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!

Nothing major but being round my friends (who was an only child) and her parents having massive rows, with her mum shitfaced on wine slurring every word. Always made me feel super uncomfortable but I adored my friend.

My ex said that he once went round his friends house and his dad had a load of nazi memorabilia in the living room. He didn't understand what it was at the time until they learnt about the world war later on in primary school and thought his friend dad up until that point had framed pictures of his grandad

@loserssaywhat
Fuck, that sounds like hard work!! A hot bean gooey dripping sandwich. I’ve got to give you credit for not choosing just cheese on toast!

Mine is from the mid 1950 era. Walked home from school with my friend on a hot summers day. She lived on the same council estate as me. Her front garden had a rickety old wooden trailer in it. We went round to the back of the house,and her Mum Dad were sitting in the garden on the grass, smoking and having a cuppa. Her parents were jolly and friendly,and shouted hello to both of us.

Friend and myself went in the back door to get a drink of lemonade,and there were her two small brothers and a younger sister,sitting on the floor eating some biscuits,it was only a very small kitchen.And in the corner there was a large lovely horse,eating some food out of a tin bucket.

The parents used to go round the houses with their horse and cart,collecting stuff that people threw out.

I was bemused when I went to a friends house for dinner and they served their baked beans cold, I didnt like them cold.

OMG this thread is so interesting

My primary school best friend’s Mum was a teensy bit bonkers. She had middle class aspirations despite definitely being working class so she always cooked strange meals. I remember wondering wtf cous cous even was at the time and she ate bizarre animal organs such as pig heart . She didn’t believe in shampoo so my friend’s hair always looked a bit greasy and always smelt like tea tree oil which she would constantly douse it in to avoid headlice. My friend wasn’t allowed to spend any of her Christmas or birthday money at all, it all went into savings which I thought was crazy as a (pretty normal) child who spent it on absolute crap.

She definitely controlled her poor husband as well. One day he hadn’t come back from the pub quickly enough so she called him up literally screaming and crying down the phone saying they had been burgled so he’d rush home . At the weekend she made him do various unnecessary DIY, their house always looked a bit like a building site.

Aged about 8 I was playing Animal Snap with the girl who lived next door to my nan.

When there were two pig cards, I shouted out 'Pigs!' and her mother came over, all cat's bum mouth, and said, 'That's not a word little girls use in this house'.

I was .

Not that weird but one friend had no TV ! This was in the 70s ,and I was genuinely amazed TBH .Couldnt understand it .Her Dad was a Teacher at our School and said once we had done our homework we would all play a board game together!

Growing up I had a friend who was Chinese. Her parents had moved to the UK from a little village in China but she was born in the UK.

Whenever any of us went round for dinner we all had to eat with chopsticks, even though none of us had a clue how to use them! I ended up leaving most of my dinner on the plate. They had a drawer full of cutlery but for some reason it was not allowed to be used, even for the visiting friends!

They also insisted on speaking Chinese to each other and my friend at the dinner table, even though they spoke perfect English! So anyone visiting would sit there being ignored and if friend tried to speak to anyone in English she would be yelled at by her parents (in Chinese though so we never knew what was said!)

I’m all for embracing other cultures etc especially if you are a guest in someone’s home but it was bloody awkward!

We remained friends for many years but after the first couple of dinners I made sure I only went round when her parents were out!

Ooh I had some friends with seriously odd parents.

-cold food house. Cold baked beans, cold custard cold rice pudding. Lots of corned beef as well. But you could also just have a bowl of crumble without fruit and we were allowed to sit 3 of us in the front passenger seat and they had thousands of pug dogs.

• naked dad house. Naked dad was a concert musician and had zero boundaries. If he needed to pay his violin at midnight then he did, it was all very hippy. And he slept naked, which was a bit of a surprise.

We used to spend loads of time inside other people's houses, without our parents. Although it was an experience I'm not sure it was always a good idea.

Once one of my friends came and fetched me in the park and dragged me over to our other friend's house to show me the giant jobby sat in the middle of their kitchen floor. There was neither a pet nor a toddler in the house to blame it on.

i was about 9/10and it was very late 80s early 90s and had a friend/neighbour who had 9 in the household(2 adults,7 kids)

they were poor but well loved house and happy

the dad used to limit a toilet break to 1 sheet per time,always the cheapest paper you can buy

he had a lock on the door so you needed a key to get in and he would then hand you a sheet

there was 4 girls and i moved away at 11 so no idea how they coped with periods and runny poo days

I went to stay over at a friend’s house when I was in my teens. It was a very large, modern open plan bungalow with pale carpet throughout. On the floor the parents had laid walkways of clear plastic runner everywhere, including the bedrooms, and woe betide you if you walked on the carpet. They also had a bookcase full of those faux leather, “gold” leaf reader’s digest books. I went to take one off the shelf to look at but was told not to in case I broke the spine. The books were for decoration not reading.

I had a friend in secondary school whose parents were rather lax, I’d never have been allowed to do the things her parents allowed.

They once left us all (about five 14 year old girls) alone in their house for the weekend with a case of beer, a bottle of Jack Daniels and £50 for a take away. I got alcohol poisoning and had to call my Mum in the early hours to collect me, she was furious and I was grounded for a month.

Her younger brother slept in their parents room despite being about 11/12 at the time which we all thought was bizarre. She dropped out of school at 15 and we never heard from her again, nobody knew why.

