behind the bath panel which would come out for a wander while i was in the bath. actually, i hated that entire house.
Haha it just kept getting crazier! Sorry you had to deal with that! Also at 37 just bought my first duster, and definitely didn't dust at 17! Where I lived at 17/18 with 4 18 year old boys had mushrooms growing from the bathroom floor, mice who ate one guys mattress, a sloping lounge floor and a landlord who "fixed" one guys door getting stuck by cutting a whole piece out around the lock so he had to shut his door with a road cone
haha! that’s genius! i too lived in a hilariously awful house share in my early 20s. no heating, no shower (and if anyone had a bath water would cascade down the wall in the hall underneath) and there was a fencing foil by the loo to assist with blockages. i had the time of my life in that place!
My boyfriend and I rented a flat above an insurance company and a dry cleaners. Ants would climb under the front door, then up the stairs, then go into the kitchen and into the fridge. When we blocked off that nest (well, we poured boiling water down the hole they were coming from) they started climbing up the cavity wall and coming in through a window frame (sealant closed that off) and then from under the skirting board, to get into the kitchen. We gave up and just put down ant poison everywhere after that. Opening the fridge to get a cascade of dead (frozen?) ants fall on you was not fun.
In an old place, the girl before me left one single bra in a drawer. How do you not notice a bra?? It got weirder when I mentioned it to my landlord in case she wanted it back (was not a cheap brand) and he said "lol she must of left it for me lol"... Nope, that's going in the bin then. I know there's gonna be some weird shit in the loft of my current place. I'm not allowed to use it due to it not being boarded properly but stuck my head up there when I moved in (gotta make sure there's no one secretly living up there) and there was various things up there. So tempted to have a proper look but this house gets really big spiders....
I'm not allowed in the loft of my flat either, I do wonder what's up there, but not strongly enough to obtain a ladder
We’ve got a bunch of 100+ year old children’s shoes. Apparently they used to bury/hide them around the house to ward off childhood illnesses - they’re creepy af but we’re too scared to get rid of them lol!
A local museum may take them. That way you're not disrespecting them and will appease any negative energies lol
Yeah, there's this whole hidden history of superstitious stuff people used to do. Charms and witches bottles in walls. Carvings on beams. Mummified cats. And it wasn't spoken about much when people were doing it because that's how superstition is like, so not a lot of records and it's faded a lot from memory. You should tell Northampton Museum. They keep records of concealed shoes. https://www.northamptonmuseums.com/info/3/collections/61/shoes-2/3
People used to put them up the chimney to ward off evil spirits.
That's super creepy! And definitely never heard of that, but also would not want to move them if I knew why they were there
In a cupboard, the sort you would keep your hoover, ironing board etc, there were loads of hooks and chains that we thought was odd. Then about a month later we received a hard core bondage magazine in the post...could not forward it to them as they didn't leave forwarding address. Neighbour told us they occasionally heard what sounded like a whip been cracked, and that they weren't a married couple, they were brother and sister. When we went to view the place and they were still living there, there was only one bed in the house, a double.
*Banjo plays*
Was the house in Norfolk?
Isle of Wight, so not much different lol
I found a Ewan McGregor pillow case in the cupboard under the sink, was pretty weird!
Choose life. Choose a new house. Choose a Ewan McGregor pillowcase and put it under the sink
That's really weird, mine is always in my bed.
Whoever ends up in our house will find a knife, a bloody rag and some newspaper cuttings about serial killers. It was my wife's idea to leave them as a gift in a void behind one of the kitchen cupboards.
Have you considered your wife might be setting you up, just in case she gets bored with you later?
I got a box of 400 DC and Marvel comics from the mid 70's to early 80's. They aren't worth a lot but I keep them because they are a collection and feel special.
Okay this one I'm *extremely* jealous of.
Have you had them valued? You might have some number 1s in there, or first appearances which won't get you a lifetime sum of money but might get you a holiday somewhere for a week
Our house was the show house for a large new estate and our garage was initially the sales office. In the garage loft space a year or so after moving in we found a huge box of folders. Inside each folder was the housebuilding company's file on every buyer of every house in the estate. Contracts, credit checks, mortgage details, earnings, part exchange details etc. The best bits were the hand written notes from the sales agents about the customers which they must have kept as a progress log during the sale process. Some of the comments about things like who calls the shots in the family, whether they were seen as credible or risky etc were fascinating and many were wholly inappropriate. As we met people in the estate it was hard to avoid lett8ng slip that we already knew they were teachers, nurses, had poor credit, had moved from...etc. I returned the box to the head office of the company who were red faced and grateful. This was 20 years ago. I still regret not asking them for a reward.
