What’s the Grossest or Weirdest Thing You’ve Found While Antiquing?
While speaking to an antique dealer and bottle digger over the weekend, the question came up about whether he’d ever found a body while digging for bottles. His answer was no, but he did say that he had found an old skull while digging in an old dump…which he quickly replaced and moved to another area to dig.
This got me thinking about what types of weird and/or gross things that we’ve found while searching for antiques. Below you will find some of our top picks from personal experience, feel free to add some of your own to the comments section. In no particular order…
1. Dead Animals: While antiquing you’ll find a lot of dead little critters, mice, possums, etc. The worst house as far as dead animals go had to be an old early 19th century stone house where we found about a dozen dead mummified kitty cats in the basement. Some were sitting on the window sills looking out at freedom when they died and remained there for, apparently, years before we found them.
2. Poo: There are lots of types of poo, and we’ve found many of them in some odd places. One house had about a dozen coffee cans randomly placed throughout the home, all with dried cat turds in them. At a former group home, someone used a graniteware roaster as a chamber pot, and never bothered to dump it…that was a surprise. Another home had a half dozen portable toilets in the basement, all full!
3. Blood: Everybody has blood, so it’s logical that you’ll find some occasionally. We’ve found two knives in with kitchen utensils at houses that had exorbitant amounts of congealed blood on them, and not the kind of blood one might expect from butterflying a fillet. On another occasion we found numerous items that apparently were present during some sort of CSI worthy crime scene as there was high velocity blood splatter all over the items.
4. Porn: Finding porn is always fun. There’s always a market for porn, especially the good vintage stuff. I especially like finding a stash that was meant to be hidden and presumably thrown away before the owner died. One man (who had died) had a bathroom in his garage full of dozens of empty Vaseline jars dating back decades….and some porn. One of our associates once found a cache of vintage kiddy porn on 8mm film in the basement of a home, along with other vintage adult films. He left the kiddy stuff with the owner, who was actually the boy in the films, shot during the 1960’s.
If you’ve found some weird or gross things along the way in your antiquing, we’d love to read about it, post your comments about the worst things you’ve found.
If you are into hit & miss engines, steam engines or just antiques in general, you’ll want to take a trip to Coolspring, PA for this year’s Coolspring Power Museum Expo that’s taking place from June 17 through the 19th. The expo is held in downtown Coolspring at the Power Museum grounds, just off state route 36, about 7 miles south of Brookville, Pennsylvania.
If you haven’t heard…The History Channel has a new antiques oriented show on Monday evenings at 9 PM EST. It is called American Pickers. The show is a reality based video documentary style program that follows two pickers, Mike Wolf and Frank Fritz, on their treks through the countryside looking for antiques. If you’re looking for another 
