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You never know what the heck you’re gonna stumble upon when you move into a new house or apartment.
I can say that the best thing I ever found was a hand-made desk in Chicago that was a real work of art. I moved with that desk about three times before I had to give it up because I just didn’t have the room.
I miss that desk…
Have you ever found anything in a new place from previous occupants?
AskReddit users shared their stories.
1. Wow! That’s crazy!
“My uncle bought a house from people whose mother had passed away. They left a good amount of stuff in the house, mostly worthless. Christmas decorations, cutlery, etc. In the back of one closet we found a trash bag full of lottery scratch offs. We started going through them and they were all winners.
Turned out to be about 12k in winning tickets. We took a few to the convenience store to check them and they were all past the cash by date and the state lottery would no longer pay them out.”
2. I’ll take those.
“Found out that theres a spot where you can get under the cabinets in the kitchen.
My cat hid there a lot the first couple of days, and after that I noticed a mysterious increase in dusty cat toys. Eventually he dragged all of the previous tenants’ cats’ toys out from under there.”
3. Surprise!
“My husband and I found a Crown Royal bag in the rafters of the basement that previous tenants had left behind.
As soon as I saw it I yelled “Open it! Open it! It’s money or drugs!” It was not money or drugs. It was a purple dildo and some lube.”
4. Hidden in the radiator.
“Way back on January 1, 1976, my family moved into an apartment. I was 10 years old at the time. We had just come to Canada in June.
While we were cleaning my room before painting it, we took off the radiator cover to clean the inside. Under the radiator cover was a complete, hand-made game of Monopoly. I didn’t really know English at the time and didn’t know what Monopoly was.
Later I found out that the two boys living in that room had been a couple of years older than me. Their parents had been very strict old-world traditional and had refused to let them buy a Monopoly game, so they had handcrafted their own and kept it hidden in the radiator.”
5. Ugh, get rid of that.
“A box hidden in a loose board with heroin, and needles…”
6. This is cool.
“A 1950/60s nuclear bomb survival kit.
Complete with rice in a can and a pamphlet that instructed mothers not to let their radiated children inside if the were playing outside when the bomb went off. So amazing.”
7. Hang on to that.
“My dad found a first edition book from Benjamin Franklin. Previous owner was a principal and book collector who killed himself in retirement.
His family didnt check the crawlspace and my dad found a bunch of stuff in it like an autographed baseball bat, playboys, a 5 gallon jar half full of pennies, bunch of valuable books, a bong, painting supplies, a broken antique handgun and sword in a box labeled “cheese”, and then just some clothes.”
8. I’d like to read that.
“Crammed under a built in drawer below a bedroom closet was a police report from the late 60s delineating a missing person/kidnapping case involving the prior, now deceased owner who at the time was teenager.
It also mentions my next door neighbor who was a person of interest in the case. Haven’t talked to him about it, and not sure I want to bring it up….”
9. That’s really cool.
“A Saturday Night Live script with handwritten notes in it.
This was in a Brooklyn apartment at the base of a shelf above the closet. It appeared to be pretty old. I looked up the name of the writer on the script and he was active at SNL about 10 years ago.
Occasionally I’d get mail with the same name on it.”
10. Better lock that up.
“Moved into an old apartment in a college town. It had previously been a fraternity or sorority house all through the 80s. I was at an all greek party alumni and met an older guy who found out I lived in his old frat house.
He immediately asked if we ever partied in the basement. I told him we didn’t have basement access from inside, so no. He then had me follow him back to my house and showed me a false wall next to the bathroom that led down into the basement.
Not gonna lie, it kinda freaked me out. The basement door outside had a broken lock, so anyone could get down there. The false wall was hard to open from the house side, but really easy to push open from the basement. Anybody could have gone down there and come up into my apartment.”
11. Prohibition days.
“Back in the day I rented the upstairs of an old brick house in the small town I grew up in. It was the first brick building to be built and served as a liquor store around the time of prohibition (In Canada on the border of the US). In the attic I found some old liquor bottles in the rafters.
The house down the street was owned by Al Capone. It has secret passage ways in the walls and even a jail cell in the basement.
My father’s childhood home had a hidden cellar under the living room. And some of his neighbors had tunnels in their basements that had been blocked up.”
12. From way back.
“I bought a 130 year old house in New Orleans. So old that drywall hadn’t been invented.
They would just build the walls out of wood and nail newspaper to it so the wallpaper would have something to adhere to. The most interesting thing I’ve found is the newspapers inside the walls reporting on the goings on in New Orleans in 1916.”
13. Smart move.
“My mom and I had moved into a studio apartment following her successfully completing drug court when I was about 11 years old.
I climbed on the counter in the kitchen to clean the top shelf of a cupboard and found a bag of crystal meth. She flushed the bag in front of me, but later in life told me she could have sold it for $200 easily on the street. Always proud of her :)”
14. I’d like to read that.
“When i was eight, we rented a victorian house for a while and found a love letter from 1912 in the banister of the stairs.”
Okay, now it’s your turn!
What’s the weirdest or most interesting thing you’ve ever found in a new place house or apartment?
Tell us in the comments! Let’s get weird!
