What is the oddest or most unusual thing you have found in your own home?

Well, my house/yard is over 100 years old. I find unusual things in the yard all the time if I start digging around. Horse shoes and stuff.

At my parents’ house, my dad found a stop sign buried a few inches deep in the front yard.
@dutchess_III that’s so cool, like a treasure hunt.

I have a related story about dead frogs. In one of my classrooms at my old school, I opened one of the blinds and found a huge frog or toad dead on the window sil. I wasn’t sure whether it was a frog or a toad, especially because the color had drained from it, but it was pretty big.

I found a dead bat on the inside of my bedroom window sill, a few inches above my head, about three months ago. It had been dead at least 6 weeks. It was during Lucky Guy’s bout with anti rabies. Ish.

Some time ago I beated a mosquito to death. Yeah, nothing usual about it, medium-sized, had white stripes, carried a big belly of blood by the time it got hit… But the interesting thing is that it stays alive for about 5 minutes after being hit, even though the belly had been completely destroyed. After 5 minutes I cut off its head just for kicks, and it could still move for 2 minutes more! Maybe my eyes were cheating me, but that was the toughest animal I’ve ever seen.

Right after being hit, it made a shrieking sound I had never heard from any other mosquitoes. Maybe the thing I hit wasn’t a mosquito?

Three cases of Xango (mangosteen juice) on an upper shelf in my closet. My uncle lived here in the late 90s- early 2000s and was involved in all kinds of door-to-door sales schemes. I also found a 90s-era pamphlet about “THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF DOING BUSINESS ON THE INTERNET.”

I found a bayonet as would attach to a rifle in my basement.

Not my house but I helped a friend replace the floorboards on his front porch. Underneath we found the husk of a possum. It was normal possum-shaped, but the innards had dried up, leaving it like a possum-shaped brittle balloon.

Reading this thread, I realize we should have left something odd for the future people to puzzle about. Like an old chair and a discarded TV to make it look like someone hung out down there.

I found Santa stuck up the chimney, he began to shout, so I burnt his arse with a blowtorch & sent him on his way.

Farmers don’t throw things away.so I’ve found interesting stuff in the barn. (And still have it because I don’t like throwing out stuff that can be used.)
– A granite gravestone for an infant that died 50+ years ago. It looks like the stone was being carved and they made a mistake and started over on another stone. The farmer got it and used it as a weight for things. I, too, used to put it on the back of my tractor for extra weight when plowing snow.
– A nice piece of plywood that has the word “Peaches” and an arrow pointing to the right. They used to sell peaches here. (Mmmm… peaches…)
– A large 3D relief map of Europe from 1956. It is still hanging on the wall in the basement!

This morning when I got up, I found this about a foot from where I found the frog carcass, yesterday. But I knew that it had fallen off of a shelf above the bathroom closet door.
Still…

The house I rented when I first moved here had pillars that helped hold up the front porch. The renters before me got pissed at the land lord so they pulled one of those pillars down. I assume they used a rope and a truck. Anyway, I bugged my land lord to replace it, and he finally did. But the kids and I made a time capsule to drop into the empty space the broken pillar had left, before it was repaired. This was in 1995. So….someday.

I found a 1932 Hoard’s Dairyman in the wall of my stepfather’s house when we were remodeling his kitchen. Not quite as neat as the FL lady that found an 11 foot python.

When I was little and doing weeding, I found a penny from 1900. I was never so excited. Thus began my love with history I guess. I still have it to this day.

@ibstubro Is there any chance you have a rodent, like chipmunk or red squirrel, in your house? They are strong enough to nudge things.
I have “decorated” the beams in my basement with pop cans from all over the world. When I travel to a foreign country I pick up a few because they’re so interesting and show different levels of technology.
They serve a second, more critical, purpose however. Mice like to travel on the beams and will knock precariously perched cans off the beam and onto the floor making a loud noise and giving me an indication of their location.
They do not roam for long.

@LuckyGuy Yeah, but doesn’t the spackle from repairing the bullet holes add up? Same idea I had for the cat wake up’s. But the animal rights yahoos would have been all over me.