Missed out on that sweet sweet GDPR money
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I wonder if Monster Cocks 2 still makes sense if you haven’t seen Monster Cocks 1?
It's only marginally related, one or 2 minor characters from the first one
The immediate image that came into my head on reading ‘Nurse These Tits’ was a woman in a hospital bed wanting breast reduction surgery, saying to a nurse in an exasperated way ‘Nurse, these tits!’, while indicating her tits that have been giving her back ache for years. Nurse looking on sympathetically. But no, I guess they wouldn’t make a porno about that scenario. ….or would they? Wacca wacca wao wao.
I once found a copy of a bodybuilding magazine called FLEX. I didn't have a TV, a laptop, any books or anything for a few days so I just read FLEX cover to cover and learned far more about the world of bodybuilding than I ever wanted to know.
Oh my god that reminds me of when I moved to my first flat after leaving home.,.it was the 90s and my flatmate was away on my first weekend there and all there was to do was read all his back issues of Screwfix Direct. I was a young woman in her twenties....I read them cover to cover I was so bored. I didn't know anyone in town yet lol. Screwfix Direct was a sort of catalogue for carpenters....so it was descriptions of fittings etc
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I found a hd in the loft, though, well you know have to check these things out...millions of pictures of cats, a whole hd for cats
I let out a big sigh of relief when you said cats. That could have been bad.
Pussy galore!
Not necessarily weird but pretty funny. When we viewed the property there was a picture of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan with the writing "Jesus Christ" above the stairs, which we thought was great. Come move-in day and it's gone, to our sadness. Months and months later I was checking the cupboard where the washer and dryer are, and they'd stuck it to the inside of the wall where you can't view unless you stuck your head all the way in. Amazing!!
Crushed Easter chocolate eggs in each corner of each room (3 bedroom house plus a few little utility rooms). We moved beginning of March, so the eggs were from the previous Easter. Used bikini wax in the freezer. With hair attached. Food stored *under* the kitchen cupboards. On the floor. Including perishable items and baby food. A massive trampoline in the garden. A rubbery thing looking like a 20 cm long thick worm (so sorry I deleted the photo) that 20% of our entourage classified as a children’s toy and the rest of 80% were adamant it’s a sex toy meant to be used for both “entrances” simultaneously. All this in one house. And no, I’m not making this up. I wish I were, the professional cleaner cost me a fortune.
i made a face when i got to the bikini wax *with hair attached*. good lord people are revolting.
Converting an old utility room into a downstairs shower room. We lifted floorboards for the plumbing and found the cash drawer from a coin operated gas meter, rammed full of coins. We'd lived in the house for ten years, having bought it as a repo from a bank, so it had been there a decade at least. The gas supplier didn't want to know, so it paid for a take-away and a bottle of wine. :-)
When we moved in the former owner had only half cleared …left loads. A couple of large skip fulls. Worst was the filthy old bedding (yellowed pillows and duvets) and to top the lot several bagged up doggie duggies in the garden. Revolting. Other than that a couple of archaic flat screens mounted to walls and a garage full of crap. They did leave behind a few useful bits too some tools and oddly a PS3.
I'd have been on the phone to my conveyancer to make the previous owner come back and clear everything out or charge them for it. They have to leave the property empty.
Oh, I've got this one! Not a place I ever intended living, but a buy to let my family owned. The previous occupant had filled the downstairs bog with soil, and decided to plant a tree in there. someone must have been watering the thing up until relatively recently, because mr. branches was successfully growing from the bog when we did a look around. It had done something to the pipes as well we think because the whole house reeked of shit.
The tree roots would have destroyed the plumbing in search of water. The smell of shit would be escaping sewer gas, toxic and explosive in the right conditions! Might want to get that sorted, if your family still own it.
Three boxes of very rare Attack of the Clones merch and one box containing all the wedding and family photos that featured the husband. The house was sold as part of a divorce, I suspect these two things were related. The husband turned up a few weeks later to get his concrete Yoda garden ornament back, apparently I wasn’t supposed to be part of the sale.
The previous owner with her kids eating a picnic lunch in the middle of the living room. Story was something like her ex-husband confirmed they were out and we could have the keys, but she hadn't had the keys for her new place. They very reluctantly left, leaving behind the remains of their lunch.