Was a little later on in life and was staying round my boyfriends. We had separate rooms (we were 16, so can kinda understand).

The parents had a special living room which was full of very expensive antiques etc. No kids were every allowed in there except for Christmas Day or birthdays. I was there one birthday and we were allowed to sit in silence and watch a Jackie Chan film. The parents didn't even use it themselves, it was always vacant and smelt funny.

The same parents used to get slaughtered on red wine at the weekends, like beyond pissed and you'd regularly hear them heaving their guts up in the bathroom. One night I couldn't get to sleep as the dad was chucking up and when I thought the coast was clear I was going to pop downstairs and use the non-vomity toilet. As I crept out I heard a massive BOOOO and his dad was standing there, stark bollock naked, in front of me waving his arms and legs around. Everything was moving. He then tried to kiss me and said 'you're a good lass' before running back to the toilet to chuck up again.

I never told a soul

I don't think this is the first dog poo post but I recall going to a friend from school for tea and there was dogshit literally everywhere - several piles on carpet in living room, kitchen etc. and the smell was horrendous. Add in the mix thick fag smoke and I was just pleased I wasn't staying for tea.

Another friends dad was absolutely rabid about people wearing slippers in the house (in that they had to) I remember my friend getting yelled at proper shouting because she hadn't got her slippers on and it happened more than once. It was just a bizarre thing.

Come to think of it, I’ve had some weird friends over the years. One friend had a step-dad who didn’t work, he just used to record himself singing Johnny Cash songs in the kitchen and he’d play them back to himself so that’s all you’d hear when you walked in the house. She also had at least ten cats, her Mum worked for the RSPCA so she’d bring loads of cats home and insisted they stay indoors. The house always smelt like cat piss, it was only a small three bed semi.

Had another friend with very old parents, they were in their early sixties when we were 13/14 which was old compared to everyone else’s parents. Her Dad was a raging alcoholic and she was so embarrassed by him. They had a lovely house and her Mum was very kind but the Dad used to sit there making inappropriate shitty jokes, clearly pissed out of his mind. My friend was mortified by him.

i went and stayed the night with a girl from primary school, sometime in the early 80s. we had tea, and when her dad came home from work and had eaten, everyone went to bed. at 6.30pm all lights out, no talking allowed. i was baffled. and bored!

it was a weird family all round. her dad used to beat her with a belt for minor indiscretions, and she was a kleptomaniac. she was once chased through the gift shop at Hatfield House by a teacher who spotted her stealing a rubber. she also stole from a dinner lady, and we each had to stand in the headmaster’s office and say whether it was us. she apparently just said yes, it was me. she was given The Slipper and then went home and was beaten with a belt by her father.

her father was the local vicar.

In the early-mid 80s, when microwave's were just becoming very popular, I had a friend whose mum cooked all weekday dinners from frozen using it. She kept a selection of frozen foods (eg. chips, burgers, fish fingers, veg etc) and a list if what they had in. Everyone eating was given the list and asked to tick what they wanted- she then put the food straight from the freezer on to each plate and microwaved it. She had a list on the fridge of how long each combination would take but inevitably some parts of the meal were practically cold and others were unbelievably hot and everything had an odd texture.

When I was a child (1950s) my Mother took me for the first time to the house of a friend. We walked into the living room and in the corner by the fire was a footstool. It was a real elephant's foot with a leather upholstered top and I was so horrified I ran screaming out of the house and refused to ever go there again.

It was and still is beyond my comprehension how anyone could think that was acceptable.

PM

I had a boyfriend in high school (lived in the US at the time) whose parents were super ridiculous fundamentalist Christians. How the hell we wound up dating, I don’t know, but he broke up with me because when I told him I believed in using childcare and wouldn’t be a SAHM. For context, we were 16.

But the weird thing was that his parents had an entire shrine to Rush Limbaugh (google if you don’t know who he is, he’s basically a woman hating racist homophobic nut, thankfully I’m pretty sure he’s dead now). Literally like an entire bookshelf in the lounge displaying all his books and like 8 A4 sized framed photos of him.

Sadly, ex bf was well known in school to have kissed a few boys (I was there for two of them, apparently he was just ‘messing about,’ but it was obvious things going on with him were a lot more complicated than that). He is now a fundamentalist preacher in a right wing church, married (to a woman!) with like 5 kids, which is quite sad actually.

One of my friends parents had a large toucan which they kept on a perch on their kitchen counter. It was much larger than a parrot and I never saw it fly off the perch. I felt a bit sorry for it.

Just remembered another odd one but this was from last year, not childhood

We were flat sitting for someone we know and they had one whole wall worth of bookcase and every single book was about Hitler. There are hundreds of them

When I was around 12 or 13 me and a friend went to another friends house. When we arrived he was there with about 3 or 4 lads and his dad was out. They'd discovered his dads 'porn' tapes and decided to put one on ... it transpires his dad had very illegal tastes, I won't go into detail but it was very real torture of a woman and I will never ever forget the her screams. It was horrific.

Another friend of mine. We went to her dads a lot when we were about 14/15. Her dad would always have a quick shower, come out in a dressing gown and sit with his legs wide open to deliberately expose himself to us. I have no idea why we would still go visit him and although we exchanged awkward glances I don't think we ever discussed it at all. I just felt heartbroken for her.