I live near a busy 2 lane highway and the vibration has been known to ‘walk’ things off of shelves, @LuckyGuy. A tumbler ‘walked’ it’s way off a glass shelf in the front window and did several hundred dollars worth of damage when it landed. Life happens. I should install fishing line and thumbtacks, but I don’t.

Several years ago, I heard splashing, scratching, bumping, sounds coming from the bathroom. Upon investigation, I saw some kind of wet creature on the bathroom floor and it was alive. I was very afraid and thought it was a rat, so I quickly shut the door and called my husband at work. He came home, peeked into the bathroom and said it was a small squirrel. We opened the back door and with brooms in hand, got the squirrel out of the house. He kind of seemed to know the way out. The squirrel had come up through the toilet bowl. Thank goodness, I was not using the toilet at the time or I probably would have had a heart attack or a very scratched and bit up ass!

Man, one time I got up. The dogs were worrying about something in the corner. They weren’t barking, just nosing. So I went and looked. There was a possum looking up sadly at me. All I could say was “Oh my!”
So I called animal control. Until they got here I was on my computer, posting about this event with the possum sitting quietly in his corner, about 5 feet behind me.

A bat flying around in our bedroom. Hubby’s a caver, so he looked at it, said not to worry, that it was a healthy but endangered Indiana brown bat, and to go back to sleep. I moved to the couch and told him he could enjoy the bat without me. Eventually he caught it and released it.

When I was living in Chicago I went on assignment out of town for about four weeks. When I got home and was putting my bags in the bedroom I saw what I thought was a tie I had left on the floor. I bent over to pick it up and it slithered under the bed. Scared the shit out of me. It was a 4 ft garden snake. What the hell was a snake doing in my apartment in December in Chicago? Turns out, another tenet had pet snakes and I was lucky enough to find one of the smaller ones in my bedroom. both it and I survived the ordeal but we didn’t stay together.

Oh! Awful @Jaxk!

We had a bat show up just a couple of days ago. I saw something flying around the living room, assumed it was a bird, but quickly saw that it was not. I yelled for Rick, then we met up in the utility room, looking for something to catch it. He grabbed something and went out, and I shut the door.
After he got the bat out of the house I came out of the utility room and ‘splained that I had been looking for something all that time, so I could HELP him. I wasn’t really hiding.
He didn’t believe me. :/

@Dutchess_III – Plausible deniability is all you need. We had a bat invade the pool hall I used to hang out in. Everyone was trying to hit the bat with their pool cues. The bat survived just fine but several of the players took a few shots from wayward pool cues. It looked like an episode of the three stooges.

Oh, I can see that in my mind! So funny @Jaxk!

It was not in my house but one of my dad’s rental units I was renovating when the old tenant got busted by the FBI. I was moving an overhead light fixture in the drop ceiling and while up in the ceiling I saw a bundle of cash. it was $10,000 cash all $100.00 bills. I took it to my dad and he said let’s keep it in the safe and if in 6 months no one claims it, it will be mine. 6 months go by and I go get a new pair of hikers and took my GF out to dinner. One night I was looking at the money and I $hit my pants as I noticed 2 bills had the same serial number. It was all counterfeit!

Long story short….2 year later the US Marshall was knocking at my door wanting to have a talk with me. It took a lot of real money and a very good white collar lawyer to keep my a$$ from going to jail. The only fun part of the story was the FBI wanted to know where I got the money and when I told them it was in that rental unit….they refused to believe me because they said they searched that entire place. I told them well you did not do a very good job now did you! lol

SO glad you’re back! So how did they trace the money back to you @Cruiser?

I found a 1953 red Ryder bb gun in the basement of my old house tucked behind a wall that was partially finished.

@Dutchess_III This is not something I care to share in public! Smart people sometimes do dumb things is all I will say.

How did a squirrel get in the sewer, @prairierose? I guess I have septic, making it unimaginable.

A possum can not be undisgusting, @Dutchess_III, and I can’t imagine one would try. IMO, of course.

Good for that catch and release, @snowberry. Not so high on the scale of spousal sensitivity.

I don’t mind snakes, @Jaxk, but the stealth and randomness can put me off. Oh, and my ignorance. I wouldn’t know a garden snake from a python.

