By Larissa Runkle
Oct 20, 2020
Many of us enjoy showcasing a few spooky items around the house this time of year. But some people’s troves of creepy things aren’t merely Halloween decorations—they’re the stuff of waking nightmares.
We spoke with professional movers from all over to find out some of the creepiest things they’ve ever discovered while emptying out homes. Their stories might just surprise you, and definitely aren’t for the faint of heart. From human remains to demonic writings scratched onto walls, here are seven of the spookiest stories about items movers found on the job.
1. Mystery ashes
Typically people clean out precious items before the movers arrive, but in one case, an urn of human remains either wasn’t considered that important or was forgotten completely—until the movers arrived.
“This Manhattan apartment was densely packed, and extremely messy with lots of hoarded items,” says Lior Rachmany, CEO of Dumbo Moving.
Rachmany says his movers were extremely unnerved when they found the etched urn in pristine condition buried under piles of stuff.
“My team kept asking the customer if they wanted to move the urn themself and take it with them to their new apartment—but they insisted on having the movers handle it,” he says.
2. Enshrined heads
“This was in Philadelphia,” Rachmany recalls. “The movers were cleaning out a hair salon when they found a variety of male and female heads wrapped in plastic all around the room.”
The life-size dummy heads felt all too real to the movers handling them, while their blank faces and crazy hairstyles made the experience even more disturbing.
3. Bewitched skeleton
“The creepiest thing we ever found in a house was an intact human skeleton in a giant, antique, cast-iron cauldron,” says Kevin Godfrey from EmptyUp.com. “It was tarred, feathered, and filled with chicken bones, knives, and daggers.”
The previous tenant of the Patchogue, NY, house had been conducting voodoo ceremonies out of his rented abode.
“Apparently, people were paying him to dig up bodies and cast spells against their enemies,” Godfrey says. “Oddly enough, that’s not even why he was evicted.”
4. Taxidermy nightmare
In a sparse Atlantic City, NJ, apartment, one moving team got a bad surprise when it walked in and saw what appeared to be a large grimacing rodent (later identified as a lemur), standing on a bookshelf at its full height, baring teeth and claws.
“It looked like an elongated rat with beady eyes,” says Rachmany. “One of the movers screamed when they saw it because it looked so alive.”
5. Doppel-doll-ganger
Speaking of beady eyes, what would you do if hundreds of them were staring at you at once? Jeff Wolf‘s team at All My Sons Moving & Storage had to figure this one out fast when it walked into a home in Fort Worth, TX.
“The house was completely dark inside with minimum lights,” says Wolf. “All the windows had blinds and curtains to block out any sunlight from coming in.”
When his crew arrived to do an initial walk-through, it found room after room filled with dolls—voodoo dolls, that is.
“The crew leader estimated that there must have been over 300 dolls,” Wolf recalls, “and the scariest part was that one of the dolls looked almost exactly like one of our movers.”
6. Homeowner’s headstone
Most of us prepare for our inevitable death by writing a will. One resident of Westchester County, NY, seems to have taken things further: When Rachmany’s moving crew arrived in the backyard of the small house, it found the homeowner’s headstone.
“My team wasn’t sure what it was at first, and found out it was a tombstone by turning it over,” says Rachmany. “There was no death date on the tombstone, but it had the homeowner’s name on it, along with the year they were born.”
7. The London house
This one was so scary, we were hard-pressed to find just one spooky thing about it. Professional mover Elisabeth Miller, of Move N’ Go, gives us all the details.
“The house, in general, looked quite abandoned and poorly maintained,” says Miller. “There were a few holes—I can only assume they were peeping holes—in the walls of the bedrooms and the bathrooms, and weird old books left around the house, containing images of organs and dissections.”
But this house had even darker secrets.
“There was a chair roped to the attic ceiling, and a secret basement with old lab equipment—including test tubes filled with unknown liquids,” says Miller.
Then there were the weird, demonic-looking etchings on the bedroom wall, right next to the bed.
“To make things worse, inside the wardrobe I found а painting of a smeared face with a date on the back,” says Miller. “The face on the painting resembled a person I earlier saw in a family photo in the living room. Thinking about it still gives me the chills.”
Read original article:https://www.realtor.com/advice/move/creepy-things-moving-crews-found-in-homes/