The Craziest Things Found Buried In People’s Backyards
By Sarah Smith
1 year ago
A ring-stealing carrot
source: history 101
This is mad, and even more mad that we've heard of it happening more than once! The original story however was around 14 years ago. A Canadian woman lost her wedding ring in her garden and, understandably, she was heartbroken. Years went by and in 2015 she was taken a back to discover it wrapped around one of her own carrots! Good job she didn't move house in the interim.
Explosive remains of WWII
Source: newsweek
Digging out tree stumps is a right pain, but was almost deadly for a 39-year-old Czech chap. Coming across more than just roots, he called in the cops, who after further investigation, discovered his yard was full of hand grenades and TNT explosives from WW2. Another reason to avoid weeding.
Wooly Mammoth Remains!
Source: history 101
What kid doesn't love dinosaurs or a good dig in the backyard? Certainly not Eric and Dylan, who were excited to unearth a weird bone-looking rock in theirs. With their fingers crossed, their parents called in palaeontologist John Zawiskie (from the Cranbrook Institute of Science) who confirmed the weird rock was actually a 13,000 year old piece of a mastodon's spine! Nice!
Creepily old news
source: history 101
Digging up a time capsule in your yard probably isn't enough to freak out most people. It's a fairly normal thing for kids to bury, right? The creepy thing about this capsule collection of old newspapers however, wasn't the choice of content or where they were found, it was that they were exhumed 10 years to the day on the paper itself. Shudder.
A literal treasure chest
Source: Youtube
Imagine a Saturday afternoon gardening sesh turning up a huge chest full of goodies. A guy in Austria in 2007 found just that and, naturally, posted his find online. He was astonished to be told that the collection of over 200 ornaments, coins, rings, plates and pearls was actually with a small fortune (not sure why he needed the internet to tell him that tbh.) Being anything but a pirate however, he donated the lot to a local museum. How noble.
A full-sized oven!
Source: reddit
So admittedly, our microwave is a bit grim, but it's no where near as filthy as the stove one lady in the UK discovered while doing some landscaping. Why would you not take it to goodwill or recycle it? People are so lazy. Mind you, pit ovens are a bit of a thing now right? Maybe it was meant as a money saver.
Cannonball
Source: wavy
It's not that unusual to have canons in your fish tank, right? What's maybe a bit less usual is digging up a cannon ball whilst building in a new fish pond in your yard. Particularly one which turns out to be from the Battle of New Orleans in 1812. Always fun to find out your house was built on a front line.
A giant earthworm
Source: History 101
Not sure we can stand to look at that picture for too long. Worms are, we think, surprisingly long when you stop and look at one - but this one was just incredible. Discovered in the back yard of Chinese labourer, Li Zhiwei, this beast measured in at 2 feet and astounded local biologists.
A ferrari. Yup. A ferrari.
Source: Buzznick
This is probably how Charles Leclerc felt a few times this F1 season. Whilst messing around in their LA backyard in 1978, two kids discovered the remains of an insurance scam. Four years previously, the Dino 246 GTS had been put in the ground and reported stolen. It's now been restored with the cute licence plate "dug up."
A big ol' bag of green
Source: stuff
Usually people know the kind of green they're expecting for their veg patch. But when one lucky dude from Illinois was digging over his yard, he noticed a nylon bag buried in the soil. Far from being the usual fly tipped junk, the bag contained a whopping £113k ($134k) in cash! Worried it was probably evidence of a crime, he handed it in. Noble. We kinda hope he got to keep it.
A whopping great big emerald
Source: history 101
Farming can be pretty lucrative, but not usually this lucrative! One North Carolinian farmer found a lot more than corn and local wildlife on his land one harvest time. Wondering through his crop something shiny caught his eye, which turned out to be an enormous, 65-carat emerald.
A criminal cover up
Source: History 101
No one likes the idea that their home was in any way linked to any kind of historical criminal goings on. Imagine, then, discovering $600,000 buried in your yard and to be told it was a portion of the $1 million stolen by two truck driving bank robbers. We think we'd keep digging with our fingers crossed for the rest...
A fully stocked bomb shelter
Source: smithsonianmag.com
The world is a fragile and unpredictable place, but few people mercifully feel the need to install any kind of shelter in their back yard these days. If a certain Californian couple did feel the urge to increase their safety options however, they wouldn't need to do much. After buying a new home, they found a submerged, fully stocked Cold War fallout shelter which the real estate agent had certainly not listed! It was a veritable museum to the 60s.
A cash register with an odd poor source
Source: onthesquareemporium.com
Not many people would expect to unearth a cash register from the 1940s whilst digging in their yard. It's a pretty odd place for one to end up, let's face it. This one however, came with its original power source - several car batteries. With the power outages of WWII, maybe it wasn't so odd. Still, why bury it?
A whole 1700s cemetery
Source: Pinterest
Not an Ancient Indian Burial Ground, but a little too close for comfort we say. Whilst digging space to install a swimming pool, one man was horrified to discover 13 caskets worth of human remains - a complete cemetery dating from the 1700s. Forget the pool mate, we'd just go ahead and move.