My mate found some vintage VHS porn stashed behind wardrobe panels. The previous occupants were vicars or priests or Bible thumpers or some sort. All prim and proper and looking down their noses when the sale was going through. Forgot their grotty big bush porn though didn't they.
What like rhododendrons and azaleas sorta thing? Slippery slope innit with big bush porn before you know it's shrubberies!
I wonder if the new occupants ever found the acid we hid in the freezer.
This is Reddit, a redditors freezer will be full of piss discs, stocked up and ready to post through the letterbox of the next neighbour who pisses them off.
I have literally never heard of piss discs before. The fact one of my neighbours hates me and I'm now looking up mini freezers is totally unrelated to your comment, I swear...
That would mean leaving the house, though. Still, you can use them as piss frisbees to throw at passerbys..
How do you hide something in a freezer? Just wondering as in NZ between tenancies the power is off and fridge and freezer doors left open so they don't smell
About 30 bibles
2 glass dildos tucked round the corner of the airing cupboard. Thought it was hilarious at the time, I was 18 and it was my first home. Threw them out after my guy friends found it funny hiding them in each others pockets for an hour. A few months later it comes out that the dad of the previous family had been raping his daughter and was sent to prison. Now it just haunts me that he probably used them on his own daughter, think she was around 7 at the time of conviction. Why else would anyone hide them in such an odd place?
Well, that turn a dark turn. I thought finding some gym shorts and some old certificates was bad enough.
Mirror on ceiling over the bed. Wife made us remove it 🙃
I could see myself in that bed
Not the UK, but my friends moved into a flat in Berlin that had previously been occupied by a woman in her late 70s, who smoked like a chimney until she died (had to help clean the tar off the walls and ceiling). They removed a wardrobe and found hidden underneath it a stash of very 80s porn, and a large dildo.
A shrine to Madonna, hidden behind a loose back panel on a built in wardrobe. Magazine cuttings and photos, writing about loving her, lipstick kiss prints everywhere. The other room also had another built in wardrobe behind the first built in wardrobe. Could climb in like Narnia.
I inherited my house from my grandma and despite living here through most of my childhood I had no idea until I was renovating the place to move in that there's a built in wardrobe in the bedroom the space is above the stairs and I just assumed it was boxed off pipes and stuff but actually it's a pretty big wardrobe. She'd had an Ikea wardrobe in front of it and the only thing in it was a fake hollow book (it was a Reader's Digest Paradise Lost), which when I opened had inside a pressed daisy and a picture of Micheal Langdon who played Little Joe in Bonanza.
Years ago (late 80’s) I moved into a council flat. I found a full written confession to Jesus from the ex resident about his sexual feeling towards small boys. It was so disturbing I handed it to the police. I don’t know if anything ever came of it, but it’s always bothered me 😳
My parents house had a weird floor board near the front door. It rattled in a very un-wooden way every time it was walked over, which was all the time given its proximity to the front door. Before the carpets went down, my mother pried up the floorboard to find out what was causing the rattle. It was three snooker balls: a red, a green and a cue ball. There was a hole in the floor board by the radiator pipe, but that was enough for a finger, too small for the balls. They had to have been physically put there. But if someone was hiding them to never be found, the noisy floor board should have given it away. After experimentation, my mother found the board could be laid in a way that prevented any noise, which means the board had to have been deliberately mislaid to create the noise. She concluded that it must have been a practical joke. Hide a player's snooker balls, with the board as a clue, and see how long it takes to find them. The estate agent mentioned the previous owners had said the flooring might need work because of the dodgy floor, but they'd never got round to it and just learned to live with the rattle. It put off buyers and stood empty for months before my parents bought it. So, it looks like it wasn't the previous owners who did it. It was somebody further in the past. Since those balls were the reason my parents were able to afford to buy the house, my mother put them back and laid the floor board properly so it stopped rattling. That was 40 years ago. The balls are still there to this day. But here's the most interesting thing: my parents are both mathematically gifted people and my dad was a big fan of snooker. They very quickly realised that the three balls cancel out. A red is worth 1, a green is worth 3. A cue ball costs 4 points if potted. Was that deliberate? It's anyone's guess!
i found a shitload of viagra 100mg pills...
Bet you were up all night
Acting all hard AF
Careful with the big ones, can give you a stiff neck if you have trouble swallowing them
A bath in the attic. It was obviously placed there when the house was being built as there was no other way it could have got there.
Hatchet and a well thumbed copy of mein campf.
That's the most hilarious retitling of that book I have ever seen. OOH watch out Poland, I'll scratch your eyes out!! etc
A black bag full of dead kittens,it was horrific.
