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12 Bizarre Things Homeowners Have Found in Their Backyards

If you thought it was cool to find a few quarters in your yard, just wait until you hear what these people found.

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fallout
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A nuclear fallout shelter

In 2013, a California couple closing the deal on a new home found an unexpected feature: a nuclear fallout shelter left perfectly intact from the 1960s. The shelter was (and still is) accessible via a 15-foot rusted ladder and included all the necessities from coffee grounds and argyle sweaters to books and sleeping pills, writes the Daily Mail. A little eerie…but not as bad the 14 creepiest things found in peoples’ homes.

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Close up of elegant diamond ring. Close up of elegant diamond ring on the finger. Diamond ring.
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A diamond ring

Thirteen years ago, one Canadian woman was devastated when she lost her wedding ring while weeding her garden. But in 2015, the ring resurfaced—on a carrot. “The carrot had grown straight through the ring, enabling it to be plucked out after many years hiding in the soil,” wrote the BBC. Even crazier? This has happened before. “In 2011, a Swedish woman found her wedding ring [on a carrot] 16 years after she lost it,” writes the BBC.

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Gold coins background : france napoleon gold coins
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$10 million in gold coins

While walking their dog on their property in the Sierra Nevada, one couple saw a rusty can sticking out of the dirt. Instead of continuing on with their walk, they decided to check it out. Lo and behold, the can was filled with gold coins. They kept digging and found other, similar cans, also filled with gold coins. The bounty totaled more than $10 million. “It was a very surreal moment,” said the man in an interview. “It was very hard to believe at first.”

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Colored marbles balls background. Background marble balls.
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An amusing marble collection

“I was doing yard work one day and came across a little glass marble. It was cool, so I put it in my pocket,” writes one Reddit user. “A little while later, in a different section of the yard, I found another marble. Picked that one up too. Then it got to where I was finding them all over the place in various sections of the front and backyard. I was putting in a new fence in the back and dug down about a foot and then was a freaking marble. They’re everywhere. I think I have about 30 of them. I don’t know what the deal is with them, but it still amuses me when I find them. This has been going on for about five years.”

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Bells in Church
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Stolen church bells

In 2013, a man from the Czech Republic was installing new pipes in his backyard when he discovered large church bells that were hundreds of years old. It turns out, the bells had been stolen from a local church nearly 11 years earlier. Authorities guess the thief intended to hide the bells and go back for them, but for whatever reason, never did.

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rich dad and poor dad media to teach our young child to be a businessman
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A bundle of “cursed” money

Not all these backyard treasure-finders are lucky. In 2013, an Illinois man was picking broccoli in his garden when he found $150,000 in a nylon bag. He brought the money to the police, who told him he could keep the cash if no one came forward for it. In time, his neighbor did come forward—but she didn’t want the money, writes HuffPost. Instead, the woman insisted the loot was “cursed.” The man was able to take half of it (the other half went to the woman’s daughter). But unfortunately, a week before retrieving his money, the man died.

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bone dinosaur artifact
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A dinosaur bone

When it comes to objects you might find in a backyard, a fossil might not seem too out of the box. But a 16-inch, 15-pound dinosaur bone? That’s something you’d probably remember. However, one Ipswich man forgot. He found the bone in 1997 and put it in his shed to deal with later. In 2013, he finally brought it to the local museum, writes the Daily Mail. The bone turned out to be 250 million years old.

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graveyard
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A graveyard

If you’ve read enough about New Orleans, you know they have a few interesting ways of dealing with their dead. Which is why one Louisiana man was probably not too surprised when he went to dig a hole for his swimming pool and instead found an 18th-century graveyard. There were a total of 13 caskets of human remains, but the owner wasn’t spooked. “It’s all part of the New Orleans culture,” he told the Daily Mail. “I think they [neighboring residents] might even like it.”

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Newspapers folded and stacked concept for global communications
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A highly coincidental newspaper

“When I was very little my dad was doing some landscaping in our backyard, planning to build a retaining wall, I think,” wrote one Reddit user. “As he was digging he found a newspaper that had been buried. After further inspection of the newspaper, he realized that it was the newspaper from the exact same day he dug it up, from ten years prior.” This measures up to the most bizarre things people have found in hotel rooms.

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eye contact with cheetah
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A cheetah

Normal backyard animals include squirrels, deer, chipmunks, racoons, and maybe even a bear or moose. But whatever critters your yard attracts, it’s safe to say that finding a cheetah out there would be pretty unusual. Incredibly, that’s exactly what happened in 2008. A nine-year-old boy was playing outside his home in Cambridgeshire when he saw what appeared to be a cheetah. The boy ran inside to tell his mom, while the cheetah began to eat his bike. Apparently, the cheetah, named Akea, had escaped from the nearby zoo. The zoo tried to play down the incident, saying Akea was as tame as a pet dog, and was merely playing with the bike.

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unexploded American air-to-ground bomb dating back to World War II found in Cagliari, Italy
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World War II bombs

How this for an explosive find? In 2017, a California neighborhood was evacuated from their home for 15 hours while the authorities discovered a chache of World War II-era explosives in one family’s backyard. Many of the weapons were duds, but some were active. Officers said the home had previously been owned by a woman and her son who was in the military, but not much else is known about how the explosives got in the yard.

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Old cannon ball on a wooden background. Rusty cannonball. The War of 1812.
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A cannon ball

“When digging a fish pond in my urban backyard, I dug up a cannon ball,” wrote one Reddit user. “After researching the area I discovered that my house is on top of a defensive line from the Battle of New Orleans. [This is a] War of 1812 cannon ball.” If you liked these, don’t miss the 12 craziest things found during home inspections.