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!

My sister and I had a very different home to others. Late 70’s. We are now in our 50’s. We lived in a rented farm cottage. 75p per week rent. No mains water. No inside or outside flushable toilet. No shower or bath. Seesaw, swing and windmill in the garden to generate electricity. Cut off in the winter months. No television. No central heating. Regular power cuts. Friends who visited must of thought we were weird.

@wanderings
I want to know how they did it.. plllleeeeeeaase

An taxidermy elephant foot as an unmbrella holder 😱

Umbrella!

GiftedFish perhaps they had a spare back door knocking about at the far end of the garden?

Aprilsinparis
"Why did so many Gran's take to their beds pre-sixties. I would very often go to friends houses, and their Gran's beds were downstairs"

Arthritis and osteoporosis, as well as breathing/heart complaints. There wasn't any treatments for many ailments except bed rest. It would save the Woman of the house from having to carry water, food/drinks and bedpans up and downstairs. As well as it meaning that the old person wasn't isolated.
Their pension was needed to prop the family up.

Things that shocked me but were not at all weird -

I remember being totally shocked when calling on a new friend on the way to school to see in the kitchen her mum and dad in their dressing gowns drinking cups of tea and relaxing. It was about 8.45 am. I was about 9 and could not get over parents sitting about undressed at that time of the morning, and not even helping my friend get ready for school.

A family in the 70s in a very working class estate who are strange food made with pulses and vegetables. I liked visiting their house, but I thought they ate strange things. I think looking back that they were vegans. This is when the rest of us were eating sausages and crispy pancakes.

As a teenager I was shocked at a friend whose parents could not bear being in the same room as each either. If one walked into the living room, the other stood up and walked out. My friend really wanted them to get divorced.

As a teenager going to a new friends flat for the first time. Her mum had a progressive life limiting illness and the father had fucked off. She had been left bringing up two kids alone, when she was struggling to look after herself. There were no floor coverings and very little furniture. Even as a 13 year old i recognised their situation was desperate.

When I was about 8 or 9 I had a sleepover at my school pal's house - what my parents (and I) didn't know was that this girl's mum was a heroin addict.
Saw her first thing in the morning buttering toast with track marks up the arm and no knickers on.
Told my mum and obviously never went there again.
Luckily she got herself sorted and I think went on to become a nurse. She had her happy ending but it was pretty fucking awful seeing that as a child.

Dead rabbits / Pheasants on tables, kitchen side, cardboard boxes, doorstep...in fact fucking everywhere. No they weren't farmers.

Also 12 bore shotgun laid on table whilst eating tea at said friends house.

Bathroom with no door!! I used to leave their house with my back teeth floating!

@GiftedFish How did they make me "fly" from one end of the garden to the other? They didn't carry me all the way in the basket, they were more cunning than that, and had me well and truly fooled.

Having blindfolded me in the middle of the garden, and spun me round lots of times to disorientate me, they told me they were walking me to the house, mentioning all sorts of things, such as the big tree. But they actually led me in the opposite direction! They got me to feel the back door, to convince me even more, but it was actually some flat object that felt similar. I also found out that they only lifted the basket a few inches off the ground, but it felt like I was a very long way up! I couldn't see anything at all, not even my feet, so I had no idea.

Used to have a friend at school and I went to her house several times after school for a couple of hours. There were her parents, my friend and 2 brothers They NEVER had any toilet paper. The first time I thought maybe they'd just run out and forgot to replace the roll, and i used tissues from my pocket. But in all the times I went there and visited the toilet (maybe a dozen times) there was never a toilet roll in there. I wondered what THEY did? Used their sleeves?!

@Wilkie1956mog probably water. I have a few friends who use water rather than paper.

Have you written about the basket "flying" on here before? I've definitely read something like that before on MN! If not, someone else on here must have been to the same house :)

To whoever asked before - no, nowhere near London.

No - sadly mine was the weirdo house I'm sure everyone talked about. My dad was and is a dreadful hoarder. Having my mum say 'sorry about the mess - we're decorating' was normal. I did think all my friends lived in show houses as they were SO tidy. It wasn't until I left home that I realised everyone else was normal and my house definitely wasn't. :(

@Rubyupbeat I agree with @32FannyDingo - there is also more than a strong chance that this man abused other children and your reporting may well help authorities put the pieces together.

I remember when I was about 11/12 (in year 7 at school) going to a concert with my friend and then staying over at her house. Her step-dad was always grabbing her bum and he’d go and get up in the top bunk with her in the middle of the night, I didn’t really think much of it as I was young but a few years later at 13/14 she came out and said he’d been doing unspeakable things, her mum left him right away and they moved up north, the step dad went to prison but he’s still down here,
I bumped into him in the supermarket quite recently. Thankfully it’s been 15years + since this all happened so he wouldn’t recognise me but I was a witness in court. I never saw my friend since she moved which is sad but looking back I feel so traumatised for her!!

