The gas oven in my student house stopped working
So my landlord sent a bloke round to fit a new one. When he pulled the old one out he revealed a very large, very dead rat under a centimetre thick layer of congealed grease.

A hand run down the inside of the sofa in the same house supplied us with a butterfly knife, an empty Zippo lighter and a little bottle of a mysterious coloured liquid we were all too scared (sensible) to even smell.

Oh, and when I moved out I left a treasure trove of my own. I couldn't fit a couple of boxes of my possessions into the boot of my car so I left them hidden behind a weird removable panel built into my bedroom wall. They're probably still there now, 5 years later. So, without giving too much away, if anyone here is at a Uni in the East Midlands and lives in a terraced house in a bedroom in the converted attic with a walk-in wardrobe: unscrew the panel immediately behind the inside of the wardrobe door. There's probably a load of old love letters and other interesting rubbish in there. Enjoy!
( naeonlite, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 23:55, Reply)

Some friends of mine set up a bar in Prague
When they were renovating the place they found a secret cellar with 5 litres of mercury and a full range of bomb making equipment.
( Zuowan, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 22:45, Reply)

ZooLurker is an angry chick with a mullet!,
so are you like... 8 now?
(sextuple rooty, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 21:55, Reply)

A beautiful moment deserves a post.
Tidying my room, I found 7 pound coins scattered in random hiding places. I had a habit at age 12 for hiding my wonga in places so that I could savour the moment if I was lucky enough to uncover them once more.

7 years on, and inflation wearing away at my soul, I was touched by my own naive mind of the past. Good job I found them now, I daresay I could only afford a bottle of Panda Pops and a Wham bar with the money if I'd've left it longer.
( TGP on the rock 'n' roll, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 20:50, Reply)

Hmmm, well, not strictly within the terms of the question, but...
I find it amusing nonetheless. Well, I do now. At the time it was a different matter. Devil Duck look away now...

Let us set the scene. It was my boyfriend's 17th birthday and his family were away, so he decided to have a little booze-up to celebrate. At this point we'd been together, ooh, about 5 months - things had gradually got more serious and... intimate. But we'd yet to go "all the way", so, thinks I, what better present could I give him than the privilege of popping my cherry? I turned up a couple of hours early in order to adequately provide him with his present, all went rather well, and we were very fastidious in disposing of the evidence, being in the days before I went on the pill, wrapping both the condom and the wrapper in tissue and hiding the package under the other rubbish in the kitchen bin. Suffice to say, being young, horny teenagers, we've been at it like rabbits ever since, always being careful how we disposed of the evidence lest our parents find out what we were up to. Now to the point.

I said we were always very careful. The excessive amount of tissues in my bin was explained away by my near-constant cold. However, I left the boyf to get rid of the boxes the johnnies came from, as there was no way of hiding them. Mostly he chucked them in a bush on his way home, or even a bin or skip if he was feeling environmentally-friendly. So I thought. After about two or three months of this, it's about time his room needs a clearout, so he and his mum set about giving it a good tidying. His mum goes for his bedside drawer - honestly, the mother of a teenage boy should know better - and is confronted with a drawer full to bursting of nice blue boxes labelled "Durex". Hidden treasure! We'd been shagging at least once a day for about two or three months at the time, with condoms coming in boxes of three... that's a helluva lot of boxes.

She, of course, goes absolute schitz and launches into a full-scale shouting match with him, culminating in her yelling:
"For God's sake, don't get her pregnant!". To which my boyfriend, to his eternal credit, replies along the lines of:
"Why the hell do you think the boxes are empty?".

I didn't hear about any of this until a couple of weeks after, and was absolutely mortified. It did at least explain why his mum had been a bit cold with me... I couldn't look her in the eye for months.

Length is one of many reasons we're still together.

(sorry, that was appalling)
( useful_idiot, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 20:06, Reply)

Ponty
While working for an asshole builder in South Wales things got a bit slack workwise and I was asked to clean up the timber shed. All sorts of timber was stacked all over the place untidy as shite,anyways getting to the bottom of the stack I finds a black flat mass of fur under this heavy piece of wood covered in fly larvae casings , fucking disgusting.Turns out it was my bosses misssing cat from months ago.Poor little shit got squished.....
(andycrass loves two hats on, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 20:04, Reply)

Hidden Treasure
I found an album by the Glitter Band in a tree
(lezza, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 19:44, Reply)

Three Months...
Yes, three months after my grandma died we put her car up for sale. But before we took it to the sale room we decided to give it a quick clean and tidy.

We didn't know that sometime just before going to hospital she had been shopping and in the boot of the car we found...