I think bats are cool, @Dutchess_III. I wouldn’t want one living in my home, but I wouldn’t have a problem with it staying there until I could catch it.

Great story, @Cruiser!

Keep or sell, @ARE_you_kidding_me?

@ibstubro The squirrel had climbed into the sewer vent on the roof of our house.

OIC, @prairierose. I have septic, as I said, so I had a hard time getting ‘there’. :)

@ibstubro Was my explanation sufficient?

@ARE_you_kidding_me I found a 1953 red Ryder bb gun

You’ll shoot your eye out!

The house with the bat incident was over 100 years old. It was made up two log cabins that had been moved to the site at different times and cobbled together to make a house. Later different residents added on a new room or so at different times in order to expand it. The house was sprawling with an unusual floor plan, as you might imagine. When we were renovating it, our electrician was pulling wire. He grabbed a black one, but it pulled back. It turns out a previous resident installed a black snake in the attic to control the rodent population. When we found it, it was HUGE.

@ibstubro Possums are fine. They’re very passive. They just look scary because they have 60 some teeth! They don’t bother me.
Bats carry rabies.

Yeah, gotcha, @prairierose.

They had turned a real black snake loose in the attic, @snowberry??

Possums are mutant ninja rats from hell, @Dutchess_III, and you can’t convince me otherwise. When we pass them as roadkill, we say ”There’s a good possum!” The only critter I will swerve toward rather than away from.

@ibstubro Yes, a REAL black snake, and as there wasn’t really an attic, it was inside the ceiling. It might have been the same people who kept a mountain lion in the crawl space or built a bonfire on the living room floor. You might say the place was a fixer upper by the time we got it.

Have you ever watched the movie The Money Pit? That was us in our first house. We loved it though. We had 3 acres and some of it was old growth timber. It had two creeks on the property. One had industrial grade rubies in it and the other had gold.

Tom Hanks and Shelly from Cheers, @snowberry. Loved it!

Sounds like the perfect place for newlyweds. :)

Prior to buying my current house, I looked at one that enclosed an old log cabin and looked out over a lake. I was afraid I would have trouble making it to work (it was very remote) so nixed it. But I loved the idea!

I found an old “garage sale” sign, obviously from the previous owners. It was up in the rafters of my garage, used to support objects, attic-style. The sign had times and dates which pre-date my ownership of the house by three years.

I peed on a possum in the dark at the lake once, by accident. If that wasn’t grounds for aggressive behavior on the possum’s part, I don’t know what is. That would have been an interesting one to ‘splain at the ER.
But he didn’t do a thing.
Rick picked him up with a shovel and threw him in the lake. I felt so sorry for the poor thing, trying to play dead and not drown at the same time!

@ibstubro Still have it

I think the key is how long you’ve been in the house, @Yetanotheruser?

Somewhere on Fluther, @Dutchess_III is an account or two of my brother, sister and I carrying a possum into the basement garage of my parent’s house and being forced to chase the fuc basta critter back out. Harrowing experience that left an imprint on my soul in regards to possums. They are equal to moles on my “If I Was King of the World” list.

Very cool, @ARE_you_kidding_me. Can you still shoot it?

I once found a blue bug in the kitchen sink. It looked like a beetle. It was huge. I managed to shove it down the sink, I was so freaked out.

So you carried the possum in, but chasing it out was scary? Because…he was scared at that point? Anything will bite if they’re forced into it. Possums are the least likely to bite, however. But they will. The second possum we ended up with in our house bit the animal control dude’s boot, and all the dude did was STOMP ON ITS TAIL!

Actually, the tree frog was not unprecedented. I have had several catch-and-release lizards, and I’ve had a petrified lizard on a mouse glue-board trap before.

@ibstubro yep, still shoots.

I have my childhood pellet rifle, @ARE_you_kidding_me, but I had to buy it from my brother, 35 years later.
Long story. Enjoy!

I don’t have my first red ryder anymore, it was plum worn out anyway. That was the toy that defined my childhood for sure. This antique one will not put a hole through a cardboard box but it’s nice that it still works. Still has the original leather tassel on the side too. I miss the Pumpmaster 760 I had as tween and have toyed with the idea of getting another for nostalgia and to do some performance modifications to.