Yankee cards
Source: dreamstime
It's always fun to find a time capsule, especially one stuffed with 1980's Yankees baseball cards; those things can fetch top dollar to the right seller. In this case however, it was not to be. The collection was too damaged to be worth anything to the gutted 25-year old who found them. Sad times.
Meteorites. Six separate ones.
Source: The Conversation
You know the whole "lightning doesn't strike twice" thing? Well usually the same applies to meteorites, except in the case of a Serbian gent living in a small village in north Bosnia. For some odd reason, his land has had six separate meteor hits. He's even starting to suspect alien involvement...
A U.B.O.
Source: freepik
Speaking of unidentified objects, this buried treasure is a total unknown. Whilst digging up worms for a fishing trip, two Canadian sisters discovered a shiny, translucent object with a blueish hue. After consulting an Earth Science professor and a gem expert, they were forced to conclude it was neither meteor or gem. No matter what it was or who put it there, they decided to keep it. Maybe they'll discover the truth one day.
More reeeeally old bones
source: BBC
You never really expect to turn into Ross Geller when you're building a fence in your back yard, but that's what happened do one guy. He even kept the bone he found in his shed for 16 years before getting it properly examined. It probably didn't change the dating of it much though, given that it was a 250 million-year-old Pliosaur bone. Mad.
1000 year old human bones
Source: Literary hub
A Pliosaur is one thing, you're unlikely to mistake that for some grisly remains of a murder scene, but in 2014 a run of the mill landscaping project turned up human remains. After all the proper channels were followed, they turned out to be the 1000 year old ones of a Native American.
Da bomb
Source: Meme Creator
Developers seem to always be being accused of cutting corners these days, but this story absolutely takes the biscuit. In Orlando, FL, 12,000 acres of bombing range were repurposed as housing. For years, homeowners there were digging up LIVE bombs in their backyards until the military spent $6.5 million to clean up the rest. Let's hope they got them all...
A missing actress (alive, not buried this one)
Source: denofgeek.com
Ok so this one isn't quite on-theme, but it is intriguing! Imagine being an avid fan of the "Superman" movies (because, let's face it, who isn't?) and one day looking out your back window only to see Lois Lane wandering around back there in dirty clothes, missing some teeth! Super bizarre. The 47 year old actress, Margot Kidder, had been missing for 3 days at this point. She was later diagnosed with bipolar and made a complete recovery.
Church bells
Source: Facebook
It's not all that unusual to unearth some random scrap metal in your yard, but this discovery was one whopping specimen. A Czech man was merrily digging away when he hit something metallic and, after quite a bit more digging, found it to be a 400-year old stolen church bell! Some people will pinch anything.
Millions worth of coins. Cha ching.
Source: Shutterstock
We're not talking small change here. Whilst walking their dog around their, we assume substantially sized, property in 2013, a Nevada couple spotted a rusty container half buried in the earth. They opened it once back home and discovered a collection of gold coins dating back to the 1890s. Upon returning to the same area, they found 7 more containers, in total hiding $26,000 worth of coins. The collection was more recently valued at a staggering $9,784,000. Inflation ey?
An super ancient stone
Source: Disney Movies
The Brits love an ancient stone - just look at Stonehenge or look up the Legend of King Arthur. So when one man was researching his home and discovered it was reportedly the site of a burial plot from 2500BC, he started looking for evidence. These things almost never turn out to be true, right? Well, in this case he struck gold, well figuratively, and discovered a stone monument to just that buried in layers of ivy.
Missing teeth. Lovely.
Source: keepcalms.com
It's not so much that a gardener in Buffalo discovered an upper plate of false teeth whilst turning over his vegetable patch, it's more the theory about how they got there. Some Americans really need to check the list for what's compostable, as the teeth were believed to have been transported there with old veg and grass cuttings. Gross.
Gold
Source: History 101
Now this Californian really did strike gold; an 8.2-pound gold nugget to be precise. Metal detecting on your own land very rarely turns up anything this good, but after finding this $ 460,000 beauty, geologists were fairly confident there is probably more around. Keep looking we say.
A ton of weed
Source: sootoday.com
Not usually the kind of weed you'd expect in the average garden. In 2012 in LA, some environmentally-conscious homeowners were having some solar panels installed on their property. Whilst inspecting an underground access vault, they found an incredible $161916 worth of marijuana.
A whale
Source: knowyourmeme
School boys love to dig up stuff, but you don't usually expect to find fossils, and certainly not marine ones. One lucky lad in 1978 found a curious rock with funny markings and, after having to enlist several friends to help him dig it up, found such a fossil. At the time it was dismissed but 30 years later, experts deemed it to be the skull and jaw bone of a 14-16 million-year-old baleen whale!
A fully loaded machine gun
Source: Britanica
Early in 2014, a Canadian gentleman was clearing up his boundary line when he discovered a pillow case buried there. Not so odd, it might have blown off a washing line... although probably not as it contained a fully loaded machine gun and mobile phone. Right, who's got a theory?
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