What's the weirdst thing you found when someone died?

[ferriswheel]

I was thinking of writing a diary. Something to help me figure out why i sabotage my weight loss success and why i tolerated the bad behaviour of my husband for so long.

I dont at all expect anything untoward happening to me but the idea of my inner most thoughts being read by whoever...

Anyway, have you ever found anything that you shouldnt have, but had to deal with because of the circumstances?

The weirdest thing we found after my paternal grandfather died was a Granite headstone using a shortened form of his name he told us he didn't like

My Dad's hardcore porn DVDs We just laughed, tbh.

Also discovered he'd left notes all over his house, a lot of them talking about DD, his only grandchild who was 1 when he died. That broke my heart

I attended a sudden and unexpected death once and found the deceased lying on the floor with candles and a spell book next to him. The page was open on a spell to do harm to an individual. A bit woo but it had obviously backfired as he was the one lying dead. ( drugs overdose though).

FIL preempted us finding out something unexpected by telling us shortly before his death that he was MIL's second husband - otherwise the marriage certificate would have been a surprise.
Armed with this knowledge when we came to clear their home out finally I was on the look out for "clues" to this earlier life. I found one book with her first married surname. That was it. No photos, letters, diary, unknown siblings in law.
On the other hand we too found a cash hoard. But it turned out she had been getting carers to take her to the bank frequently and then just been putting the money away. I suspect that happens with a lot of older people. What will we the internet banking generation with our smart phone apps and our contact less cards do I wonder?

Not a wierd thing that we found but we dropped off a bag of my grandads things that were meant for his hospital stay after he died. All clean he hadn't had chance to use them sadly as died day. After his op. Anyway it wasn't till we realized a few days later that we must have accidentally left his false teeth in the bag. Hate to think what they must saw them :o :')

When my (very lovely and gentle) great-grandad died 9 years ago we had to clear his council flat pretty quickly, and we found a very large axe, it was bigger than me and I was 15 at the time! 😱 To this day we have no idea why he had it.

One of my nan's friends died before I was born. My nan and one of her friends washed the old lady before she was put in her burial clothes (something I always thought was really nice) and they found that she wasn't a she! They think she may have had both...

My ex husband's grandad died and his nan was confined to a chair. When going through his things they found a very recent prescribed box of viagra and a photo album with a woman and a child that no one recognised! They think he had a secret family as someone called my ex mother in law but was sketchy about who she was!

When my great granny died, my grandad find his birth certificate, paper clipped to a hand written letter from his mum saying that although she had listed her husband as his father, he wasn’t, she’d actually had an affair with a Pakistani man, and she included his name and address in the letter. It did explain why my grandad has got strong Asian features in comparison to his siblings! He decided not to track down his ‘birth father’ but he’s kept the letter.

When my other great nana died, we found 87 packets of smarties (the old ones with the plastic lid) full of sixpences and buttons.

When we cleared out my GMs flat we found a letter written to her and her sisters (8 of them) from her brother who was fighting in France during WW1. In the letter it says “I feel like an old man”. He was 20 at the time and was killed a month later. My mother and I cried when we read it. There was also the newspaper announcement of him being killed in action.

When my grandmother died they found her marriage certificate and divorce decree from her first marriage that literally no one in the family had known about.

Great post. When I sorted through my mother's house ( my father had already died 25 years previously) She had kept a few things of his. A dog lead from a family dog that had died in 1977. All my birth congratulations card, all my baby teeth ! and my first pair of baby shoes. I'm over 50.

Great thread... I'm looking around my house with fresh eyes :)

When we packed up GMs house we found dozens of packs of imperial leather soaps - exactly the same as another poster! - and several packs of brand new hankies. Why so bloody many?!

Irritating - hundreds of pointlessly kept bills... but no sign of the goddamn will. Anywhere! Took ages to find it.

But - a lovely selection of handwritten recipes.

Bafflingly- photos of unknown people we would have loved to have known who some of the smiling people were!

Great to find some photos when people had written a note on the back..... eg) to my lovely sister Marnie...

Makes you think of sorting the old life admin!

My GM and GF had a very unhappy relationship, I don’t remember them ever getting on. Divorce or even just leaving each other was not an option - they each said they didn’t want the other to get the house. It was a very toxic relationship.

