There sure is a lot of crap buried my yard.
Matchbox cars, glittery broken glass shards, unidentifiable pieces of plastic toys. It’s just an embarrassment of head-scratching riches! But the oddest of them all is something that looks an awful lot like an old, heavily corroded railroad spike (from a Ponce Heights railroad that was never built??)
So I’ll throw down the old gauntlet. What’s the oddest thing you’ve ever found buried in your yard?
Latest from Decaturish
Judd
spreak
theron wasson
smith
Deanne
macarolina
Kevin
Sara
AED
spreak
smith
Decatur Metro
Curious
Deanne
Deanne
Two tombstones.
This was not in Decatur. The house was built in the early 1800’s. We think a former resident in the late 1800’s was a stone carver. The individuals named on the stones were real, but as far as we could tell they were not buried there. And as a ten year old kid I dug pretty deep looking. I found all sorts of old bottles and dishes but that’s it.
That’s awesome!
Under a small hole that suddenly appeared in the driveway one day, I found a void big enough to swallow the minivan parked on the thin concrete above it.
jimmy hoffa
We found one of those granite curb stones in our backyard–over 70 yards from the street.
An old car bumber
Next to our cottage in the back yard, I found a horseshoe. Makes me think the ‘cottage’ was once a small barn.
A cell phone and a tube of Chap Stick. Right next to each other.
A whole loaf of Wonderbread, still in the bag.
A three-foot fiberglass statue of some guy in a 1920’s-era suit and hat.
I found a hatchet in my backyard. Hope the truce lasted.
I found one of those old irons that would heat up on a stove or whatever they used back in the day. Rusty as heck.
TONS of glass which is no fun.
A few cobble stones…not sure what they were doing in the yard. Trying to figure something creative out to do with them.
I’ve always wondered what folks have found around here. Decatur probably has a lot of buried history out there in peoples yards. Civil war troops were around here, the city is older than Atlanta…who knows!
Kinda like the show “if walls could talk”…
In the yard of our late 1940s Decatur home we found lots of rock, brick, glass, metal bits as we did landscaping. We were told that developers of that time period typically dug a pit in the back yard and threw all their trash in–then covered it up. I’ve heard they dig old sewer pipes where they would find buttons, apothecary type bottles and other historical items preserved/protected by the pipe. One man’s trash…
There’s parts of our yard where you can’t plant bushes or bulbs, you hit all sorts of concrete and other debris. No question that developers just buried their leftovers.
Dozens of long silvery white rods. No idea what they were for, but my boys attempted to build a fence with them, only to find that they oxidized very quickly and were perhaps a bit too warm to handle, at least in the summer heat. The metal would literally start to flake off before long… Very strange, poor quality metal apparently. They ended up in a big blue Decatur trash bag, only to melt right through it in less than 30 minutes. We ended up taking them to the dekalb dump because they were making a mess. That’s about the strangest thing we’ve dug up in the yard, other than the six odd religious (catholic?) statues that were buried in our dirt cellar, upsidedown no less.
Dedogur,
You likely found a St. Joseph buried upside down to “sell the house quicker”. That is the most likely candidate.
A Mercury dime while digging up my driveway. Came across many black widows that day so the shiny dime really made me happy. Had never seen one before. Did a little research on it and learned that it is more properly known as the Winged Head Liberty dime since Mercury, the Roman god of commerce is actually NOT depicted on the coin. The engraving is of Liberty, embodied as a young woman wearing a Phrygian cap with wings.
The Mercury dime was introduced in 1916 and minted until 1945. In 1946, the Mercury was replaced with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died the previous year. The Congressional decision to memorialize the creator of the New Deal in this manner was a testament to his search for a cure for polio which resulted in the charity March of Dimes and carried an implicit reference to “Brother, can you spare a dime?” –the song of the Great Depression that he had helped resolve. And one last interesting tidbit, the the dime is the only (coin) denomination not “taken” by another president. Sorry, too much information, I know, but I just found that irresistibly interesting. You gotta love the Internets!
Other than that, like many posters, a side of my house has old buried construction debris that is difficult to dig into/landscape.
Our house is probably 1910s, so we have have found cool old patent medicine bottles and clay marbles, which I have kept. Our house was also a crack house right before we moved in, so we have found pipes, needles and condoms along with assorted crackheads.
if anyone finds clay marbles and patent medicine bottles, I WANT THEM! (please!)
I buried one of those big Tonka toy trucks in my mom’s flower bed at some point.
I don’t think she’s found it yet.
hundreds of small salt and pepper shakers. hundreds.
Is your house an old deli??
nope, i can’t figure it out. they’re very small, like the ones catering companies use.
Maybe they’re from some sort of great deli heist!
That’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.
Found a 3/4 full propane tank buried in the backyard. had a heck of time finding womeone to safely remove it. (midway woods area)
Did you call Hank Hill?
My dad’s marbles from when he was a kid (don’t worry–I’ve already maxed out the jokes about Dad about losing his marbles). I live in the house where he grew up! Also have found a number of old-timey medicine bottles. Dad told me once that a physician lived in the house directly behind mine, and he would bring home and bury much of the waste from his practice (!!!!) in his back yard.
Once, when I lived in SC, I dug up a lovely piece of Fiestaware pottery in the yard of my rented duplex.