Strangest Thing that Came with Your House

Now thats the best one yet!
Happy Birthday to him.
Bernie

Looks like he was an Easter baby! A very late happy 3rd birthday from another Minnesotan (along with Bernie).

He was! He was born Easter weekend. Right now he think's the Easter Bunny and birthday are the same thing! Luckily it doesn't hit on his birthday every year! Last b-day we had a Spiderman, Easter Bunny party. It was one big party all day! Easter Bunny, church, then Birthday! Spoiled little feller!

Nicole

Too much to list, but:
Here's a start-- a previous owner took out the tub and installed the most god-awful walk-in basin thing, cut half of the 100 year old ash window frame away and walled/tiled over half the window opening:
http://www.bikechicago.info/pics/crack.jpg
http://www.bikechicago.info/pics/drain.jpg
http://www.bikechicago.info/pics/track.jpg
http://www.bikechicago.info/pics/window.jpg

Ack! Any after pictures? That looks like a lot of work!!

Nicole

The mystery and intrigue is killing me...

golddog will you please go check out what is behind that 4'x4' door and share with us all what you find? I can't believe you've made it 15 years without taking a peek. I would have taken an axe to the door while the moving trucks were backing up to unload my property on the day I was moving in.

I loved everyone's stories! I have a couple that might make you chuckle.

We moved into a 100+ yr old farmhouse in a small rual farming community in MI, from a big metro area in south Fl in 95. Our DD was 10 at the time and did not adjust well to this move, she NEVER liked to be dirty messy or anything OLD and did not understand the word "renovation"

The house has always been in my family and when my grandfather passed away, my mom ( who lived in FL) rented it out for 13 years, so no real work had been done to house and the last repair my grandfather had done was back in the early 70's when he put up paneling in the kitchen to stop the plaster from falling off the walls.

Our DD cried when she first saw the house and her bedroom, IT WAS BAD! So the first room we tackled was her bedroom.... We ripped the old horse hair plaster off the walls right down to the slats and due to the type of construction, my DH, who is a builder said we had to remove the slats so he could try to level and insulate the walls. Well here he is on a 6ft ladder with his crowbar in the middle of the room and he wedges that crowbar in the slats in the ceiling and just RIPS a huge hole thru those slats and then it just starts POURING out black walnuts, thousands of these things, they are just pouring on his head and he can't do anything but stand on that ladder with this dumbfounded look on his face!
These things must have been coming out of that hole for 10 minutes, by the time they stopped, they were 2ft deep in 10x12 room, we had to get shovels and fill those big garbage cans to get them out of the house. To this day DH wonders what kind of R value those walnuts had.

Then, one night when our DD was 17, she came into our bedroom and woke us up and said she had SNORING SQUIRRELS in her bedroom wall! of course DH woke up and said "WHAT the ?!@# do you mean SNORING SQUIRRELS!? GO back to bed!" Well DD hasn't changed much in the last 7 yrs, she was/is still a priss, so I get up and go in her room and lay accross her bed where she hears these Snoring Squirrels, she's right there with me and we don't hear a thing, but she is pleading her case so I make a fist and I'm going to TAP the wall and see if that disturbs the squirrels so I can hear them. WELLLLL, one small, light tap and my fist goes thru the wall and out comes BEES, lots and lots of BEES. Needless to say none of us got much sleep that night! DH doesn't ponder what R value the bees had: just mad they ate his insulation and drywall.

Kizzie! MY MY! That sounds like a movie!! You should write a story about it! Good grief!!!

Nicole

In our old house in Ontario I found an odd discovery. Opened the crawl space into the attic to check for Raccoons cause we had some that were always in our yard. Turned on the flashlight and nope no raccoons or signs of them but a pool table. The crawl space entrance is 2 by 3 feet wide. How and why it was up there I have no clue. Wasnt in disrepair or anything just a generic (no detail work on the wood) pool table in working order. Never played on it though as the heat and insulation made breathing awful. Anyways told the people that bought the place and that was that.

We have something strange in our attic, too. We guess it is some kind of antenna. It consists of two thick wire (or thin bar) ovals, about the proportions of paper clips, (but much larger, of course, like two feet long). I forget now if one is on top of the other or if one is inside of the other, but they are attached to each other at each's center and arranged perpendicular to each other. The long direction is horizontal. This assembly is on a small pole and is attached to an attic floor stud.

