To ask what the weirdest thing you experienced or saw at someone else's house when you were a child?

[BillHadersNewWife]

Inspired by a Reddit thread...there were some absolutely weird things that people experienced or saw at their mates' houses as children.

There was a man who said he hated eating at his friend's house because they weren't allowed to drink water with a meal.

There was someone who said their friend wasn't allowed in any other room but the kitchen and their bedroom.

That kind of thing! I'm thinking myself and can't really dredge much up. There was one friend who lived in a huge mansion...think National Trust style place...and it was empty!

Just room after room with less furniture in the place than in an average semi!

Normal-ish family...I think they were broke due to having 5 kids and privately educating them all!

A neighbour was a hunter, he had a son my age and a younger daughter. There house was decorated floor to ceiling with trophies including a full size zebra skin, complete with bullet holes.

@MitziK ♥️
Mine wasn't as bad though visiting a clean organised home as a DC was an eye opener for me. It felt shit.

A friend I didn’t know very well asked me over. Her mum was at home, daytime, just pottering about but fully made up and dressed if she were about to appear on Come Dancing (as it was known before the days of Strictly).

She then insisted that we “all take tea” sitting round on little hard chairs in their sitting room and poured me a cup despite me saying more than once that I didn’t like or drink tea. I ended up drinking it to be polite as there didn’t seem any other way to get out of it.

It will have been one of Franco's spots, MrShue

I went to a party at a girl's house when we were all 14 or 15. The girl hadn't been at school for a while and I realised why when I saw her - she was massively pregnant. Her parents and older brothers were there and everyone in the house was smoking, including the pg girl. The adults offered all us youngsters cigarettes. This was in about 1979.

"Loads of weird stuff but for 'ordinary weird', my best friends family kept the family hairdryer in its original cardboard box in the hall cupboard. When you washed your hair, you went to the cupboard, took the box down from the shelf, used the hairdryer, put it back in the box, and back up on the shelf."

My MIL does this! No idea why! It has never really struck me as massively weird, possibly because there are definitely odder things going on in their house.

I was about 13 and a friend invited a small group of us to her house for a Sunday afternoon birthday tea. Only didn't tell her mum. When we arrived you could tell the mum was furious and zipped out to the local corner shop to muster up sandwiches, crisps and french fancies. We danced to some records. As we were leaving our friend said "please don't go cos my mum's going to kill me". It tickled my dad when I told him (he knew the family well) to the point 35 years later he still occasionally mentions it and laughs

Some of these are really sad and it seems that a lot of the homes were abusive and parents had mental health issues.

Oh and I remember thinking it was seriously weird that some families had two meals, the kids' meal (nuggets, beans, chips, it was the 80s after all) served at around 5.30, then the adults ate later (around 7 or 8) and something "proper", lasagne, shepherds pie or whatever.

Every single thing we ate was beige freezer food and we all ate it together on the dot of six.

Going to call for a friend at her house and being asked to wait in the kitchen whilst said friend got ready.
Her uncle was sat in there. He was seated on a kitchen chair with his hands turned upwards whilst resting on his knees. Those hands were HUGE and gave me the strangest sensation whilst looking at them.

Years later as an adult, I heard on the grapevine that he was doing time in prison for molesting/assaulting small children.

A friend I had as a teenager lived in a house where anything was ok, we could drink and smoke, climb on the worktops, write on the walls, play music as loud as we wanted, spray paint the living room. I had a friend like that too. The walls in her room were covered in felt tip notes from her friends and her mum let us drink beer (we might have been 13). They used solid silver cutlery, which I had never seen before.

My friend's parents took meanness to all new levels. I remember having tea at their house once and the meal was... an onion. A baked onion. Well, we did have one each, but still it was a plain onion. On another occasion it was spaghetti. Just spaghetti. No sauce. I can remember the hot embarrassment of realising I wasn't going to be able to eat it all. Friend's family all cleared their plates and I think I was persona non grata for leaving a big clump of arid, congealed spaghetti.

I understand it now with adult hindsight but I remember the first time I visited my [then] best friends home when I was 11 or 12 and her house had absolutely no carpets or real flooring down. It was bare, grotty floorboards and they had flattened cardboard boxes, laying them down all over the place for people to walk on. I remember asking at the time if they were decorating (cringe) and them sort of changing the subject.. With hindsight they obviously just didn't have much money for things like carpeting. As I had never experienced that kind of thing in my home I just assumed they were waiting on the carpets going down

I was friends with that girl right through high school and they never once had "proper" flooring. Her family/home life didn't seem appealing for a myriad of reasons such as the standard of living and the way she was treated

She tried to get into the living room via the hatch from the kitchen but got stuck!

That's hit my funny bone!

I slept over at a friends house when I was 9-ish. There was a large, framed photo of her grandmother in a coffin (she was dead) in the sitting room.

I remember going to a friend's house in the mid 70s and there were no carpet upstairs. Not intentionally bare polished floorboards but just no carpet.

Another friend's house had no bathroom, and they had chamberpots under the beds.

I remember staying at a new friend's house. She asked did I want to stay up til 11pm.
To see her ddogs get fed!
Their one meal a day was just before her dps went to bed.
I was quite upset the poor ddogs had to wait all day for a meal.
They also had stuffed wildlife on the walls. Stags, fur pelts and stuff.
Her df was very shouty.
Still felt more sorry for ddogs than dfriend and her siblings though...

@whatisthisfuckery I'm at work and I can't stop laughing at that last sentence 😂

Going to a friends house for tea after school and finding Grange Hill was banned in their house!

Rather disappointingly I suppose we are all more uniform nowadays. Of course the tales of abusive homes are awful, but on a lighter note modern communications have contributed to the disappearance of people's little peccadilloes which they had no idea were odd.

I was 4 or 5 and went to a friends house.
The friends mum used to tell me that the friends Dad ate little children up for his tea.
She used to get me absolutely petrified about the dad getting in from work.
What a strange thing for an adult to do to a 4 year old?

Going to a friends house for tea after school and finding Grange Hill was banned in their house!

My friend wasn't allowed to watch Grange Hill either! Although (bizarrely) they were allowed to watch Neighbours and Home and Away. The kids also weren't allowed to cross the road (we were 10!)

Oh, and we always use to eat the bird food in the garden!!!

I wasn't allowed to watch Tiswas; I still feel slightly aggrieved.

In fairness to the friends dad @SillyUnMurphy my dad used to switch radio channels when Brick in the walk came on!