From creepy to cool: Buyers are finding unusual things hidden in their homes
The couple was undaunted and moved in. All was well until they renovated the attic.
ll houses harbor the whispers of ghosts who came before. Writers from Celeste Ng to Jhumpa Lahiri have crafted tales about people moving into homes and turning into amateur archaeologists, prowling quiet corners and unearthing secrets. Religious totems, antique toys, medals — tiny flashes of lives long gone, overlapping with the present only due to happenstance.
But sometimes there are sequined bras.
Like so many home buyers in 2009, Matthew Stein and his wife, Cathy, were hopeful.
The couple had found a two-family home behind Somerville’s Union Square, close to Winter Hill. The neighborhood was still somewhat unknown. Prices were reasonable.
“It was a great time to buy,’’ Matthew Stein said.
Sure, there was a bit of intrigue: A previous owner was said to be a recluse, neighbors revealed. But no matter. The walkthrough was going swimmingly until the couple reached the basement. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first. Laundry, storage area, plumbing.
“But then we turned on a light, and plastered all over the walls were 1970s porn magazine cutouts. My buyer’s agent turned bright red, didn’t say a word, and went upstairs,’’ he said. “I absolutely died laughing.’’
The images seemed to span eras, ranging from full-page 1970s cutouts to smaller centerfolds in the 1980s, complete with big hair and tan lines.
The couple was undaunted and moved in. All was well until they renovated the attic.
“We found a decaying plastic bag of pasties, skimpy bikini tops, and a bunch of women’s shoes, all unworn, stuck into the eaves,’’ he said.
The couple disposed of the salacious garb, but the cutouts remain in the basement. (Their first-floor tenants have a sense of humor about it.)
However, this bounty seems downright benign compared with the extremely graphic porn magazines that Tim and Caitlin Cunningham discovered upon moving into their West Medford Colonial, mixed in with copies of National Geographic. The plot thickened when they peeled away wallpaper in an upstairs bedroom, revealing “primitive, crude’’ cartoon drawings from a teenager complaining about her mother next to scrawls about school crushes. Perhaps someone felt a touch of guilt, though: The Cunninghams also found paintings of Jesus in the attic.
“It’s like someone leaving leftover food in your fridge — this residual quality of knowing a family lived here,’’ Cunningham said.
Or, perhaps, a killer.
Jamie Coelho’s husband, Andre, was clearing debris from beneath the shed of their Swansea home two years ago when he made a jarring discovery.
“Out came this handle,’’ Jamie Coelho recalled. “He thought it was a rake, but it was a creepy antique scythe. It looked like a murder weapon, a Grim Reaper tool. We thought about selling it, but we were a little bit frightened of it, to be honest.’’
They slipped the 6-foot-tall relic back from whence it came.
Sometimes, though, the residual feeling that Cunningham describes is warm and fuzzy, not X-rated, mysterious, or murderous.
Gary and Carolyn Walsh moved to Needham in 2014 and renovated their basement a few years later. Clearing out a storage area, they stumbled upon an envelope stuffed with baby pictures, which they mailed to the former owners, who now have four grown children.
“It wasn’t clear that this was a purposeful thing at that point,’’ Carolyn Walsh said.
Gradually, though, they began to stumble upon more personal mementos. Locked into the basement’s built-in desk was a stuffed bunny for the new occupants, with a note from the children: “This is my old stuffed animal, Carrot. Treasure these memories.’’
The Walshes took a photo of both of their kids holding Carrot — now a favorite possession — and sent copies to the family.
“It was a touching gesture of goodwill for the people who had just finished growing up in the house to pass on a piece of their childhood to our kids,’’ she said.
These discoveries can offer interesting tidbits about a home’s history, too. Erin and Jim Quealy are expanding their Lowell farmhouse and have unearthed buried medicine bottles, an ink blotter, a kerosene lamp, an iron wagon wheel, an iron horse, and vanilla extract.
“The cool thing is that the bottles are all etched. This is before they made bottles on machines. Everything was handblown and durable,’’ Erin Quealy said. The family tried to trace some of the bottles based on their etchings, discovering that many date from the turn of the 20th century — despite the fact that the home’s deed states that it was built in 1935.
“I’m wondering if the deed to our house was reissued. It might be older. It’s fun to find these little clues,’’ Quealy said.
Especially when the clues come to life. When Phil and Tara Lasker moved into their Arlington Heights Victorian in 2011, they unearthed a trove of letters, photos, and postcards while gutting the kitchen. The day after their discovery, two women pulled up in front of the house and stopped their car. Phil Lasker watched this scene unfold from inside the house. Eventually, the women began chatting with the contractor. Curious, he went outside.
It was an elderly woman and her daughter. The older woman had grown up in the Laskers’ house and wanted to see her childhood home. Lasker welcomed them inside and showed them the letters and photos.
“That’s me as a child,’’ the older woman told them.
“We couldn’t believe how random it was that they came the very next day after finding these items. I honestly probably wouldn’t believe this story if it didn’t happen to us,’’ Tara Lasker said.
These days, though, a standard purchase-and-sale agreement stipulates that a home should be left absolutely vacant and “broom clean,’’ said Ed Greable, a real estate agent with Keller Williams Realty in Cambridge, who once discovered an urn and ashes during a routine walkthrough (yes, he alerted the listing agent).
Blame distracted sellers, absentee adult children selling an old property, or folks with a sense of humor: It doesn’t always happen this way. When Greable finds debris, he’ll usually calls a junk removal company and passes the cost along to the closing attorney to get reimbursed from the proceeds of the sale.
“They will honor that. I’ve always been reimbursed,’’ Greable said. Consider yourself warned before you leave behind your favorite skimpy bikini.
Or at least be discreet. Katie Noyes sealed a time capsule into her family’s Medford Victorian during a 2014 renovation, complete with an edition of The Boston Globe, the front page of a Medford newspaper, a new quarter, a letter describing her family, and before-and-after photos of the house. She stuffed it into a cigar box, painted the address and “time capsule’’ on the top, and sealed it into the wall of an under-construction bathroom.
“I wanted to contribute something back to the house and keep the story going. Maybe when we move, I’ll hide some other things for people to discover. It’s a really special house,’’ she said.
And sometimes, mementos are just too hard to throw away. Cunningham, who owns the West Medford house with Jesus portraits and suspicious magazines, also shared a heartwarming tale.
Her parents bought a beach cottage in East Orleans previously owned by an older couple, both now deceased.
“The woman had passed away, and her husband lived there afterward. And on the back of their bedroom door was a card that we assume he gave her on the last year she was alive. Every year since she died, he’d sign it again. You can see his handwriting getting shakier. He signed it until the year he died. It was incredibly moving.’’
Her parents never took it down.
See some of the Quealy family finds below:
Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected]. Subscribe to the Globe’s free real estate newsletter — our weekly digest on buying, selling, and design — at pages.email.bostonglobe.com/AddressSignUp. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @globehomes.
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