Your home is your safe place. We all have certain expectations of safety and security. An askreddit thread asked people about the worst thing they’ve ever come home to. Some of the stories are sad, some are strange, but they’re all worth reading. Here are 17 of the best:
1. Creepy
I go to turn on the light and…nothing. The electricity is off. Go to the electricity box outside and turn it on and go back inside: house has been cleared out of all valuable things. I hear a whirring sound and realise it’s the old VCR video tape rewinder rewinding the video tape I put in it in the morning as I left home with my baby son. And then it dawns on me: that tape only takes about 3 minutes to rewind… The burglars must have turned off the electricity seconds after I left home with my baby in the morning. They were watching me leave from inside the garden…..
2. Secret meth lab
Meth lab bust. I was raised by my grandparents (they were wonderful people who adopted a bunch of sh^tty kids) and they’d let my aunt and her boyfriend move their RV onto the property because they got kicked out of wherever they were staying. The worthless as$holes were trying to cook meth in it and it caught on fire so they ran off and left it there burning. The neighbors called 911 and the fire department got the fire out before it got to the house. It was nice coming home from school to that. It was a huge sh^t storm. My grandparents were almost arrested and they almost lost their house and land. Pretty much the only thing that saved them was that the meth lab was in a vehicle registered to the boyfriend. Even though we didn’t get into any legal trouble it was still a pain in the ass because the whole house had to be tested and they had to hire someone to clean up the mess and have the property test clean before we could move back in. And my childhood home is listed as a former meth lab on the National Clandestine Laboratory Register. My grandparents never recovered financially.
3. Everything was gone
I came home from a business trip with 3/4 of the furniture at my house gone. My wife of 20+ years had left me for her high school sweetheart and moved across the country to be with him. She took everything she wanted and left me with divorce papers. Hard to imagine a 5000 sq ft house with nothing in it. Depressing for sure.
4. Poor pup
Dog had had surgery on both paws. Husband decided after a few days that he trusted him without the cone of shame. Arrived home to find bits of white cotton scattered down the hall. Followed them to find the living room floor covered in blood and the dog in his bed with a paw swollen to twice its usual size after he’d shredded the bandages and ripped out his stitches. Worst treasure hunt ever.
5. No more Beanie Babies
When I was around 7, I came home from a family weekend away, I walked into my room towards my cove. I had this hanging chain that you put your beanie babies on. As I passed it, it seemed like there was a bunch of dust particles in the air around me.
I started moving my hands in front of my face as if to push the dust particles from blocking my view… that was when I realized.
These were not dust particles, but rather hundreds upon hundreds of tiny baby spiders. While we were gone tons of eggs hatched and I was walking in all of them hanging from the ceiling on web strings.
I immediately ran screaming into the shower and refused to go back in for days after my dad killed them all. That was the end of me having beanie babies, time to grow up.
TL/DR: Hundreds of spiders hatched from eggs, I walked into them all over me.
Edit: For those who asked, this was in Connecticut, feel free to cross that off your travel destinations.
Whether or not the spider laid the eggs on the beanie babies, or they came from within.. I was taking no chances. My dad said that was the epicenter and he could see tons crawling on them as if their “fur” was blowing in the wind.
6. Water damage
Once my family returned from dinner out (a few hours at least!) and upon entry back into the house we noticed water leaking from the garage roof. Turns out our top floor toilet tank had cracked and water had been continuously pouring and was cascading down the stairs, through all three floors. A ridiculous amount of damage.
Edit: After reading your comments I can say we are very fortunate we weren’t away longer. And… get those water detection alarms people!!!
7. Squirrels!
Got home after work, sat down on my couch. Caught a glimpse of something in the corner of my eye. Turn towards the love seat and see a squirrel sitting on top of it. Then look behind the love seat and see that my air conditioner side paneling was torn to shreds and all over the floor.
Chased the squirrel out and made better side paneling, but the squirrels never stopped trying to get in. It was horrible hearing them scratching and gnawing. My landlord tried putting up some wire fencing around the window hoping to prevent them from getting in. Instead, they would manage to get in and then forget how to get out. So they would be trapped between the wiring and my A/C, panicking and gnawing and the window sill and and I’d feel bad for them and despise them at the same time. This went on for a long time and I now f*cking hate squirrels and window A/C units.
My friends printed and framed a particularly good photo of one of those squirrels attempting to get in. And bought me a squirrel throw pillow.
8. Separation anxiety
When I was in about sixth grade or so, my family and I adopted a dog–Sally–we had found abandoned with her pups. We found the pups a home and decided to keep Sally, little did we know the mom had separation anxiety.
Before I left for the school bus one morning after my parents had gone to work, I was to put Sally in her kennel, but she absolutely REFUSED to get in. Knowing I was already running late, I just gave up and left.
When I came home that afternoon, it was pure destruction. The blinds had been destroyed, she had scattered all my things on my desk on the floor–including a small fish tank–and the house had a myriad of broken objects throughout. Let’s just say my parents weren’t too thrilled, but I managed to persuade them to keep her.
