Household Relics

[Sollywos]

Many years ago a new friend of mine showed me a tudor ball that they'd found in the cottage they'd done up back in Suffolk.

They'd found it while doing work on the ingle nook fireplace and had learnt that it had been there since the house was built as it was meant to bring good luck. She'd had it verified by the local museum.

I was horrified that she hadn't rehidden it and thought it a dreadful thing to do. Ok so maybe she didn't believe in the superstition but I felt that was besides the point. It was part of the history of that house. I felt her desire to own the artifact was a poor excuse to remove it from where it had been for four hundred years or so!

 

[Frideswide]

cup hooks in vast numbers hanging from the ceiling

my guess is that they were for a thread network to display model aircraft built from kits. Not that I'd know. Or anything

 

[catseye]

my guess is that they were for a thread network to display model aircraft built from kits. Not that I'd know. Or anything

Or a stuffed crocodile, if the previous occupants were, say, alchemists or something.

 

[Dinobot]

American friends of Escet at CERN lived in a quaint French cottage with doors and a stairway too narrow to admit their antique wooden bed.
They of course had an upstairs window removed and hired a crane to lift the bed into place.

Puts me in mind of those Americans being craned out of their homes....

 

[Spookdaddy]

I’m in the process of renovating a very large flat built originally in the Edwardian period. Unfortunately I live in it so every night I go to bed on a building site and seem to live on a diet of dust and splinters. In the process of gutting the place I have found numerous strange items.

Behind a skirting board (mop board in the US, I think) in the kitchen the tooth fairy had deposited about a dozen milk teeth.

Quite often I find folded pieces of paper with poems and what look like (benign) spells written on them slotted between floorboards.

The bones of a frog were placed carefully beneath the floorboards in front of the entrance door of the flat, facing outwards.

The saddest, and somehow most unnerving, find was a plastic carrier bag from the late 60’s or early 70’s (judging by the typography) full of used sanitary towels which was stuffed under a loose floorboard in the front bedroom. Sounds gross I know - however my immediate thought was one of pity for the poor girl who was so ashamed of the natural process she was experiencing that she had to hide the evidence of it in a shopping bag under the floor.

The area I live in was once owned and developed by the Duke of Devonshire who I suspect was a top Mason as many of the houses he had built are decorated with Masonic motifs and other esoteric symbols. I have two large gargoyles (Sid and Nancy) either side of my front bedroom window and there is a house behind me that has a fantastic green man carved above the entrance to the garden from the road.

Still in the aforementioned flat (and...ahem...still not quite finished. And the bits that are finished - some of them are ready for redoing.)

Turned out that the lady I bought the place from was a practicing witch - of the benevolent variety she assured me. Although, turns out that not all of my discoveries were down to her.

There's been more subfloor discoveries since then - as described on the Inexplicable Ephemera (Miscellaneous Stuff / Items Found) thread:

I’ve mentioned before some of the items I’ve found while renovating my flat. I’ve been thinking about this again recently, while replacing floorboards prior to sanding and varnishing the floor of the back room that I’ve been using as a storeroom/workshop for the last several years.

I found a quite large pickle jar with an unusually (more or less) intact label:

View attachment 20624

Also, an odd arrangement - which consisted of a partly singed couple of pages from a newspaper (dated 1917), some beheaded lead soldiers, a single wooden cube with pictures on the faces, and a pasteboard fish! The newspaper was so desiccated that it fell apart in my fingers – but before it did I noticed that the most prominent article on the sheet was in regard to the loss of a British ship. As I said, this seemed like some sort of conscious arrangement, but that was probably my own desire to find a pattern (I’m sure if I was an archaeologist I’d use the phrase ‘ritual purposes’). At the time the fish, certainly, seemed somehow macabre – although in the pictures it looks more forlorn than sinister.

View attachment 20625View attachment 20626

And here an assortment of some older finds:

View attachment 20627

A couple more underfloor discoveries from the same room mentioned in my post #77.

There appears to have been some sort of secretive grocery fetish going on in there. Actually, here - I'm using that room as an office just now.

View attachment 35905

View attachment 35906

The board had been split for side battening to support cross battens holding ancient junction boxes. I feel like I have to make something out of those.

Edit: Actually, I see that there's another tea packet in that older post. Clearly a favourite.

 

[Floyd]

Still in the aforementioned flat (and...ahem...still not quite finished. And the bits that are finished - some of them are ready for redoing.)

Turned out that the lady I bought the place from was a practicing witch - of the benevolent variety she assured me. Although, turns out that not all of my discoveries were down to her.

There's been more subfloor discoveries since then - as described on the Inexplicable Ephemera (Miscellaneous Stuff / Items Found) thread:

You tried one of the Woodbines Spook?

(How do you not crap yourself every night there?)

 

[Spookdaddy]

...(How do you not crap yourself every night there?)

The amount of work I've put into the place, if anyone's going to haunt it, it'll be me.