Once they had both died, we got some things from the house, including GM’s cookbooks. DM still uses these cookbooks and when leafing through one day discovered a recipe for Divorce Cake, which was apparently a thing. It called for icing sugar to be sprinkled over at the end, and GM had scored out ‘icing sugar’ and written ‘arsenic’ above. It gave us a laugh, but really, what a waste to spend your life with someone you hate.

Not weird just very touching. When my dear beloved Mum died we found all the lovely thank you cards from her wedding. A photo of all of us, her family, together, which she kept permanently in her handbag with a prayer asking god to take care of everyone she loved.

And a little book in which she recorded what she wore and what she served for dinner every time they had guests for Sunday lunch (mainly her married children and their in-laws). She wasn't grand or posh in any way, they humble in fact, so it was just a very touching detail.

I found a letter to my Dad after he died about my birth saying I hope you're not too disappointed as I know you wanted another boy. I was a real Daddy's girl so he hid it well.

A relative of mine only found out that the reason her partner wouldn’t marry her after 23 years and two kids together was because he hadn’t divorced his first wife when said first wife turned up at his funeral. He had two kids and a grandson she knew nothing about too.

The power of death notices in the Times!

"I dont at all expect anything untoward happening to me but the idea of my inner most thoughts being read by whoever..."
I learned shorthand for this reason, OP. Just the other day I started reading my diaries written almost entirely in shorthand from 15 years ago. It's hard going, because I never actually got very good at shorthand, but it's interesting enough to me to keep going, and I'm pretty sure no-one else will ever bother learning shorthand in order to read them, so my privacy is almost 100 percent assured.

Sorting out my nans things after she died, we found loads of cash stashed in random places even though she had a safe. We also found about 6 sets of false teeth. Plus in the back of a cupboard I found a bag of stones I'd collected on various beaches and given to her. Made me cry as she was never sentimental and I always knew I wasn't her favourite grandchild.

When my DH's Father died, he left behind for him a large sum of money, along with a box with his teeth in (not false teeth either).
I thought it was a (very unfunny) joke at first, but nope, it was down in his will.

Not me personally as it happened before I was born but when my dad’s dad died my dad was sorting out his papers, belongings etc. And found a marriage certificate and birth certificate that revealed that my grandad had previously been married and had a child before he’d met my gran. And had never told my dad anything about it.

When my dad told some of his older relatives what he’d found, they told him that yes they’d all known about this, but as my grandad’s first marriage had ended in divorce in the 1930s it was shameful and ‘something we didn’t talk about.’ So my dad had/has a half brother no one bothered to tell him about!!

Ah, the good old days...

When my Godfather died we found a bunch of photos of him in the war which had a person cut out of them. Turned out it was his first wife, he just liked the way he looked in the picture! Other than that we found a bunch of medals we didn’t realise he had, he just had a special selection that he showed us I guess

My dad gave his auntie a box of milk tray every year for Christmas. She always seemed grateful for them. When she died he found them all hidden away in a wooden chest in her bedroom!

After her parents had died, my dm discovered her eldest brother had been adopted. We don’t think he ever knew. In retrospect, he did look different to my emails and other brother.

I would have loved to have asked my gran and grandad why they had adopted, did they think they couldn't Have children (then had two children naturally), was the baby’s parents someone they knew etc.

15 years ago, I was 24 and my 50 year old dad took his own life. I was his only immediate family and we'd never lived together or had much of a relationship. As well as the suicide note I was meant to get I also found one in a suitcase in the attic, one ripped to bits in the bottom of his kitchen bin (yes I felt the need to go through his kitchen bin to discover his last meal of fish,chips and mushy peas!) , and the 4th suicide note in the paper shredder on his desk. I didn't know it was another suicide note at the time but just in case it was something important my new partner took the shredded x4 A4 pages home and sat all that night putting it back together again. He'd never met my dad, we'd only been together a few months (still together) and it will always be the most amazingly thoughtful thing someone could do for me. I still read them from time to time.

The only other remarkable thing I found was camcorder videos from when I spent a couple of months in Saudi living with my dad as a teen, the only time we'd lived together. They were still labelled as videos of me and I was so excited to watch them - until i discovered he'd made homemade porn movies over the top of them with different women - cringey and heartbreaking!!

After my grandad died I discovered his father had been a bigamist & my grandad was one of 22 children not 13 as he'd thought...