79 People Share The Strange Things Previous Owners Left Behind In Their Homes

We moved into an old house where the same family had lived from about 1945 to 1998. I was cleaning the attic and happened to move some of the blown-in insulation. I saw what looked like a book. I dug around and found several things. The 1969 Sears Roebuck catalog was intact, so I set that aside and kept digging because there was more. The most interesting item was a girl's diary which she had kept from around 1952 to 1957, her teenage years. I read the whole thing, and it made me sad in a way because here was this young girl writing about her life and now she must be in her 60s and these old memories have been locked away here all this time. The girl had long since grown up and moved away, and the parents had gone into a nursing home somewhere. But I started doing a little sleuthing and found the father's obituary (he had [passed away] a few years before, unknown to me) and it listed his survivors. There were two daughters, and it listed their married names and cities of residence.

I looked up the girl whose diary it was, and sent a letter to her last known address. I told her what I had found and included pictures as proof. Within a week she called me, and not only wanted the diary, but was willing to drive out and get it. She lived about 100 miles away! She and her husband came over, and the other sister and her husband as well. It almost felt like a family homecoming. She was 61 and her sister was 56. I gave her the diary and she said she never knew what happened to it. She couldn't remember hiding it in the attic and thought maybe her mom hid it. Anyway, we gave them a tour of the house and they showed me where their rooms were, and where there used to be a staircase that I never knew about, and some other details (the house had been added onto extensively). So it was a kind of happy ending for her and the diary, and I felt better instead of just keeping it.

I wish to god I had saved it, but it was over 20 years ago. We moved into this old house where the lady had passed away and her family lived far away, so they just sold it as is.

She was 90 when she passed, born in 1905, and she had saved EVERYTHING. There were secret closets filled with old newspapers, phone books from the 1800s, and a collection of old camera.

My favorite thing I found was an old school book. It had little lessons that the young girl would finish. Her mom would comment on each with little notes. "You are so smart and precious to me." "You got X wrong, but I can see how much your handwriting is improving."

It was such a beautiful, simple look into the relationship this woman had with her mom.

When I was a kid we moved into a house that had been built in the 1920's. Mom found a barrel in the crawl space full of crystal glasses from before the depression and lots of other very nice dishes. Mom was stoked.

We moved into a huge federalist home circa 1910, when I was in middle school. The basement was like the catacombs. The former owner was the town coroner. In the basement, in the back room were long freezers, shelves of jars with unidentifiable items in them. We found a bag with a metal hip joint, and it was labeled Mary Kimble’s hip joint. True story.

We bought a house that was previously a children's home for orphans and abandoned
Kids. Huge house. 8 bedrooms 4 big suite full baths etc. 4000 sq ft with big garage. When we were cleaning to move in I opened some cabinets and there were little labels, shoes, t shirts, towels etc. enough for 12 kids in several cupboards. This struck me as so sad. No dressers, just a shelf with labels. Institutional life. We ripped them out painted and lived there for 19 years. Surprisingly often had people drop by and tell us they lived there as children and had good memories of the place.

In a closet was the original blueprint and the contract from the contractor that built it. My $160,000 dollar house was built new for 12 grand in 1962...

I have a weird hidden cubby hole in the dining room. The room has solid oak wall paneling. Well, one of the panels pops off the wall and there is a secret space behind it. My husband and I can fit in the space at the same time. I have no idea why it’s there or what others have used it for in the past.

A friend of mine from highschool had something like this. When we were freshman and his older brother a junior, his brother found 94 bottles of liquor in the attic under the insulation. They were bottles of Takka brand vodka, Takka gin, and Kentucky Tavern Bourbon.

The three of us all quietly used it as our own private stash until Dean (older brother) got a dui and finally told his dad where he got all the old booze that the cops found in the car. Was a great year.

The labels said the booze was from 1979. This occurred in 2005.

Here's a story my mother told me.

