She has about 6 adults and 2 kids. Kinda creepy and you always feel like someone’s watching you.

Someone WAS always watching!!

That was before he escalated to humans.

just before an intense thunderstorm in Wichita KS probably 60 years ago now. The front door was open and and we all heard a hissing crackling sound and through the front door "rolled" a bright glowing sparking "ball". Rolled across the floor and blackened the carpet and hit a wall where it went pop and vanished leaving a burn mark on the wall... we were all terrified. I was a small child at the time.

that came in through the chimney and was spitting in terror and anger.

I was told it was a hawk. What kind I could not say. We backed out of there quickly. My friend’s father trapped it under a bucket (somehow? He was not bleeding) and released it outside.

It felt like to my tiny little self that that gigantic bird turned in the air and bowed to him like a thank you. I doubt it did truly; I saw it do it though with my own two eyes

And saw a wall to wall confederate flag displayed on his living room wall. I could not get enough oxygen to my brain to breathe as I was speechless. This was 2006-7 and I’ll never forget it.

1976 - We lived in a sub-division with a HO association - no farm animals allowed. The bull's owners had a farm outside town. Late one evening, after work, they went to check on mama cow and 2 day old baby; found mama dead. Had to take baby back home with them. As close friends, several neighbors took turns bull sitting while owners worked. Younger children delighted to hold the bottle to feed the baby. After 5 days, another cow-owner took the baby and placed him with his cow that had just lost her baby - she accepted him.

In my college dorm room for nearly a week once. I was bottle feeding orphaned lambs for a livestock club and this one got pneumonia. I got it antibiotics from the vet school and tried (but failed) to save it. At least it didn't die in the cold barn. Lambs are really loud and my roommate and I were terrified the advisor would hear it baaaing and we'd be thrown out of the dorm.

I thought I was weird but at least I didn't have a bull calf! 😁

Thank you!

It was standing in front of a full pelt from a dead tiger.

It was in the house of a client of my father. I was home from school for some reason and he took me to work with him that day. One of those things you don't forget.

This was in the home of Mattie Lou O'Kelley, which, of course, was covered in art but a Renoir in a room that produces steam?

Strange.

Made me nervous just going to the bathroom. Had to find a different one to use.

Yucky to me, just not strange for them.

Two years after the dogs died there was dried up poop all over the place. Super gross

He had both his dogs trained to only poop in the guest bedroom. Needless to say I did not sleep in there.

I assume it was inert, but I’m not sure.

I seriously doubt he would have put his family at risk, but one never knows.

You can just buy them from some military surplus places

We were relocating from Washington State for my husband's new job in Oregon, so we were looking for a home to purchase. One of the houses we looked at in Portland had a stuffed giraffe from the upper torso, neck, and head mounted on his living room wall, which went from the floor to the ceiling. It was wearing a top hat and bow tie. Somewhere I have the picture saved because it was so weird.

They used it as a photography darkroom.

Sparkly gloves, jacket, album covers, photos, paintings all spread out on the bed.

This was in the house of a retired white couple whose house was for sale.

...in a jar of formaldehyde on his living room mantle. That really creeped me out.

We got busted for drinking water out of a garden hose at the house up on top of the hill by a nice lady. She did not think water out of a hose was healthy, so she hauled us inside the house to have a proper drink of water. She opened her walk-in refrigerator (a walk-in refrigerator!) and pulled out a crystal pitcher of cold, cold water and we had a grand talk. Turned out, her husband was an oil tycoon galavanting around the world, making more money (and shooting more endangered animals, I guess), while she was there, mostly alone. I remember her name, Mrs Burke, but I was never able to learn anything about her oil tycoon husband.

I found out later, the house used to be a roadhouse which explains the walk-in refrigerator. It was also suspected of being a speakeasy that was off limits by the police for obvious (wink, wink) reasons, but that's another story.

Years later, Bill Graham bought the roadhouse and lived there until his death.

whatever to infinity

In the living room was a secret room. It was cleared out but can imagine what was in there. Because of his next find. The bathroom mirror was a two way mirror you could access from the closet in the bedroom.

Another had something in the backyard that was strange. Way back some people built concrete boats from a plan. There was one almost completed there. It just sat there until the house was sold and the boat was demolished in place. It was bigger than a large shrimp trawler.

