If you live in an old house what's the most weird / interesting thing you've found?

[Comps83]

I live in a boring new build which I hate
Hoping to move to a Victorian terrace with period features soon
If you live in an older property what have you found when ripping out 70s plaster board or carpets , in the loft etc.?
I love anything like this

The house I grew up in was built in about 1910. My great aunts lived there first of all and my parents moved in with them when they got married. During the war a V1 rocket came through the roof and through the floor of the attic. My great aunt was told by her sister not to go up into the attic. But she did and was so busy looking at the sky through the hole in the roof, that she put her foot (and leg) through the hole in the floor. Her sister had to get a neighbour to help pull her leg out.

I live in an 150 year old house. It had a long coal shed attached in one side ending in an old outdoor loo. The shed was filled with random bits of wood and debris, and had not been used for anything in decades. But on the wall, in between the dust coated cobwebs, was a postcard size photo of Mick Jagger. Not particularly odd object in itself, but what the heck was it doing there?

A safe that nobody can open. It is sunk into the floor near the kitchen.

I live in a farmhouse, parts of which date back to the 16th century. When we took down a wall to have a new window and windowseat fitted a few years ago, we found a small glass bottle, stoppered and sealed with wax, containing some murky liquid, a couple of twigs, and several children's teeth

We made the builder build it back into the new wall, because it felt like something that shouldn't be messed with.

We are renovating our 150 year old house and found a cupboard with a door behind multiple layers of old wallpaper. We have removed the door and it has made the room look a lot bigger so it was a great find.

My parents found a newspaper covering the sinking of the titanic when they bought their house in 1960

Didn't keep it though, did they??

Our house is 1910 and when we took an ugly gas fire out, we discovered a stunning tiled original fireplace underneath. The week before we'd been looking at said fireplaces in a reclamation yard and wishing we had one. It's the focal point of the room and I love it.

Not weird, but we found an old bread oven built into the old fireplace when we had our kitchen refitted. I found it fascinating to think if it being used years ago. Also, an old well pump, though the wooden handle is mainly gone.

My house is Victorian and I found a box of porn videos in the loft.
The age of the house is obviously not related to this but it made me laugh when I found it. And my landlord denies all knowledge

@CreepyCreepster

I live in a farmhouse, parts of which date back to the 16th century. When we took down a wall to have a new window and windowseat fitted a few years ago, we found a small glass bottle, stoppered and sealed with wax, containing some murky liquid, a couple of twigs, and several children's teeth

We made the builder build it back into the new wall, because it felt like something that shouldn't be messed with.

Sounds like a witch bottle. We found one in the cottage we lived in when I was a teen, also children's shoes filled with nails bricked up in the fireplace. The cottage was built some time in the 1600s so no surprise really! My mum spoke to a local historian and he gave us some insight into these things.

A wonderful framed oil painting in the loft of a beautiful lady. Now hung above the mantelpiece in our spare room. Also 6 safes which I thought was a little OTT - according to the previous owners clearly every bedroom needs a safe - we've been giving them away to friends!

@CreepyCreepster Definitely a witch bottle! How wonderful - I would LOVE to find one of those. I recommend a book called The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic by Ralph Merrifield if you want to know more. The sludgy liquid was most likely urine..

Not as dramatic as a witch bottle, but we found two old milk bottles from local dairies in the loft.

When I bought my previous house the loft was full - and I mean FULL - of the possessions of a man who had lived there from the 50s to his death in the early 80s. None of the subsequent owners had bothered to remove it because it had just been used as a rental and there was no proper loft hatch - just a tiny hole within one of the cupboards.

We had a new hatch cut so we could get up there to remove anything. It was insane - mountains of religious books and writings, along with clothes and even his false teeth. He was deeply religious and ran some kind of odd Christian sect from the house - we found the headed notepaper. There were hundreds of letters, some of which were bizarrely sexual in nature but also deeply, fervently religious. He always lived alone but it sounded like he used to befriend vulnerable women and attempt to convert them/sleep with them. It all made me feel pretty, pretty weird.

@GidgetGirl you win !

These are all great! We foundan Edwardian garden
roller when cutting back a very overgrown and brambly part of the garden, and an ancient horseshoe, but nothing in the house!

I live in an old listed building, we have two little trap doors, about 18 inches by ten inches, with brass rings embedded in(you lift the ring out to open the door), in the floor boards. I think they are little stash compartments, or safe’s. You lift them up and there is a sort of stone area hollowed out.

Not me, but my parents have a house in Eastern Europe which is around 700 years old. During renovations they have found a medieval metal barred window that was covered up, a column carved into a wall that had been hidden, and a 16th century coat of arms of one of the owners carved above one of the doorways.

My house is in London and from 1906 and we found amazing original wallpaper but we had to remove it as it probably contained arsenic. An embroidered tablecloth, bright as anything and brand new looking although clearly of a similar age to the house in a cupboard, phone lines going into every room in the house via holes in the window frames and in the garden a huge amount of coins and keys turn up whenever you dig. It's like someone emptied a box of coins and keys into the garden. The coins are from all over the world.

Edwardian house with mostly upvc windows but a couple of old wooden ones at the back. One of the windowsills was rotten. On removing it to decide whether to completely replace it, we discovered it had been stuffed with shredded paper. Which turned out to be pages from a bible.

Relatives found a well near the front door. Then met a chap who’d lived there as a child and had had to carry water up to the house a fairly long way everyday- he was gutted!

We bought a house built in 1830 and found a letter from the gardener to his father. And an old newspaper. Plus some old wine bottles in the attic where the servants slept. Think they stashed them if the house owner left any wine at dinner!

It was creepy in the attic as there was a locked room. Think that's where the drunk servants were kept! Or the mad woman in the attic!

There is s bread oven too but that is behind a new wall now. And we dug up part of a Victorian bottle dump over the garden railings. A few old poison bottles!

Also another ex resident who’d been locked into a particular cupboard as punishment and wouldn’t go near it even as a adult. Plus a few ghosts (dh saw one and thought it was niece, regular wafts of cigar smoke- the vicar came and did a blessing).

Cat skeletons and witch bottles in the walls

There's bits of my house that date back 400 years ish.

We have a cellar that no one in living memory has been into (the house has been in the family for around 80 years and the cellar has been boarded up all that time). In wet summers we get frogs coming up out of it into the house through all sorts of cracks in the fabric of the building, but oddly never mice or rats so we think frogspawn must somehow get washed into it.

When we took the fireplace out we found an ash drop hole underneath the 60s tiled fireplace down into the cellar, but it was too small and gloomy to really see anything.

We have been told (handed down through family lore) that there is a secret passageway from one room out into an adjoining barn that was put in so that the occupants could escape from marauders from elsewhere. We have an idea where it might have been but there is no obvious entry point from the house so we think it might have had a cupboard built in front of it sometime in the 1800s, which is still there.

Many of the internal walls are around 3ft thick and the way the house is built into the hillside means that some parts of 'downstairs' are actually higher than 'upstairs' rooms.

Most of the doorways are only about 5'5ft. People must have been much smaller in the old days!