Mine aren't particularly strange but here goes.

1. Friend at primary school, way back in the 1970's. Her family were Indian and quite superstitious. I was shown around the house by my friend, and she pointed out that her sister slept with scissors under the pillow to defend herself from 'nightmare monsters' that often attacked her. Friend was about 7, her sister maybe 10. Looking back, I wonder if the parents knew she kept (very sharp) scissors in the bedroom.

1. Possibly outing if the person I was friends with is on here. Her mum had a very quick temper, and we're talking about the 1970s where corporal punishment was the norm. She'd been a bit lippy to her mum, so her mum lashed out at her, hitting her over the head with a (string) bag of sprouts that she happened to have in her hand as she'd been unpacking the shopping. The bag broke and sprouts went everywhere.

Reading this thread has made me realise why my mum was so stingy with food growing up. She was a post war baby. Born in 1945 and lived in a village in rural Scotland. She only ever made exactly what she thought was enough for one meal, really small portions. No leftovers. We were always asking for more and she was always baffled that we weren't full. She never did buy more though. I was always hungry. If you had looked in our fridge it would have maybe milk, butter and a few veg.
Her fridge is still the same now. You would never go to her house and expect a snack, and if you did you'd feel guilty as that'd be all her food gone!
As a result I bulk buy and hate not having lots of food in. I'm always worried my kids lunch boxes aren't packed with enough. I hated being hungry at school.
She was an older parent too and gave me a lot more freedom than my friends parents. I think that was the kind of freedom she had in her village but never occurred to her it wasn't appropriate where we lived. I think my friends parents thought I had no supervision and ran wild.

I have a few weird stories from my childhood but pretty similar to most of these (from the 70's/80's).
My own daughter though brought her friend for tea about 10 years ago when she & her friend we're about 13. I served a nice safe pasta. 'What is this?' she said. She'd never had pasta before & said she had no clue what it was & she wouldn't eat it. I thought this was really odd.

Going to a friend's house after being invited to a friend's house for a Halloween party, it was fancy dress & her mum lent me a Basque, stockings & suspenders so I could be a bunny girl, I was probably 16, we all had a good night, her mum had invited some friends as well, we were all staying the night, sleeping in the attic, about 20 teenagers. To get to the toilet you had to go through her mum's bedroom, I went to the toilet & her mum was naked banging away at some random bloke in bed, someone else went down later on & she was shagging someone else. We didn't know until years later that she was a working girl, prostitute. Years later her grandchildren went to the same school as my ds, she said hello to me in the playground at school, I didn't recognise her until she said who she was.

My parents were post war babies and responded by being very generous with portions.
But when DP and I were first married we didn't have snacks either in the house. I remember a friend popping in and staying, and then saying they were hungry and what snacks did I have. All I could offer was toast or a cheese sandwich or an apple. We were just following how our parents brought us both up to have 3 meals and no snacks. That used to be the norm.

@BertieBotts I have written about it before, I don’t remember which thread, or when though!

Once I started high school (13), I met new friends and one girl invited me to stay for the night. She had a little Jack Terrier dog and basically wanked it off in front of me! I was horrified and had to share a double bed with her; I literally slept on the edge of the bed and avoided her like the plague after that!! Years later, I did Ann Summers parties. There was a red vibrator that looked like the poor dog’s willy. I was telling the story and I kid you not - she walked into the room as I was getting to the punchline!!! We’re friends on fb but I don’t even know if she got how messed up it was to do that to her dog

My BF at primary school lived in a farmhouse that had been two houses together; it had two separate attics and one was derelict - it had rooms with no windows or lights, rooms you couldn't walk across etc. The other attic was ok but one day one of the roof tiles came down with the weight of all the fungi behind it. Great long trails of fungi going from floor back up into the ceiling, and they just left it there. The garden was a bit of field they never mowed.

Her mum belonged to a religious sect/cult. She used to make religious statements out of nowhere, and if you politely said no thank you to her food, she would say, "You have to have some because I made it specially." She'd serve it from old school dinners urns and pots.

She was a very kind-hearted woman and I did love being there, but god, we camped in the garden once and weren't allowed to speak in the tent in case we woke up her stepdad in the house! Also, I caught her scraping flies' eggs off the morning bacon once.

Our neighbours at the end of the lane let their goats in the house and when one went to slaughter, kept its heart in the fridge for the dogs. You could hear the rats running around behind the panelling, and every day the bog backed up so the mum would go out and stick the poker into the septic tank! Euw!

I'm not even that old. Our NDN had no indoor plumbing and did bucket and chuck it. It was a very rural area, but this was the 90s (and he died about 5 years ago).

@GeistohneGrenzen
You weren't far off the mark!
@wanderings
I'm not sure I like how cunning that is. Lol.