Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire what you find in old houses

Our daughter just got home from deployment in the ME for a year. She got a job near Salt Lake and bought an old fixer house. We've been there the last couple days helping her with some work. She has a chain link fence on top of a 12" cement wall. There was an ugly bush growing right up against it that needed to go. It had maybe 40 or 50 stems coming up from the roots so I went to work with the chain saw to get it down to ground level. About 2/3 of the way through, I had sparks flying. I figured the bush wasn't that hard so I started trimming with the loppers to find out what I'd hit. I finally got down to a cast iron bathroom sink, upside down, and with the main stems of the bush growing around the drain. I kind of think it was put there 30 years ago to force the bush forward away from the fence. It wasn't nearly as attractive as it sounds. It was quite a job to cut the wood away from it and pry it out with a 4x4...after resharpening my saw.

That's one of the more unusual things I've found over the years in old houses. What have you found?

Was pulling baseboards off an old house and found a couple penny postcards from 1911. Took them to an antique dealer I knew and he told me they weren’t worth much ($5) because the corners on the stamps were ripped off.

Decided to try to find the family as they were mailed and received locally. Went to the city clerk’s office and explained what I was looking for. I knew the clerk, too. Turns out the addressee was her great, great aunt. I gave them to her.

5 miles of cable

As it should be, well done!

Absolute weirdest was a blow up doll with "her" arms handcuffed behind "her" back in a run down trailer we had to clear off a lot I bought.
Same trailer had about 30 microwaves stacked in a bedroom.

Bongs quite a few times. A flag with 48 stars (really cool).
An extremely old wheel chair that ran off bicycle like pedal and chain system I was told was post WWI.

Also found a complete copper pot still set up in a building on some mountain property we bought. It might still be around....somewhere....

Had a preservation crew helping us on a Wright Brothers job in West Dayton Ohio...

West Dayton is another white flight abandoned [bleep] northern city.

After work sometimes some of the out of town guys would snoop around the old abandoned (but beautiful architecture homes)... looking for 100 year old mantle pieces, doors etc.

About 10pm one night I got a phone call that they had found a very dead crackhead hooker.

I can probably find the newspaper article if I have to...

Some days it is royal PITA to be a boss.

That time I backed a loaded cement mixer into an old Victorian home's abandoned and forgotten brick septic tank. Damn near rolled the truck.

Closet full of assorted frederick's of Hollywood
type lingerie
Top shelf stacked with letters from a prison
inmate with terrible spelling- " I luv yoo so mooch
babee . Yoo r the onelee womun 4 me " etc.
Letters from wally world and a couple of law
enforcement agencies concerning bad checks.
Shoe box full of insulin syringes.
Closet floor with 2 big plastic tubs full of
assorted sex toys and several glitter g strings

I don't remember how many cans of lysol
spray I used

when I was a kid, newspapers from ww2 (Kingsville TX). Wished i'd of kept them.

We had a farmhouse on our place it was built about 1911 I think.

Found some pennies from the 19-teens, 3 or 4 V nickels and a Tin Type 3x5 of some young man, that was probably older than that house.

I have lost track of that tin type, several moves over the years.


We have a log cabin also that is still standing mostly, from the 1870-1880s. Never found anything in it.

Wasn't too long ago I read about (maybe it was here) some dude tore down a wall in his place to remodel, and found a fully auto Thompson complete with a few mags and ammo in a wall. That would be a nice find! I think he reported it and lost it to authorities though. Dumbass....

I remember being at the family farm and we were cleaning the house; I was probably 5 or 6 and my grandpa gave me a canteen that was stamped U.S. Property 1910.

Carried it for years and had a canvas WWII belt holder and a WWII belt along with a dual mag 1911 holster, also canvas.

Dont know where it ever went. It was probably stolen by the neighbor kids or a "friend" along the way.

Read a story on the S&W forum of a guy finding a Registered Magnum wrapped in an oily cloth inside the wall of an old place. That would be a win

My cousin and his buddy used to hike up to an old cabin that was half fallen in up in the hills where they live in NM. One day the took his buddy’s toddler brother with them in a backpack carrier and when they walked into the cabin the little fella started reaching and saying “gun, gun”. Sure enough jammed between the logs up in the corner of the cabin near the roof was a Remington 1858 percussion revolver. They’d been there 100 times and never noticed it.

Newspapers from the 1940s under an old floor. A few coins, but none valuable. 20lbs of birdseed from a pack rat. Lots of dead mice and wasp nests. Nothing good yet. I do a lot of remodels. I am always hoping to find something cool. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Oh...and lots of piss poor framing.

a lot of that post-war building was put up quick and dirty.

Pine plank deck roofing recycled from shipping crates, I’ve had to do some creative magic to some roofs 4,5,6 inches out of square

My grandfather remodeled a portion of the farmhouse that was built in 1904 and found a flintlock rifle in the plastered wall. My Uncle has it know.

Four circuits.
No apparent relationship to the eight rooms in the house.

The trouble with that is what can you do with it? If anyone catches you with it you're screwed and you can't register it. As much as I'd like to have one, it's a big liability without all the right paperwork.

Enough rat carcasses and snake skins to make your skin crawl. Pulled down a kitchen range vent in a rent house 15 years ago and an enormous snake skin fell out on my head. Must have been a big chicken snake or something. Fugging thing was slithering around right over Mama's head while she was stirring the chili.

Around here if they are old enough you will find termite damage more often than not.