This place was "really old" in 1929 I was told by the visiting old man who had move here then as a child. It was added onto several times, porches later became rooms, and the old logs were covered over with T&G pine inside, lapboard outside, sometime in the 40's which is when the home was registered on the town rolls. No records of it seem to exist prior to that time. Now it is sided with vinyl due to the poor condition of the wood in some places.
The inside walls were multi-layered with paint and many damaged, so drywall went over them. All in all the walls in the original parts of the house are over a foot thick. In the attic some of the old logs and wooden pegs used to join corners can be seen/found. The only closets in the house were 2 small ones outside the bathroom door in a tiny hall way. The bath still has the glass towels rods which I saved, but the rusted out metal shower stall had to go, along with it's sink.
The kitchen had a 'store bought' sink and cabinet, but the only thing similar to a shelf or cupboard was a metal medicine cabinet on the opposite wall (?). The chimney access for a wood stove pipe was stuffed with foil. The walls were painted in some areas with patches of green and orange paint, and floor to ceiling red velvet drapes were hung at the kitchen windows.
Due to horizontal T&G boards, it was easy to see how one side of a couple rooms are easily 8 inches higher than the other, and an outside corner near a doorway is flush at the bottom, but 4 inches out at the top. The door in the hall is weirdly cut to fit a leaning door way that is also wider at bottom than top. Clearly no levels were used here! There was a flat dried out cat in the attic, and an old dead freezer with a huge dried out rattlesnake in it outside!! It has been remodeled to a fair degree, with a 16x20 addition also added on, but it will never be large or fancy, but feels very solid and comfortable.
I know of at least 3 people that died here, one when a storm knocked a log from the top of the wall, hitting a new mother who was holding her infant son. The blow from above/behind caused her to pitch forward, flinging the infant into the arms of an aunt who then raised him. The mother died on impact. The 'infant' still lives in the area and visited once briefly, now in his late 70's. The other two were more natural, an elderly cancer patient, and the other an old woman in her eighties, the mother of the man who had moved here in ''29, blind at the end, who loved flowers but could no longer see them. With her in mind I have planted especially fragrant bushes at key points in the yard so if my sight fails as hers did, I will still have the enjoyment of some of my flowers, and know where I am in the yard. I'm sure she approves, and I personally haven't seen any ghosts to date I'm glad to say. Nearest to it was when 'something' took control of my computer mouse arrow, and tried to take over the Solitaire game I was playing. It tried several times to put the wrong card on stacks while I banged the mouse, then sat watching. It gave up after several more tries then let me finish the game alone. Pretty weird and confusing, but nothing visible. Maybe a computer glitch.
However, a temporary renter insisted an extremely good looking but anxious young man had appeared in the dining room one day asking where her boyfriend, the cancer patient was. When the surprised woman said he was in the shop out back, the man disappeared before her eyes. Scared witless she ran out to the shop to confirm his existence, but he had never shown up there. I don't care how cute he might be, I would prefer never to meet him!

Whoa! Pictures of this place?

Starting as a simple 300 sq ft one room log cabin on 20 acres some time in the 1800's, it's gradually been expanded (and land reduced ) into a simple 1600 sq ft house on three acres; just right for two old folks like us ;)

Many of the other oddities have been covered over, but this corner and the door are hard to hide! All doors, including the front door, locked or unlocked with the same skeleton key. Some of that has also changed ;)

If you meant pictures of the flat cat or snake, you are way too late!

This isn't exactly strange, but it isn't "me". This is what I call the Las Vegas chandelier. It is in the dining room. When we moved in, the prisms were crooked and it was all dusty and looked pretty bad. I figured that it would be one of the first things to go, but 8 years later, it's still there. After the prisms were cleaned and hung back on straight, it looked fairly decent. It still isn't "me", but one thing it does is provide a lot of light. That is the main thing I want out of a light fixture.

I washed the prisms today, so here is the Las Vegas chandelier at its best (except for 4 burned out light bulbs.)

That's retro cool... Looks like melting Ice :))

Susan

That chandelier is neat! It looks like hand blown art glass in the picture. If so it is worth a mint! I understand it is not for everyone's taste but there are a lot of people out there that would love to find such a great piece!

Love the chandelier!

It does look like ice, but it isn't hand blown. It also looks more golden in the picture than in real life, but it is clear glass. The metal components are brass.

From outside at night, it looks like a UFO hovering in the dining room. I get a kick out of that.

LOL kelli.
Pati

The hanging glass looks like transparent cloth of some kind, with its pleats. Although I do confess to not being an expert on hanging transparent cloth.

Hey golddog, did you ever get into that room under the back porch? I swear I would have broken in there as curiosity would have gotten the best of me.

Last year, I asked hubby to plant some bulbs in a certain location, but he couldn't...there was cement a few inches under dirt. He uncovered it and tried to see where it would go...it just stops in the middle of our yard. We figure there was once an outhouse there. Our house was built in 1902 and so our bathroom is an addition.