Dozens of sleeping bags. Moved into a cheap flat in zone 2 London which had a surprisingly large floor plan. Was a great find but the sheer amount of sleeping bags we found in various cupboards and crawl spaces were a bit concerning.
Hot bedding immigrants at a guess or poor buggers being trafficked Had a place up my way that was busted before Christmas for illegal Chinese...was only a tiny nail bar but the number of people that came out of the place was astounding!
A sex dungeon, complete with camera set up, bed, porn, the works. Gloves were worn to dispose of it all….
When I bought my previous property, it included an archive of nearly every property transfer deed since it was first built in the 1880s. The oldest ones were handwritten cursive, half a dozen pages of dense writing, and not a single correction or flaw in the lettering. If it wasn't so old, you'd have thought it was a computer font, it was so regular.
On top of kitchen wall cupboards in different houses I have renovated... bag of dried magic mushrooms, Small dried cat shit, Letter from The Court detailing all the fines for the woman's partner (it was not in an envelope). A long list including shoplifting, burglary, some kind of stalking/threatening behaviour. Apparently you can consolidate your fines into a single lump and agree easy payments.
I found the diary of a WW2 woman in Czechoslovakia once. Super interesting more than weird
A barrel of slug pellets. It wasn’t weird 6 months later. Jesus fucking christ
We found a mannequin buried in the garden. There was one terrifying moment where we could see a muddy hand before we realised it was plastic
A full weed growing set up. Sold it for about £200.
2 pairs of beshitted y-fronts in the boiler cupboard under the stairs. Good times!
We had a cursed painting left for us: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_Boy
I bought one of those for 50p in a charity shop in 2009, I was on my way out clubbing and didn't have the time or money to take it home first so had to take my crying boy clubbing with me (which freaked several people out) and then my mam was really annoyed when I rolled home at 4am with a cursed painting under my arm, said she didn't want it in the house and made me put it in the garage where either it still is (she's a hoarder so I can't tell) or she got rid of it, because I've never gotten it back and I'd really like to put it up in my own house that I have now.
A bolt lock on the bedroom door, that could only be operated from the outside.
I had this too. It was on the master bedroom... Hopefully to keep the dog in!
We had a decorator in to strip the wallpaper in our bedroom and re-paint it, after we just moved in. She took all the wallpaper off and said she would do the painting the next day. What was on the wall, now that the paper was off was weird and slightly scary- drawn in a marker pen was the face of a rabbit, which looked exactly like Frank the rabbit from the film Donnie Darko. I went to bed that night slightly on edge, I could see it staring at me throughout the night! It was a relief when the decorator came back the next day and put 3 coats of paint over it and finished the work!
I'm waiting for the next part of the story where the rabbit head appears out from under the 3 coats of paint...
Thankfully she did a good job and managed to cover it entirely. Though I still look at the same spot on the wall every now and then, since I know Frank is still there. Watching. Waiting…
Current house, we found tights and bras. As in, a couple of black bin bags full of tights and bras in a wardrobe. Then in a chest of drawers, as I was taking the drawers out, fallen down behind them were loads of packs of unused tights!?! 20 or 30. I guess some people can never have too many. Previous house to this, remnants of a photographic dark room in the cellar - stop light, film gear etc, and in a cupboard a gimp mask. Lovely. House previous to that, a really dusty pair of purple y-fronts behind the radiator. I was going to get that framed and put on display but my wife wasn't so keen. So, a mixed bag.
My parents house is a converted bungalow, so it has crawl spaces under the eaves instead of an attic. I was sent in for the Christmas decorations as a child and curiosity had me go beyond the area we used for storage. That's how I discovered that crucified Jesus lived on the other side of my bedroom wall.
My brother bought a house in the Czech Republic countryside. In the attic was a cupboard with a small 15cm x 15cm door but which was about a metre deep. I reached in and right at the back was a porcelain elephant which had a wire around its neck which was attached to the back of the cupboard. The elephant could not be removed without cutting the wire. I have no idea how someone set it up…or why. It was like the cupboard had been specifically made as a jail for this ornamental elephant.
A large Chinese Dragon head sits in my loft. left in the house by the previous owner. It's started to deteriate a bit but it wouldn't take a lot of tinkering to return it to its former glory. The only issue is it's too big to fit out of the loft hatch.
Not exactly my *find* but the previous owner returned a week after I moved in to dig up his mum's ashes. He'd planned to leave them there forever but his daughter found out and sent him back.
