It’s the spooky season! As such, we’re bringing you 5 of the creepiest discoveries ever made by those moving into a new property. From haunted houses to nests of creepy crawlies, these movers got more than they bargained for with their new ‘homes’…
A Home With Ssssspecial Guests
When Ben and Amber Sessions managed to buy a five bedroom house in a rural area of Idaho for around €160,000, they felt pretty fortunate. It was an ideal place to raise their two young children (with a third on the way), they thought.
This turned out to not be quite true, as they quickly discovered that the house sat on top of a snake ‘hibernaculum’, where these feared reptiles go to spend a cold winter.
It might sound like the beginning of a nature documentary until you find out that this meant that Ben had to kill 42 snakes on one particularly bad day as he went about his business. Not only that, they heard the snakes moving around in their walls, pipes and under the floors.
So bad was the problem that the day after their third child was born they accepted foreclosure and left the property… probably with a life-long case of ophidiophobia (fear of snakes).
The Secret Room
One horrified homeowner was so disturbed by a discovery in their new property that they took to Reddit to share their story.
Reddit user u/Nukestorm purchased a house, having viewed the property first and falling in love with it. But when they came to move in, they discovered there was a small secret attic, complete with a metal grate over the door, and no handle or lock on the inside to escape from within.
Some of the commenters suggested that it could be a quiet/dark room for a migraine sufferer to avoid any painful stimulus, with others adding it might be a room to house a mentally ill family member from centuries ago. The industrial construction, lack of internal door handle and prison-style bed inside prompted a lot of comments and theories about who might have been locked up in there.
Home Invasion
The third case comes from Whitehorse in Canada, where Calvin Oshowy bought a house in 2013. Very quickly he discovered that the house already had some occupants, and they were also mammals. However, these mammals were small, brown and black and could fly. He and his family found hundreds of bats living in their attic, in the walls and all over the outside of the house.
If the discovery of this creepy problem wasn’t enough, they then all left and headed south for the winter. Thinking the issue was resolved the family were horrified to find out that bats often nest in the exact same location, and so to avoid being flooded by flying little black predators in the winter, Calvin decided to construct a bat sanctuary near the house in the hopes of avoiding them coming back.
An Unexpected Housemate
The penultimate weird discovery happened in the sunny coastal town of Roses, Spain. A bank had repossessed the house after non-payment of the mortgage, and the new owner was most likely feeling pretty happy about getting on the property ladder cheaply.
Jorge Giro arrived to check out his new property for the first time, and was surprised to find out the reason the mortgage had not been paid by the previous owner – they were a mummified corpse sitting in the house. The bank had never sent anyone to look into the property, so the previous owner had been waiting to be discovered for more than six years…
Resting in Peace
The next scary discovery comes from Germany, where a man was attempting to extend his house for some extra living space. After being unable to drill through the walls, he scraped enough of the plaster away to discover that he was trying to drill into a WWII gravestone. Further inspection found a significant part of the house was constructed from very durable gravestones, complete with their grisly and sombre history too.
And one extra, just because it’s Halloween….
Be glad you aren’t in Maria and Derek Broaddus’ shoes. They just had to accept an offer $440,000 lower than they paid for their house in New Jersey, according to The Cut. Ever since they bought it as the perfect home to raise their children, they have been receiving creepy letters from ‘The Watcher’ that turned evermore threatening.
Letters commenting on their children – referring to them as ‘young blood’ – and on the visits they made while the house was being renovated. One letter warned not to let the children play in the basement because ‘you would never hear the scream’. The Broudduses went as far as trying to secure permission to tear the house down. It was denied and followed up with a letter from ‘The Watcher’ threatening revenge – perhaps an illness, the death of a pet, or even a loved one.
After unsuccessfully trying to rent out the property, or sell it for more than they paid – due to the extensive renovations – they finally had to accept the lower price just to be rid of the property. We are yet to know if The Watcher has returned…
