People Ask For Help Identifying Weird Objects, And The Answers Are Surprising (And A Little Creepy)
“I was at my grandparents’ farm; huge, over 1,000 acres.
We went to where a house my great great grandparents had lived in was once located. Although the house was gone, there was still a garage.
I was pretty young, so I looked through a hole in the door and saw a car stamped with ‘MER’ on it.
I said ‘Dad, it’s a Mercedes!’ to which he laughed and said ‘no, it’s probably a Mercury, son.’ People out there don’t drive German sports cars.
A week later my dad was on the phone with one of the renters on that land and told him that story.
Apparently, there wasn’t supposed to be a car there, but we had found the door locked or rusted shut.
The renter goes over with a sheriff, and find a teenager frozen to death in the driver’s seat. I’m really glad I couldn’t open the door.
The story we heard from the sheriff was that he had run away from home in the fall (this was late winter/early spring) and he had nowhere to go. It’s about as remote as you can get, and he probably found the garage and parked his car there to be hidden. He was apparently covered in blankets, frozen to death probably on the first night, but maybe he came and went a few times. I’m guessing it was unlocked, and then rusted shut? I remember yanking it hard a few times with my dad, but it didn’t budge, and whats to see anyway? It’s just an old rotting garage, so we gave up.
I don’t think it’s that he ‘couldn’t get out,’ but I think he just didn’t make it. It’s northern Missouri, so on the wrong night, it can get very cold on the plains, and he couldn’t run his car for heat, he would have died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Come to think of it, that may have been it? I doubt there was an autopsy.
The family hadn’t known anything for months, so a very sad story, but at least (I?) found the body.
If I had never made that funny little observation, who knows, it could have been years until someone went to that garage.”
They Found A Noose In A Secret Room
An anonymous Redditor shared this story:
“In my sophomore year of college my friends and I decided that we wanted to rent a house. My mom was handling all of my loans at the time (just the paperwork, not the actual paying of said loans) so she wouldn’t let me move in, but I hung out there a lot. We were checking out the house and looked behind this big furnace only to find a door that couldn’t be seen from the main walkway and the realtor obviously didn’t know about it as she didn’t show it to us. We went in and the lights didn’t work so we brought a flashlight. As we walk in the room we notice it smells really stuffy and it’s pretty apparent that nobody had been in there for a long time. Upon further investigation we find that there is a noose hanging from a 1000 lb weight bracing unit on the ceiling and there were all kinds of things written all over the walls (plus a bunch of old junk that had been thrown in there). We’re not sure what happened in the house and nobody knew about the room, so we cut down the noose and never went in that room.”
Floppy Disks Full Of Adult Entertainment On A Shelf
Redditor ahardfloppy started things off with this interesting tale:
“Two or three years ago, I was looking through a bookshelf in a very communal and frequently used part of my parents’ house, the house I grew up in.
I found a few floppy disks, which was weird, because it was the mid ’00s. Since we still had a desktop computer with a floppy drive (Dell), I popped them in to see what, if anything, they had on them.
Yeah, it was porn. Still images of several women spread eagle.
I’m still trying to figure out if it was my brother or my father who created these anti-floppy floppies. I just don’t understand why either of them would have left them out in such an obvious and open place. Anyway, my brother is a Redditor, so maybe he’ll see this and fess up.
TL;DR – Rule 34”
Odd Things In An Attic
This one was contributed by jonny_lube:
“My current apartment was left with all sorts of freaky [stuff]. When I started renting the place, the previous tenant [passed] after living there for 90 years. I was told by my landlord that upon cleaning out the basement, he came across three casks of prohibition whiskey. Pretty [cool] stuff.
Once we moved in, my roommate and I continued to explore the place to find other relics of a past era. The main floor was fairly empty, however when we found our way into the attic, we encountered all sorts of bizarre stuff. The attic itself has no electricity. It is dark, cold, and the walls are messes of remnants of peeled paint and mysterious stains from ages ago. One room … consists of a pair of four-foot-long wire bed frames, an old sewing machine, and what looks like a noose made from pantyhose. In the corner is a dresser with four empty drawers, and one drawer that clearly has something in it, but the knobs have been removed and despite our efforts, we have been unable to pry it open.
