10. Unrestricted Access
I lived in Stuttgart, Germany back in the early 90’s.
They had something called Sperrmüll day (bulk refuse), where people would put out their bulky items for collection.
But, a lot of useful and even brand new stuff would go out, so it was common practice for a lot of people to drive around -particularly in the rich neighborhoods- to see if something good was available. I had a lot of furniture, skis, bicycles, etc, that I had gotten this way.
On this particular one, I found a wooden roll top desk that only needed some sanding and refinishing. When I got it home and started taking it apart, one of the locked drawers had a binder with US department of defense schematics for what looked like a howitzer cannon.
The whole thing had lots of RESTRICTED ACCESS stamped all over it.
I called the US embassy (this was at night) and left a voice mail in their emergency contact line. They called me within an hour and 2 MPs and 2 crew cuts in suits showed up at my house in less than 1/2 hour after that! After a lot of questions, thorough examination and some arguing about who would keep the desk (they took a lot of pictures of it and said they might send someone out later to collect it, but never did) they asked me to keep the incident to myself and left.
I never heard anything else about that event. My guess is that the documents were in the possession of a military worker living in the city and someone in his/her household wasn’t careful about throwing stuff away. The fact that people who looked like CIA showed up in my house so fast is the exciting part.
11. A Payday Wrapped in an Enigma
My good friend who used to work at a recycling plant found an Enigma machine.
That’s an encryption device the nazis used.
It was worth like 10.000 dollars.
12. Rabbits!
A box of live rabbits.
I don’t know how this managed to happen, but a lady had mistakenly put the said box in her bin. She was hysterical, came to the site and we found the box with all the rabbits still perfectly healthy.
13. Meth!
I work in the office of a company that collects garbage. I got a call from a customer, and she stated that every time they bring their bin back up from the street, something on it burns their skin.
I called the operations manager who went out to check it out with the environmental officer. Turns out the next door neighbour had a meth lab and was disposing of toxic chemicals in his bin and there was some transfer.
14. An arm
I worked at a recycling plant in Springfield, Ma. One day while we were unloading a cardboard dumpster, we noticed an arm sticking out. There he was, in all his purple glory. This poor gent had drunkenly crawled into a cardboard bin the previous day and ended up being pressed and compacted into a cube. So yeah, that was fun.
15. A Remodel
I’m sort of ashamed to admit it because I feel like it was profiting off the misfortune of others but I lived in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina and I basically rebuilt my house from stuff that people tossed. I was amazed at the amount of stuff people ripped out that was above the waterline. People would literally hire crews to gut their entire house and they would put everything, and I repeat, everything on the side of the road.
I still have a 3 storage units full of house parts I picked up back then that I have slowly been incorporating into my current home renovation. It was truly a shame to see all this great old stuff be tossed and replaced with hardware store junk. I could have filled 10 more units with stuff I saw and couldn’t store.
16. Memories
This was in the early 90’s. I was emptying the public trash cans in a city centre in mid England. I saw this really expensive bound leather photograph holder book. I took it and lobbed it in the cab to check out later.
After work I started looking through it and it started with these fresh faced young soldiers laughing and grinning at the camera. They were doing their training I think in some leafy camp in England. Then it switched to an awful looking desert – it was the time of Gulf War I.
The smiles went and then the carnage came. Busted tanks, cars and people. Fires, death and destruction. Almost unrecognizable burnt corpses. Just horrible, horrible stuff.
Then I stopped looking and threw it away as the owner had intended. I often wonder who threw that away, I hope it was the soldier trying to forget rather than one of his grieving relatives. That was more than 20 years ago but I think of that poor boy a lot.
17. Must’a Took a Ring Off It
Photo Credit: Pixabay/CC0
A friend whose dad was a garbageman (distant I know but still) once told me he found an engagement ring and a pack of condoms in a small disposable bag, he always wanted to know the story behind it.
18. Foot
The creepiest thing was in the early 1970’s, Dad and the other two guys were in East New York, an area of Brooklyn that is really bad. They come across a very large human foot.
Not knowing what to do, they put it in a paper bag and drove to the nearest police precinct. They walk up to the desk Sgt and place the bag in front of him. He asks what is this about?
He gestures to look inside. Desk Sgt does. closes bag up, looks at Dad and his partners, and tells them “Cycle it” (By cycle, he meant just run it through the truck with the other trash). He tells Dad that the foot was likely removed as a warning to someone, that they (the police in that precinct) had seen it before. It was likely drug related. Even if they did find the owner, he wouldn’t talk, and the foot couldn’t be attached back. By moving the foot, they pretty much ruined a crime scene.
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