A 3-month-old joint of meat. EW!
(Ruthyruth, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 19:34, Reply)

I just found a torn, empty condom wrapper down the side of my bed.
Not the finest gift a friend could leave.
( Malchick, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 19:30, Reply)

cats
oh and my friend peter lost his budgie when it died. they hadn't really wanted it - it was an escapee - but they gave it a decent burial nonetheless.

three weeks later the cat decided to go digging for hidden treasure in the garden. and found the nicely decomposing bird corpse.

it went on the fire for a cremation after its second coming, which was even more unwelcome than the first...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 18:39, Reply)

speed
as a leggy gang of gawky 16 year olds, we headed off for the weekend to my friend's family holiday home in the lake district with her 19 year old boyfriend and all his fit mates. trying desperately to hide the geekiness and act cool, my best mate and i nearly choked on our braces and specs as we found a mountain of - gulp - Speed hidden right away behind the beers at the back of the fridge.

in hushed voices we discussed what to do. of course, it didn't take long to establish that we had to join in when it was passed around. but we were both shocked and more than a little bit scared.

at that point, one of the more gorgeous mates arrived to sling some pizzas in the fridge. he looked at the Speed and laughed.

"my gran does that," he said bafflingly - and went on as we goggled at him as agog as two gogs - "jesus, as if a bit of baking powder's going to hide the reek of beer this weekend!"

oh well...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 18:33, Reply)

Denied!
On the road for two weeks for work, we stopped at a laundromat to do laundry. Walking up to a drier, a woman across the room politely informs me that there are about five minutes left on her drier, and I'm welcome to them as she is done. Cheapskate that I am, I take her up on her kind offer.

Not five minutes later, a co-worker of mine puts his clothes into the drier I was going to use, and finds two $20 bills.

Denied $40 for five minutes of drying. That's $8 a minute!
( setimret likes his metaphors mixed, not stirred, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 18:19, Reply)

On a boating adventure my dad and I
found a large legbone on an island close to my house. He took it to the police to get identified... it was a human femur from a 12-14 year old girl.

Ew.

Not exactly treasure, but I thought it was impressive at the time.
(grumperfish, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 18:08, Reply)

while i was in boarding school (late '99 to early 2000)
we got taken on "outings" if we were good and had to stay at school if we were bad.one of the best places they ever took us was a place called hide'n'seek.it was generally an oversized McDonalds playroom except with huge ball pits.now,me and my girlfriend loved digging around the bottoms of the ball pits trying to find shit and one day we actually found something! A silver wedding ring! i walked over to my teacher and asked her how much she thought it was worth.she said it was worth bugger-all,but if i found an engagement ring,that would be better.a little while later,i was told that it was time to order our dinner in the food court of the shopping center next door.

while we were waiting for dinner, we decided that it would be funny if i threw the ring at a fat guy who was ordering some kfc.i threw the ring and the gf ran over and picked it up.she told me that i could keep the ring as long as she could have some of my fries.

she dumped me the next morning...
(That guy with a hat., Tue 5 Jul 2005, 17:19, Reply)

FAO vixen13andahalf
I want to see it!
(G.Eusebio ...Fentruk from the long past..., Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:53, Reply)

Cheeseburger
Colour, texture and, of course, flavour.
(Wrecked Tums, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:38, Reply)

Another, interesting treasure
When I was helping my mother dig around in the garden, sorting rocks out of the dirt, I found a small tupperware box. No, its contents were not porn. They were apparently one of my 4 year old diaries from the days of yesteryear, aka 2001, approx, chronicling how much I loved Orlando Bloom, how much Johnny Depp weighed and the first time I actually wrote the word 'sexy'. ( That was the third time in my life, right back there. I'm not a big discriptive person.) What a treasure.

I burned it and dumped it out of a moving bus window. All very touching.
(ZooLurker is an angry chick with a mullet!, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:29, Reply)

How did they know
it had been there for 2 years?
(Biscuit Boy - aka - mcvpjd3, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:28, Reply)

not me but
my friend who plays saxaphone noticed a stench in one of the sax;s at the highschool .. she was later to discover the hidden treasure of a half eaten Cheese burger which had been there for 2 years mmmmmmm
(SPoRk, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:25, Reply)

8-Ball
Open it and tell us all what is inside!
( Clairebare Back once again with the Ill behaviour, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 16:09, Reply)

pisasterdrone
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh aren't you smart.
(mmmmmhaggis, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 15:31, Reply)

Having recently moved into a 300 year old house
I was rather disappointed to find that the attic had recently been insulated, and is empty. ButI fared a little better in the shed - a surfboard (no fins), a sickle, some willow pattern plates, and a rat that had been dead for so long it was totally flat.
(teasus likes tea, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 14:56, Reply)

In my student days..
On my merry way home after a nights drinking and I find a group of mysteriously placed traffic cones. 'Bingo!' I think, and proceed to take them home to decorate the old pad. Amazingly the next day, on my way to uni I found a car down a hole in round about the same spot as I found the cones the previous night! I think it maybe some sort of lucky spot.
(I've done it so many times it's boring now..., Tue 5 Jul 2005, 14:12, Reply)

Found and lost
When I was a slip of a lad... about 10 years old or so... I was visiting my great grandparents during a long Summer holiday.