The other room in the attic is a little more on the fun end. Other than a pair of disgusting 1940s couches, there is an old Victrola, newspapers from the 1940s (hilarious) as well as an oddly placed dream catcher hanging from a small, 1.5×3 ft ‘closet.’
All in all, there was a lot of bizarre and interesting things left in the house. The most unexplainable however, showed up a year and a half into my residency. I woke one day only to find scribbled in red on the wall of my bedroom, the word ‘Miaau.’ Nobody has been able to explain what it means or where it came from. Pretty weird stuff.”
Meat Hooks In The Basement
anthropology_nerd shared this story:
“My family purchased a 100-year-old house in upstate New Hampshire. The previous owner was a German guy who made his own sausage in the basement and sold it out of the front parlor of the house.
Imagine, if you will, half a basement that is stone-lined, dark, with a dirt floor and perfectly creepy in its own way. There were massive gaps between hanging light bulbs so you frequently walked/ran in the dark after turning off the lights to go upstairs. Combine this part of the basement with the other half (tucked around a corner under a newer addition to the house) built to sanitation code with white plastic walls, concrete floor, temperature control, a walk in freezer (for some reason with no door handle if you were locked inside), and meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. After the initial exploration, my brother and I never went in the basement.”
The Secret Room
Redditor otherself commented:
“I lived in this big, but really crappy party house for a year, and after we all left, a bunch of our friends moved in. It was an old house, and our landlord sucked – would put up plexiglass for the windows instead of actual glass, when we complained of the drafts moving through, he tried to board up the windows with plywood… Anyway, our friends who moved in afterward rearranged the kitchen, and thus, found a random square cut in the wall where some shelves were.
So they popped it out to see what was behind it – ends up, there’s practically another room between the kitchen and the dining room. A skinny room, more like a random strip of space. But then there was a ledge, which I guess we assumed was what the attic crawl space was supposed to be from upstairs, and on that ledge, they discovered a sleeping bag, a pillow, and other random things – all of which weren’t that old and looked fairly used.”
Is It An Exorcism Kit?
From YouveBeenDuplicated:
“Not my house, but my grandmother’s … She [passed] early last year, and I was given the task of clearing out her house for sale. Among a lot of valuable but mundane antiques there was a really worn-out picture of Jesus in a wooden frame, a few inches thick, which I found in her room. Just by chance, I noticed there was a rusty latch on the side. The picture actually opened from the back and revealed a very odd assortment of items: I remember a large wooden cross, vial, rosary, cloth, and spoon (?). The stuff really looked ancient. I knew my grandmother was very religious (went to church every day, house and car filled with religious paraphernalia) so it didn’t surprise me. When I showed it to my mother though she had no idea what it was, she’d seen the picture before but never knew it opened up. Personally I like to think it was an exorcism kit or something of the like.”
A Dangerous Kit In The Crawlspace
A contribution from Redditor dailydishabille:
“Shared a house with some friends years ago on the Northeast side of our town.
We’d lived there for a while but had never really spent much time down in the basement, so we got drunk one night and took a peek around.
The basement was half-finished and had a dirt crawlspace that started under the far edge of the basement and extended under the porch. My roommate scurries under there with a flashlight and takes a look around. We hear him yell that he’s found something and minute or so later he emerges with a black canvas duffel bag clutched in his hand.
Excitedly we opened the bag and found: two black ski masks, a 4 1/2″ hunting knife with a broken handle, and a single black leather glove.
We debated what to do with our find, and eventually we decided to call police non-emergency and ask if any of their detectives were interested in our find.
Turned out they weren’t, so we burned the bag, the mask and the glove, and I kept the knife.
Still have it, too.”
A Missing Fish
This one is from Cadejo:
“I had an aquarium when I was younger. My fish, Fireball, lived in it. One day, I woke up and Fireball was no longer in his tank. Weird. I looked all around the bookcase that the aquarium was on top of. No fish. About five years later, my family moved out of that house, and I finally found Fireball. He was under the bookcase. No… not behind… under. RIP, friend.”
An Embroidered Yarmulke
This weird find is from elphilo:
“I found a [yarmulke] underneath my TV stand in my bedroom when I was moving out of my parents’ place. It was embroidered and looked really nice. I’m not Jewish and the only Jewish friend I had at the time was non-practicing and had no idea where it came from either. It had to [have] been under there for years since it was dusty as hell too.”