A copy of Duck Soup. Have no idea where it came from.

A gold nugget. My dad took it away from me. I wonder if he still has it.

The adjustable steel columns in the basement of one house I lived in were all set on tombstones.

The tombstones were all mistakes (born/died dates reversed, names mispelt, etc.) but it sure was freaky until we figured that out.

My cousin, Per Ulla.

When we were remodeling my brother's house, we found a warranty card that had been filled out but never sent in from the '60s. My brother worked at an elderly housing community, and he recognized the name on the card as being the same as one of his tenants. He brought the card to him and it turned out it was the same guy -- he had lived in my brother's house at one point.

Mitheral, that would flip me the hell out.

I found an old-fashioned glass milk bottle buried in our yard right behind the back door. It's intact, too... we use it as a vase sometimes when we cut flowers out of the yard.

Oh, and my stepfather, a carpenter, once worked on a house that had at one point had all of its interior walls filled with dirt.

Neither I nor any of my architectural history professors had ever heard of anything like that.

I found a really rough looking iron revolver (all rusted out and wrapped in rags) with a beveled barrel, it was post-civil war but not by much. I grew up in a building built in the 1880's in the neighborhood that was called five points, a rough part of town, so of course I told myself a lot of stories about that gun.

My parents once tore out a wall in a really old house in Long Island and found a secret room with cans of food and a bunch of movie magazines from the fourties.

I've had ghosts talk directly to me in my aunt's house in San Diego years ago. Boy and a girl.
Turns out they died in a fire before my aunt bought the property, and no I'm not kidding.

"Don't leave - help us. Help us."

I was just talking to a friend about this! He just moved into a new place, and in one of the cupboards he found an old sweater and a handgun.

I found a single dying bee in the middle of my livingroom floor on a spring day. It happened again the next two springs.

The house we moved into when I was 10 was a Cape Cod, and so there were a bunch of attic areas (we called'em crawlspaces) under the eaves that you could get to through small square doors in the upstairs closets. In one of them, we found two cataloges from the '50s or '60s: one was for Barbie accessories, the other for model airplanes.

My house was built around 1870. I was running some wires in the basement last year and found, tucked waaaaay back in a dark nook, an 1880s bottle of sasparilla tonic elixir, obviously hidden there 120 years ago. It turns out that this tonic was used to treat syphilis! The cork had long decayed and the contents dried up and decayed, but it looks like the bottle was mostly full when abandoned.

I had always wanted to know more about the people who lived in my house.

Rock Steady: your arch. history profs don't get around much. I wouldn't say it was a common insulating material, but dirt was certainly cheap and used in very early pioneer construction.

My parents and I have found so many minor small oddities across our four properties but nothing jaw-droppingly weird. Lots of small bottles. We know -- my dad's an historian -- that this block had a perfume factory in the 19th century. There are tons of bottles that turn up when you dig, and a fair number are actually intact. There's a hole under a rock wall taht must have been a drainage cistern, and we throw leaves into it every year for compost -- haven't filled it up yet.

Maybe the neatest thing was the C+ artwork scrawled on the walls of the wing over the garage, where my brother and I had our bedrooms growing up.

Rock Steady, stillicho: the ceiling of our house (built in 1930's) is insulated with dirt. Well, that, and heather (to keep the dirt from falling through the cracks in the ceiling).

We haven't found anything weird in the house, except maybe for the gun cabinet inside one of the doorposts. Apparently, one of the previous owners of the house had kept a hunting rifle in there, probably illegally, and it seems that everyone in the village knew about it, because one of the neighbours (who was quite jealous that my father had gotten this house as he [the neighbour] had wanted it to be given to his son) once called the police on us, claiming that there's an illegal firearm in the house.

We've dug up lots of weird stuff in the yard, though. The man who built this house was a blacksmith and there used to be a small smithy near the house. It had burned down decades ago, but a pile of scrap metal still marked its location when we moved here. Most of it has since been taken to the scrap yard, but you can still find horse shoes and other small iron things when you dig in the ground where the smithy used to stand. We've also found lots of interesting stuff in our old shed -- the best finds probably being the barrel part of a WWII era machine gun and a rusty helmet.

The thing I yearned to find the most as a kid was a hidden treasure. Unfortunately, I never found it..

I'm casting back to see what things I've found... But one cool thing was in an old 1800s house in New Orleans after I had lived there for some months, I found a door in the back of a closet that led to a "secret" staircase that went up to the next floor, to a doorway in someone else's closet!

I didn't know that person then, so didn't go knocking, but later we became friends and would often use that staircase to travel between our two places. This building was a big "double" house of three stories that had been built for two sisters and their families, then later remodeled as an apartment building with 12 apartments.

One time I found my ex-roommate's unstable boyfriend in my house, that was certainly a surprise.

In one Baltimore house we found 60s era Swedish nudie magazines stuffed up in the drop ceiling. That was fun. And the house I'm living in now is where a dog toy from outer space was dropped on me by kind aliens. I kid you not: I was sitting on the back steps having a cigarette and suddenly this thing bonked me in the head. It turned out to be a really hideous and weird green rubber old battered squeaky dog toy. It looks kind of like those guys in Star Wars who are all short & wrapped up in rags like chubby mummies (which is strange enough; who knew the Star Wars marketing empire extended to chew toys?) but the weirdest thing about it is that it's apparently indestructible: it's been through three puppies now and it still squeaks.

Sure, you could say that it had been up on my roof for years and a squirrel knocked it off, or possibly some delusional hawk had grabbed it thinking it was a real live edible alien and then dropped it on me but I know better. It came from outer space, was dropped off an interstellar ship by a space dog and then flew through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds only to land on my head.

When we bought the farm house there was a baggie of something green under the bottom drawer of a cabinet. (no, we didn't).

Thirteenkiller, that's truly scary.

My basement has a couple of cinder block support columns. One day, forthehellofit, I stuck my hand down into one and pulled out a National Bohemian cone top can.

The can that looks the most like it that I could find online dates from the early 40's and my house was built in 1942, so I always assumed somebody building the house stuck it there.

there was a pair of thong underpants in the middle of my front walk this morning

Space Dog rocks, mgl. He wears a helmet with deely boppers.

There's an odd picture of a woman hanging in our barn. It's from the 50s or 60s and was torn from a magazine. Just a picture of her face and we can't figure out what about her made the farmer want to stare at her and only her.

There's also an old sled with a child's name written on it hanging from a hook in the scrapple-making room. It intrigues and creeps me out. Why does it hang there? Did the child not treasure it enough to take it with him? Did some horror befall the child and his parents couldn't bear to take it down? Why is it abandoned?

You found a scrapple-making room? Wild!!

It's true, dano. There is a room in our barn with a built-in, wood-fired scrapple maker. Some day I will have to get a Flickr account so all y'all can get jealous of my luxurious hillbilly lifestyle.

A whole room just for the making of scrapple is indeed the very height of luxury. That's the big time, meat slurry loaf-wise.

An ex-boyfriend's family bought a house in New Jersey that supposedly was once owned by Al Capone's aunt. There was a room on the second floor that could only be found by pulling on a nail in the wall that opened a camouflaged door. There's also a slab of concrete under the raised porch with no apparant purpose.

You guys rock. I want to get an old house now, too, and see what I can find.