To this day she was one of my absolute favorite dogs. Who woulda thought?
9. Warning: poo stories
Kid decided to remove diaper after p*oping, then smear the p*op everywhere. Wife was covered in it and everyone was screaming. When I walked in, I assumed someone was severely injured.
Edit: This isn’t even the most memorable p*op story, just the most recent. This one was also one that fell to my lovely wife to deal with.
Let me tell you about the death of Potsy. Back when my kids were maybe ~2 and ~4, they had this cooking pot toy. It would chatter away as you played with it, singing about food and colors. They also had this pop up tent in their play area. Well, somehow, the 2yo p*oped in Potsy. It starts singing – “Every food, has a special color…” Well, the 4yo takes Potsy directly to the play kitchen and starts pretending to cook with it. At this point, they’re playing quietly so no alarms have been raised.
Of course the 4yo then takes the Potsy Pot of Poo Porridge and starts trying to feed it to the 2yo. This is when the drama started, as well as the smearing. Potsy died that day, well loved and full of shtew. The tent was also a victim, as were some of the pretend veggies and utensils that came with Potsy.
I came home and half of the playroom was gone, and my wife had the thousand yard stare. We’ve since bought another Potsy, but the legend lives on.
10. He found his mom acting strangely…
I was 13 and came home from school. My mother was walking around the house naked and delirious. Randomly picking objects up and dropping them. Calling me by a name that wasn’t mine. I called 911 and a neighbor.
She had a fever of 104. It was bacterial meningitis. She was in a medically induced coma after that, required brain surgery and then months of antibiotics. She had amnesia after that and was never really the same.
11. Face tattoos
I remember walking into my house with a police officer after a neighbour had called in a robbery .
“Does there appear to be anything missing?”
“Ah well yeah there should be about twice as much stuff in here, the bracket on the wall usually has a tv mounted on it.” Had cleaned out almost everything except large furniture and appliances. Even took my clothes and a hair dryer.
The neigbour got a positive I.d on the guy, full face tattoos so pretty hard to mistake. Had only been out of jail for a month and was well known to police. Despite all this it took awhile for the police to nail him so insurance had already paid us out, then they chased him in court for their money. He was charged with robbing 6 other houses and a bunch of other regular criminal sh^t, went back to jail for another 7 years and the insurance companies will be sucking him dry for the rest of his life.
12. Good timing
My dad, sitting at the foot of his bed, in tears, with a shotgun in his hand. I am so glad I got home when I did. I was out with friends and something was telling me I needed to get home ASAP, so I left early. I took the shotgun out of his hand, put the safety on, and just gave him a huge hug.
On a lighter note, the first “mess” I came home to in my first home was my cat finding the canister of catnip and exploding it all over the living room. I mean, it was ALL OVER THE PLACE, and the cat, looking smug as a bug, was rolling around in it, high as a kite.
13. Just heartbreaking
A bunch of cop cars and cops standing around in the yard, it was a hot sunny day, I don’t remember who else was there except my ex-MIL, and I had just dropped off my 3-year-old at my grandmother’s house but my 1-year-old twins were in their car seats in the back, and I opened the door and was told my husband was dead inside the house and I took the twins out of their car seats and sat in the grass in the sun with them and I don’t really remember how long I sat there
14. How long was that walk?
My gf and I were having a problem. I told her I needed to take a walk, but I’d be back. I kissed her on the cheek and walked out the door.
I got back and she had cleaned up, packed her things, and left me.
15. A plague
8 billion baby praying mantis in my house. Over the fall, my daughter went out into the woods and collected every praying mantis cocoon she could find and put them in a shoebox in her bedroom. They all hatched in the early spring while we were visiting my parents for the day…
16. Two things
2 things:
When I was a kid the dog ate 2 pans of fudge. the puke was *everywhere*. in the back hall we actually used a snow shovel to scoop it into trash bags.
Went on vacation for three weeks, driving across the country. told the now ex, let’s turn the water off. “No, we can’t, I’m running a load of dishes.” sh^t, honey, we can wait 30 minutes. “No! We have to leave.” when I came home, the door wouldn’t open. turns out the icemaker water control solenoid decided that it had been working for too damn long, and stopped holding the water back. There was mold **everywhere**. Everything in the house went into the trash. clothes, bedding, furniture, etc. they took up all the flooring down to the slab, and the bottom 4 feet of drywall, down to the studs. It was a 6-month rehab job.
17. A wasp’s nest
My dad came home to find a wasp in the house. And then another. And then another. He investigated. Heard a buzzing coming from the dining room. An entire nest of wasps had been living in the walls and chewed through the sheetrock (or whatever it is they did) and were now pouring into the house through the hole.
Edit to answer a few questions: the dining room was a formal room only used for holidays and dinner parties and since it was summer most entertaining they did was done outside. So no buzzing heard. Also my dad was older and hearing does get less sharp.
Exterminator cleared it out. My dad removed the sheetrock and replaced it and replaced all the vent covers.
They typically had wasp nests hanging from the eaves all the time so seeing wasps outside wouldn’t have been noticed (they even had them in the mailbox).