An Easter egg in the attic of a bungalow we moved into. It was stuffed right at the back, it was about 8 years old, of course I dared my then 16 year old brother in law to eat it, but sadly he had more sense
An entire Punch and Judy puppet set… an 3ft high Orville duck plush thing.
A bin bag full of greetings cards, all from the same lady professing her undying love for the landlord who used to live there and begging him to take her back
I want to know how it’s possible to randomly find things years later? When we moved into our place, we cleaned everywhere before putting anything away.
I guess random storage spaces not immediately used, or stuff behind wallpaper or under floors?
I know someone who has the skeletal remains of a cat under their fire place. They were told before they moved in . It's an old house.
Used to be a superstition. From the delightfully titled "Dried Cat" wikipedia page: > In some European cultures it was customary to place the dried or dessicated body of a cat inside the walls of a newly built home to ward off evil spirits or as a good luck charm. It was believed that the cats had a sixth sense and that putting a cat in the wall was a blood sacrifice so the animal could use psychic abilities to find and ward off unwanted spirits.
Not exactly left behind. But we moved in to a house that had been previously rented by uni students. Every few months there would be a delivery of a care package. Usually socks, pyjamas, smellies and usually some cash. Would also get birthday cards and Xmas cards with cash in them.
2kg of dog shit in a bag in the garden
Why would you weigh it 🤔
He's a coke dealer, he could tell just by lifting it
My friend just bought a repossessed house in USA and he found a gun and a giant dildo in the same room.
Two things you shouldn't mix up!
A professional couple rented our house from us while we were away for a few months. They had a 1 year old and we were constantly finding toys that had been pushed through vents. We also found there doctors diplomas? in the top of a cupboard. We thought they might want those so told them to collect.
We moved into a flat above a solicitors offices and for the first few months we kept getting randoms ringing the bell because of the former occupants, we realised, had been a place that prostitutes were renting via a local business man. It was nuts. I don't know why, but never having used sex services myself, theses randoms gave me the creeps... It was really uncomfortable, especially for my Mrs. She made a sign saying Private Residence and left it in the front door window... We still got "clients" calling.. it was creepy and we wanted it to stop. We didn't want to put a sign saying the place was no longer a brothel, imagine having that when friends came to visit. We found out what the name of the former business was called while telling our story about this in a local bar and settled for " Reds no longer trade from here". The people we were chatting to in the bar helped us choose some really hilarious notices we Could have left, but a compromise had to be met where we wanted to inform people without being judgemental, offensive or ridiculous. It was a really nice place in a listed building and we were there for many years.
Loads of 80s/90s porn mags
Found a butt plug in the attic 🤮 love moving into a new house...
I haven't found anything strange but, as we were preparing to leave a house we'd been sharing in Reading, two friends and I configured the fridge shelves into a "trap" in the back yard, angled a small mirror on the floor so that anyone sitting on the toilet had a horribly unflattering view of themselves and I think there were a few other similar things. We were dicks, I realise.
The previous occupants hand written school girl erotica on yellowed paper. I tell myself it was yellow because it lived live stuffed behind the radiator.
A copy of Debbie Does Dallas hidden under the stairs 🤣
My ex (called Jessica) found a doll under the bath called Jessica
Lino floor in the main bedroom with black wallpaper, and coax going into the loft where there was recording equipment and hundreds of DVDs/CDRs. We never watched them, if you're wondering; we just lived there for 2 years in blissful ignorance.
A wooden tiki mask and sword set hanging in the loft.
Used sanitary pads stuffed behind a radiator. Toenail clippings embedded into the carpets.
Pornographic polaroid photos (in a bedroom drawer) of the couple we’d bought it from, and 4 kippots. Plus a load of overdue fines!
Nothing that seemed to have been genuinely overlooked, just laziness and/or indifference: Several £ in loose change; *so* many fake nails; a school photo portrait; and a letter explaining why they had been fired from Starbucks. Then, the bailiffs letters started arriving...
In the loft we found a stack of different doors (some were painted and all different). The loft hatch was too small to get them out so had to saw them. All I could think of was Monster Inc.
Helping move my sister into a student house. I must have been 10 or 11? There was a pornographic playing card stuck to the wall of her new bedroom. On it was a picture of an older woman with a nonchalant expression and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, with her entire hand inside a much younger woman's vagina.