Went to a mansion to work on the elevator. They had zebra skin rugs throughout the hallway to the dining room. There they had a massive antique crystal chandelier from a Tennessee ballroom. Kind of an odd combination. But in the master bedroom the wallpaper was giant metallic silver anacondas, a Chinese lacquered dresser, and an antique German fireplace. The master bath was what I would call rustic Scandinavian bath house with an antique leaded glass knight in armor window. About 6 by 8 foot. Seemed more like someone couldn’t control themselves at auctions.

started building a concrete sail boat in his backyard in Long Beach CA. this was probably in the 70's. He passed away from an aneurysm, with the hull completed. Could this be the same boat?

Pentagram, deer skull, black candles...not sure what it was. Interesting conversation piece. I just shut up and got out of there. To each their own...

but it was strange to me.

My mother's cousin's house had a rec room in the basement where all of us kids (my siblings and me along with our cousins) were sent to play when we visited during Christmas holiday gatherings. There was a little train set and miniature village, which is not the strange part. It was fascinating for us to watch the train run through the village, which only my cousins' father was permitted to operate.

But, over the train set and village, mounted on the wall, was a real moosehead - neck and head with a very large set of antlers. As a child, it looked both scary and just plain weird to me, hovering over the village like some sort of animal god. It felt like the eyes were watching us. I could not understand why anyone would preserve the head of a dead animal to hang on their wall.

I learned later that some people do that, but they were the only ones that I ever knew who did.

having a yard sale. He was a true believer, he had lots of Nazi stuff. He was a high school machine shop teacher.

He may have pulled it down in Paris when the Allies liberated it.

I would like to do something productive with it. I sure as hell won't put it on ebay and let some American Nazi buy it and put it to nefarious use.

The thing is large and is actually a banner. Interestingly it is made of lightweight wool.

He also brought home 2 German bayonets, one of them has the 2 lightening bolts of the SS.

Caroling at Christmas time, I was in 6th grade and the group I sang with visited a weathier family in a posh part of town. They had a camel saddle sitting on their Oriental rug and asked if any one knew what it was. (I thoight it was a foot stool.)

So you know, you weren't wrong!

A band I was in was flown out to LA to play a private party for a Hollywood power couple.

...and yep, they showed us around their place...including the dungeon with whips, chains, bondage gear, and other assorted weirdness. They were very open about it.

It's been a LONG time since I visited his home.

One was a painting of someone’s new born prominently displayed by the front room. It looked like a demon child ready to attack. I don’t think I still have the pic he sent.

A couple who were planning on divorcing. She took every days newspaper and stood them up in a big sort of hall/dining room. Years of them. He had to measure the room but couldn’t touch any of them or they’d all fall down. He had maybe a foot between the papers and the wall to slide through.

Lots of messy houses. Everyone claimed “oh I’ve been meaning to get to that” or “I’m just putting those there for now” when it was clear the pile of clothes had been there for quite a while. He had one lady’s bedroom that had so much clothes in it you could barely squeeze into the door and there was a path to the bed. That was the only part of the floor that didn’t have 2-3 feet of stuff covering it.

My sister and I double-dated with her boyfriend at the time and the boyfriend’s buddy. We went over to the buddy’s house first before going out for whatever reason I forget now. But his buddy had a “Mickey Mouse” room. He had an entire room with floor to ceiling shelves with hundreds of statues of all manner of Mickey Mouse. Plus posters, framed art, anything with Mickey Mouse on it like coffee mugs, shirts, neon signs, etc. I thought it was kind of strange for a young guy to be so obsessed with Mickey Mouse. This was in the 70s.

Down in the root cellar was a little alligator (released pet?) that would snap at anyone getting close. Took most of a day for my Dad and his friends to catch it.

This was suburban DC.

A single mother and her three kids were living in this house my friend rented out. Apparently the sewer line backed up and began filling the basement with, well, sewage. She did not report this.

The "water" in the basement continued to rise until it extinguished the pilot light on the furnace. This caused the house to become quite chilly (winter in Michigan). She still did not report this. The furnace kept turning on, because of the temperature, but did not light.