I decided to go hunting around their house for "artefacts"... you know, World War 1/2 guns, bullets and all of the other stuff that elderly people always have hidden in their homes.

Half an hour of snooping through draws revealed that my increadibly house proud oldies have cleared all of the interesting stuff away and all I could find that looked even slightly old was a rather nice soft brown leather wallet - no pun/paedo remark intented.

At this point, my great grandfather walked in an caught me in the act of disshonest appropriation with the intent of permenantly depriving the rightful owner.

Lovely old boy that he was, he told me that I could keep this wallet. I then spent the rest of the holiday trying to blag as much spare change from all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and anyone else who would cough up some dosh for their darling grandson/nephew.

I even took up playing Newmarket - a gambling game - with my auntie to boost my cash levels. The curruption of youth eh?

Anyway, come the time for my father to collect me and drive me home two weeks later, I had the princely sum of £11 in my little brown wallet.

To a 10 year old in 1982 that was a shit-load of cash... FYI it was easily enough to purchase 9 original Star Wars figures or 9 gallons of petrol or 16 pints of beer or 70 bars of Cadburys chocolate... so you get the picture.... I was rich.

Dad and I stop at a motorway service station for a drink and a rest on the way home and I proudly take out my wallet to remove a crisp £1 note (for the junior B3TA readership, born after 1983, £1 notes are those funny little green pieces of paper that looked like Monopoly money) to pay for an extra-large chocolate bar and a fizzy drink (with plenty of sugar and E-numbers in it).

Upon returning to the car to finish the journey home, I open the little brown wallet to re-count my cash. And I make the horrifying discovery that somewhere between my acquiring gastric treats and getting back into the car, I had lost every pennt of my ill-gottten gains. Bugger.

The realisation sets in that at 15p per week pocket money, it was going to take nearly two years for me to replace it!

...now that kind of length is unimaginable to a 10 year old!
(IcePimp, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 14:08, Reply)

Magic jumper pocket
I bought Mr S a brand-new sweatshirt -- with tags on and everything -- from a shop in Brighton's North Laine. It (the jumper) had lots of little zippy pockets all over it.

A couple of days later he wore it to our local pub's quiz night. We got bored waiting for the quiz to start to I decided to explore all Mr S's new pockets.

Lo and behold, in a pocket on the arm, we found a tenner that had clearly been through the washing machine. Yay! Nearly four pints!

And we won the quiz.
( Safetyfox, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 13:57, Reply)

Yay - More Porn !!
Being over in the Netherlands with work for two weeks can get pretty tedious. - If only I had something to keep me occupied...

..I found two wonderful porn mags!!

Unfortunately, I found them on my last day there when I was packing to go home. I'm always uber-paranoid about leaving anything behind when I'm away, so I checked every shelf in the wardrobe... including the shelf which was far too high for me to reach anyway. There's no way I could have put any of my clothing or other items up there. - but my obsessiveness got the better of me and I got a chair to check. - Yay, porn !!

I have other stories to tell about hidden treasure, which I have been remembering since registering last week, but can't be arsed to tell them. :-)



POP! - first post. Wooh and yay for me !!
(MrCarbohydrate, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 13:47, Reply)

Lady Di banknote
You mean they're *offered* for a hundred quid. Antone spunking a ton on that deserves to have "I AM NATHAN BARLEY" tattooed on their foreheads and set on fire, the clueless twunts.

It's not art, it's taking the piss.
(InfiniteZenMaster, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 13:45, Reply)

FAO tickles
I hope you didn't burn that fake bank note. Those Banksy of England £10 notes are worth quite a bit... they're the ones with Princess Di's face on rather than the queen's, right?

They were made in really limited numbers for the 'Santa's Ghetto' exhibition and go for about £100+ each on eBay - I'd think that probably qualifies more for the 'hidden treasure' title than the real £20 note you found.

cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=360&item=6539974366&rd=1&ssPageName=WD1V

EDIT: In response to the post above, I know that link has the b.i.n. price of £100, but I have actually seen them go for more than that too (although admittedly, that was earlier in the year). And yeah - it does take the piss.
(Arnolfini wasn't feeling very funny on, Tue 5 Jul 2005, 13:33, Reply)