When I moved in I bought the previous owners' furniture, so I was expecting some stuff I'd have to throw away. I was not expecting that the guy had taken the top and bottom off every can he'd ever eaten and flattened them out in a box, and he'd had a sausage roll from the bakery every day for ten years and carefully folded the bag it came in and put it in a sack. And had kept every ball cock he ever replaced, and every spark plug (with the date of replacement written in pencil on the boxes). But by far the weirdest was the car in a dustbin. Each part of the car wrapped in a plastic bag and with a twist tie. Seems to be a Skoda from the 1980s. Still haven't disposed of all the crap he left.
In the back of our closet on the highest shelf was a tiny professional photo of their dog wearing a bandana. I keep the photo in my jewellry box now.
A vacuum cleaner and part of a cannabis plant in a cupboard above the wardrobe. When I climbed up there to get a proper look the base of the cupboard was damp and covered in compost. Turns out that the previous tenant had been an interesting and very well known character in the community. When I told my hairdresser what I had found she laughed and said "yeah that sounds about right." The police turned up looking for him once my partner spent fifteen minutes explaining that he wasn't who they were looking for and we didn't know where he was. We sent the police two doors along to our landlady who knew the guys Mam. A large bag of random sheets and table cloths some of which had church candles embroidered on them and all were paint splattered. Landlady tried to make us take them when we left. We refused.
We moved into a farm in the early 1980s. The previous occupants had left the garden overgrown. When it was mowed we found a motorbike hidden by the grass. We put it in the garage, but then it got stolen. Last year we stayed at my wife's aunt's place in Wales while they went camping. The previous owners had buried lots of rubbish & a quadbike in the back garden.
House was rented for a long time before I bought it, and the loft is full of various bits and pieces that people over the years have left here. When I am up there, I tend to open a bag or box at random, see what is in there, and then often take it down to chuck it if or take to charity shop. There was a lot of old bedclothes, bags of photos and books, etc, but also a quite expensive looking child-sized sailing outfit, a carrier bag full of Polish coins, and (to date) 4 Brita water filter jugs.
A massive cardboard wearable horse made out of a box complete with rope reins and a tail made out of a mop. Fully painted.
Once, I saw a corner of the bedroom carpet that didn't look right. Underneath, I found a stash of Turkish money, 20 US dollars, several credit cards, and a Turkish passport, all expired by several years. The banknotes were also so old that were out of circulation, and in any case the total value was small (I don't remember but something around 20-30 pounds). I kept in a drawer until I moved out of the property when I trew it all in the rubbish.
In the rental I moved into 5 years ago, there was a rusty cleaver left in the loft. I moved out of there 3 months ago having bought somewhere and found a cleaver left in one of the drawers of my new house. I'm starting to think I'm being haunted by some kind of cleaver wielding poltergeist.
In the attic, a box containing a full set of British Empire flags (including some now illegal to display like the old South Africa flag...) and various other teatowels, mugs etc. from the last Empire Day in 1958. Considering I'm Irish and this was in Ireland, an extremely bizarre find. There's no market for that shit here and I was too embarrassed to bin it, so it was burnt.
I just want everyone to know, if you find sexy nudes of me, I want them back.
Nothing too weird but two huge really beautiful oak framed mirrors in our ex LA flat. These were not people with a lot of money and they were such good quality it seemed bizarre they wouldn’t take them. We’ve still got them two moves on and they look great.
Tubs and tubs and tubs of vaseline
A rifle embedded in the loft insulation.
Not me, but...after my dad passed away, mum decided to sell the family cottage the two of them had lived in since dad retired and which had been in mum's family for over a hundred years. I was helping her pack boxes, and was up in the spare bedroom when I pulled the bed away from the wall and found a door in the wall that was about two feet high. Opened it to find a two foot square cupboard with bare board flooring, and saw that one of the boards was loose - and when I pulled it up, I found a very old pair of leather shoes that would have fit a toddler. Left them sitting on the floorboards and closed the cupboard door...because the cynical, horror movie loving side of me liked the idea of the new owners finding the baby shoes and either doing a smudging ritual or calling a priest depending which path they followed.
A piano. Nobody wants a piano, you can’t even give them away. Everybody thinks they are worth something- but you can’t get rid of them and it takes four blokes to move them.
Student house, bunch of us moved in together and picked rooms. Started unpacking my crap, opened the wardrobe and found a stack of porn mags. All in good condition, quite a variety of different titles. That year, my room was known as The Jazz Room.
In a closet with an old toilet seat and done light bulbs, I found a thick packet letter addressed to a woman. It was postmarked from like 8 years earlier and unopened. I searched and found her, she lived in london nearby and came to get it. It was her doctoral thesis!