Her ex-husband came around to visit his children and noticed that the house was freezing cold and that she was heating it with the burners on the gas stove in the kitchen. He reported this.

When we got there to help you could smell the gas from the unlit furnace from the street, in the car, with the windows up! When we entered the house and noticed the open flames on the stove top we freaked out. How that house didn't explode I will never know.
We turned the stove off and headed down to the basement.

Ugh, 4 feet deep sewage and you could hear the gas from the furnace bubbling out under water, unable to light because no pilot and UNDER WATER. To say the clean up job was disgusting is way to polite of a term. It took many of us many days.

She moved out.

So, not really strange, but wow...

Last edited Mon Oct 28, 2024, 10:45 AM - Edit history (1)

Volunteered to help clean out an elderly gentleman’s house. He had saved and stacked up so many books and magazines that we literally had to squeeze between them to move around in the house (and I was a skinny one back then! )
He was a WWII survivor from Eastern Europe. Much of the printed material was in Polish, I think. We recycled everything we could… filled more than one dumpster's worth with just printed material.

... we saw one with carpeted walls in the living room, the same shag carpet that covered the floor. It was a very quiet room and sort of cozy but we wondered what structural problems the carpet might be covering up.

The house I grew up in was full of strange things and strange people. My parents were artists with day jobs with very eclectic tastes in art and some very eccentric friends. Some of the neighborhood children had been forbidden by their parents from visiting our house, probably not so much for any nude photography they'd see, but because they might meet a gay person.

My dad's parents also had an interesting house. My grandfather was an aerospace engineer by day and a mad scientist nights and weekends. My grandmother constantly struggled to keep his experiments confined to his front room "den" or the garage. At one time I remember a heavy cable snaking out from some machine he was building in his den, through the house, out the milk box in the kitchen, to another machine in the garage.

This house had a small kitchen, evidently too small for the large stove some owner had wanted so they put the stove in the dining room. We'd seen refrigerators in dining rooms but not full-size ranges. A refrigerator occupied the space where the home's original small stove had been.

The real estate agent offered to show us the basement but we peeked down the creaky stairs into the darkness and declined. I could see it had an old "octopus furnace" and the octopus arms were asbestos.

The house we eventually bought had an octopus furnace too. This had originally burned coal, then it had been converted to burn oil, and by the time we bought it, had been converted to burn gas. More importantly its octopus arms were not asbestos.

https://www.oldhouseguy.com/heating-old-octopus-furnace/

The uniform was the one worn by the general when he surrendered to the allies during WW2. It was displayed on a mannequin in one of the bedrooms. Included was his pistol and hat.

One of our neighbors whom we didn't know very well had it in their living room. I was probably about five-years-old and it made quite the impression.

Went to an old school friend’s house and sitting in his living room was his headstone. Date of birth carved on it but no date of death. I asked him about it and he said that he’d been the executor of his Dad’s estate and it was such a mess that he vowed he would have every dot and T crossed so his own son wouldn’t have to go through the same ordeal.

But the whole house. I went to an estate sale. The house was a 3 story. The thing that set it apart was the shape. The entire second floor was in the shape of Texas.

It did have a few other things that set it apart. A glass greenhouse, a full size basketball court, a monster garage that would fit their cars and monster rv with a vehicle lift.

It was tricked out also. Master closet with one of those laundry hanging conveyor. Evidently the person was a collector/hoarder. The basketball court was completely filled with stuff from storage. About 10 sets of silverware there. Then add the silverware in the house. All sorts of antiques. They only had a few days to sell what they could then the auction company would be moving it to their warehouse to sell later. They wanted to sell as much as possible before that. Didn’t pick up much because we already have enough stuff around the house. But did get a 3 piece set of Murano glass goblets for $15. A small brass bird sculpture on a malachite base for 10$. Found out it was from a decent sculptor and sold it locally for $200. A couple Stiffel lamps for $20. Sold local for $500. We used to love going to estate sales.

Biggest hit I ever made was buying a picture of the shuttle with 56 signatures around the edge of it. The owner worked on the shuttle and got a bunch of signatures on it while he worked there. It has 4 of the Columbia shuttle disaster astronauts on it. Several other well known astronauts also. Estimated value around $2,600. Thinking about getting it auctioned off at one of the major auctioneers.

his kitchen cabinets. He gets them at estate sales. I went to an estate sale with him and in the kitchen of that house everything had strawberries on it or was in the shape of strawberries.