We also have skeleton keyholes on all of our doors, including the front and back door, but we don't have the key!! No one in this town locks their doors, so it's never been a problem before, I suppose! I'm not kidding, when the post office had to leave a package, the woman just came in the house to leave it inside! And the neighbors just come on in since there wasn't a doorbell when we moved in! I moved here from a city, and I needed a lockable door! Someone had added an room off of the kitchen (the kitchen is also an add-on), but they didn't finish it and it just had a screen door. So we finished it and put a regular door LOCKABLE door there. But I still haven't completely gotten my husband to remember to actually lock it...

Hubby's also found old pennies and we've found old odds and ends here and there, but it's all junk.

I love this thread! I had to go thru and read every story.
Our house was built in 1895 so has lots of history. We are the first owners outside of the original family and the grandson of the original owners (he also grew up in the house) live right behind us.
Our strangest discovery was in the attic of our garage. My DH had climbed a ladder up there because we could see odds & ends and were curious. He was digging around and let out a shout and almost fell back down the ladder. He yelled out there's a leg up here. It was a wooden leg with the boot still on it. Turned out that one of the prior family members made prosthetic limbs for a living, but it scared my DH to death!!
We also have hidden passageways in between some of our walls, but none of them really go anywhere, just to other rooms that have normal doors, and one of them just ends in a blank wall.
They also left us with cable hook-ups in every room, including both garages, and some have multiple hook-ups. There are a total of 36 places on our property where you can watch cable tv if you wanted.
We also inherited some old dry wells at random places in the yard. I found one by building my pond right next to it, and a stream over the top of it. The first time we had a heavy rain my stream caved right into it. Luckily we also inherited really good soil, because they used to have a barn with cows that wandered around the yard, so lots of fertilizer was put everywhere!!

that's so funny, flowerchild, my dad works with prosthesis and he's a terrible tease!

One of my neighbors and close friend lost both legs in WWII. My twin girls thought he was the NEATEST person they knew because he held up his socks with thumb tacks! LOL
Pati

Cj, I forst moved to the Atlanta area as a result of my kind cousins, who now run Glover Organic Farm in Douglassville GA -- more about them.. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/fyi/student.bureau/01/05/organic.farming/
When I first moved to their home in 1991, a very long time passed before I was going to be home after dark and I asked for the key. They asked me "what key'? They had never locked their doors and they never did while I lived there. The city has moved further out now and I still don't know if they do that, but I wouldn't be surprised!! My doors are locked every night!!

Here's a paranormal dream I had while living there.. it was my cousin Skips families land going back for generations. After I moved in, I had a dream that he was giving me a tour of the home and we walked up a flight of stairs and there were bedrooms up there. I told them my dream the next morning and they both looked at each other and told me that there had been a second story but it had been removed years before due to decay. Freaky!!
:)
Susan

I love all these stories!
Just looked back to see what I had added and find I told you about the house where I lived in the UK and its 'child ghost', but didn't tell you about this one

Along with the house here in France came a pony :)

I love this thread. Our house had zilch, nothing, nada when we moved in. Okay, I take that back - we had stepping stones in the shape of feet outside.

Flowerchild95, I've just got to ask you about your house. How did you find your passageways? Do you have pictures of them? I'm an old mystery lover, and have always been facinated by houses like yours.

Flowerchild was your home on the underground railroad? I have helped with the care of several of those homes and they all hae those features to hide the slaves... just a thought!

Mitch- I may be wrong, but I don't think the underground railroad went as far north as indiana

I know it came through Atlanta. When I was in 8th grade (early 60's) we used to sneak into the basement of our Catholic church and see the rooms of the underground railroad. The long tunnels were boarded up, but the rooms were still there. I think they are long gone by now, though.

There are tunnels in Columbus, Ohio from the underground railroad so I think it is possible it could have been in Indiana.

They went any way North they could to get to Canada, so Indiana is in the possible scope of things... worht checking out would make your home value really jump up!

Went all the way to Canada. Ontario in fact.

Don

Wow that is fascinating to think of having a home like that.

Susan

That house was built in 1895, long after the Underground Railroad.

Good thinking Kell... I would look into your areas history and see who they might need to hide. I know some homes have listening hallways were you could hear people talking in the room with out being there, they were mostly used by some of the mystics of the day who would have one person talk to the people gathered and then the mystic would come out and know a lot of personal information... just another idea. Homes of ill repute also had such hallways to keep the cops or wifes from finding folks... I will dig a little more and see what other places used them.

Just from knowing the family that lived here, I don't think the passages were ever used for anything too exciting. The ones I know are pretty straight-laced, but I guess older generations could have been into something. I know our area at one time had mob ties and at one time we had a big hotel and train station in town, so it may have something to do with that. Have heard that Al Capone used to visit this area. Wouldn't that be exciting to find out that he hid out in my house!!!!