One day police came and knocked on her door and told her she had to evacuate her house temporarily. The city brought a bus and picked up all the residents of her block and took them away to a safe place for a few hours. It turned out there was a house up the block that had been occupied by a retired ~~high-school chemistry teacher~~[*]. When he passed away, someone discovered that he had hoarded a bunch of chemicals in his basement that were highly toxic and unstable and might leak or explode. The truck that was going to haul the stuff away needed to pass by my mom's house, so they evacuated the whole block as a precaution. There was no leak or explosion, as it turns out.

When the previous owners [passed away], their kids cleaned out the freezer and just threw everything away. Apparently, they didn't know that their parents had wrapped up their savings in meat paper and stuck it in the freezer.

A girl I know went into the basement of the old house that she was renting and found a spine in the ceiling (it was an unfinished ceiling). She called the landlord and he quickly said it was a dog spine, took it and left.

Later she went to check out a noise in the attic and when she opened the attic door a ton of crayons showered down on top of her.

A really big army type rucksack with nothing in it but false teeth. I don't know why but that was really creepy to me.

$5,000 in cash in a small box.

We bought an old Victorian, the previous owner only had it for 3-4 years when he sold it. He didn't leave much, mostly just some junk and odds and ends, except... everywhere kind of out of the way: In the attic, in the crawlspace, in the water heater closet, in the space under the base of the sink, stuck under floorboards, was just full of machetes. Over 50 machetes. Hidden all over the place. Over ten years and occasionally we still turn one up. Just really creepy.

My brother bought a house. It was full of elephants.
Small ones, big ones, elephants in one color, elephants in many colors. Everywhere.
From the basement to the attic, the whole house. Seriously a [ton] of elephant sculptures.

I was told a hoarder once lived in my house. When she passed, a guy bought the house from the estate, cleaned it up, fixed it up, and sold it to me. He had gotten rid of almost all the bizarre junk but he missed a few things. For example, there was a cabinet on the wall in the garage that contained a big burlap sack full of chicken feathers. Not nice downy feathers like you might make into a pillow--just all kinds of coarse feathers, like if you [ended] a chicken yourself and plucked it and saved all the feathers, and kept doing this until you had a big bag full of feathers. Some of the feathers were bloody.

A box of greeting cards, report cards, letters and pictures. When we put them in chronological order they documented the difficult life of a boy with problems: grades, truancy and difficult relationships. And into a man with a drinking problem and eventual schizophrenia. The final piece with a date was a card from him to his ex-wife from a regional mental institution. In it he writes he's getting better and he will show her he can be a good husband. It's been a while but I recall that other parts of the letter did not indicate he was improving. We found other members of the family in the phone book in town(this was while ago) but realized this box was left on purpose and returning it would not be a happy event for the family. I burned the whole box and prayed for the man and his family.

Above a drop ceiling we found a cheap white leather purse containing a manila envelope with 2 ticket stubs, hotel res, and itinerary from someone's romantic 1980's Caribbean getaway.

The names on the tickets didn't match any of the previous owners.

I briefly lived in an old house way out in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota. On the ceiling in a bedroom in the basement was a hand painted poem that read "I wrote a little poem. I wrote it on my wrist. I wrote it with a blade. I wrote it with a twist". My parents told me the previous owner [took his own life] in the backyard and before that an ederly couple had passed away inside the house. Needless to say, we didn't stay very long.

Friends moved into a house and found a package of meat in the fridge. They called up the previous owners (who'd recently moved to a bigger house after having a baby) and asked them did they want to come back and collect the package of meat they'd forgotten in the fridge...
"Definitely, we'll be over after the weekend for it..."
"Ok, but sure you don't want it for the weekend?"
"Can't make it, but don't throw it out, we, well my wife needs it".
"Uhhhh, ok, fair enough, but why is it that important?"
"It's her placenta. She'll cook it and eat it. It's good for nursing mothers y'see..."

They didn't call back for it after the weekend, so my friend dug a hole in the back yard (a small 125sq plot out the back of UK inner city terrace) and buried the placenta, some decent sized rocks. The next few nights the yard was filled with screeching cats wailing and stalking the area looking for it.