Our neighbor in Mississippi Bought his Wife a stripper pole. They set it up in the bedroom. This was about ten years ago. They were WILD and CRAZY, but very good neighbors.

What do you buy the woman who has everything?

stripper poles then you can shake a stick at.
The agents usually ask me to photoshop them out.

The agent took a few pics with his phone and posted online. We got a few nibbles. After about a month he hired a real estate photographer. When I saw the pics I wanted to by the house myself. Our home never looked so good. We kept copies of his pics. But now I’m on to you guys. I’m pretty sure we are in our last home but if we do sell I’ll insist on the agent hiring a photographer.

When I was a kid in Idaho my buddys house had a coal broiler in the basement that we had to fill up in the winter to keep the house warm. Think of shoveling coal into a huger broiler like in a train.

I was prob only 7 or 8 and the opening was without a doubt big enough by far for me to fall in to. It was a roaring inferno as well so if you did it would be really really bad.

but when deer hunters have the neck mounts of dead deer displayed on the walls of their home. This has always been an unpleasant sight for me. I realize that the deer population needs to be controlled due to deer overpopulation and deer diseases but damn.



It took me awhile to remember this but I'm going to tell a story about Tree House Axel (not his real name). Tree House Axel and his wife built a tree house out in the boonies and sold their regular house to live in their "tree house" that they build themselves. It's all politically motivated of course because those "Dems are evil and blah blah blah". Tree House Axel attempted to get political with me one day and asked me if I knew what was going on. I said, "Yes, I know exactly what's going on." and I walked away.

I've never been to their tree house and don't plan on visiting, but they've showed me photos. The sad thing is, this couple would give someone the shirt off their backs if anyone ever needed it , they're just conspiracy theory orientated.

antlers of elk and deer. The gazebos are all over the place.It's very say. I glad you stayed away from your neighbors. They sound like they are MAGA Take care honey.

As was my father. One thing he said was "don't even insult the deer by mounting his head in your home. He died so we could eat, you at least respect him for that and bury his body".

We were poor Appalachian farmers/coal miners, so hunting was an absolute requirement

I once visited a friend of a friend who worked in the film business as a prop person. I have no idea how he got it, but when one walked into his living room, the first thing you notice is the fact that he had The Necronomicon sitting on his television. It was one of the ones used for the film. (I feel it was from 'Evil Dead 2' rather than the first one, owing to the budget of the first one.) It was just surreal to see the Book of the Dead sitting on a television in a normal living room.

https://i.postimg.cc/Prh8vdn4/Necronomicon-Evil-Dead-Book-Leather-Notebook-Hardcover-Journal-Decoration-Evil-Dead-Book-Horror-Movi.avif

My ex built an experimental aircraft and he suspended the wings from our ceiling.

'Nuff said.

in 2021 that we lived in and raised our two sons for 35 years. It was time to "downsize." It was a traditional tri-level house built in 1970.It had four bedrooms, eat in kitchen 2.5 bathrooms large living room, dining room and large family room
/fireplace.The new owner was a big game hunter (reminded me of the pictures we've seen of the Trump boys).
After about a year I had to go back to settle a small financial issue with the owner. He had made an agreement to purchase some furniture which he hadn't paid yet.
I walked into the family room from the garage and gasped to myself, there mounted on the walls we mounted headed of the animals he had hunted. I saw deer heads, tiger heads, bears heads lined up around the perimeter of the room. Along with a leopard skin prominently displayed on the way to the kitchen. We settled the debt and I left.
I was sad to see the room that housed so many parts of our lives...birthdays, HS/college graduations, weddings, grandchildren, holiday gatherings.....to be desiccated like that. It's hard to un-see that.
Anyway it his house to now and that's how he chose to decorate it. I have a lovely smaller house that we downsized to......
It's now two years this month that my wife of 51 years passed away. I took care of her in our new home until I couldn't. She was in a hospice house at the end. I still have the memories and lots of pictures to remind me of the good times we shared together during our 51 years together.

I was there on an EMS call.

I told the guy that I appreciated his preparedness.