20+ Unexplainable Weird Things That Shocked Guests, but Were No Big Deal for Their Hosts

You can never fully know a person without visiting their home first. Your acquaintance may seem like a completely ordinary citizen at work, at school, or on the street, but as soon as you go visit them, you have no idea what skeletons in the closet (sometimes literally) you will find there.

We at Bright Side came across a discussion on a social network where users talked about the oddities that they found at their friends’ homes, and “poor Yorick” on the shelf in the living room is the smallest one of them.

• Once, when I was a kid, I was invited to stay over for dinner at a friend’s house. My friend’s mother poured ketchup into a deep cereal bowl, and the entire family dipped their fingers in it and licked them throughout the meal. © [deleted] / Reddit

• A white carpet in the kitchen. © pomjuice / Reddit

• When I was a kid, I was at my friend’s house, and her mom poured us some orange juice with our lunch. When we finished eating, she took the remaining juice from the cups and poured it back into the container. Even as a kid, I thought that was disgusting. © munkyyy / Reddit

• I was invited over to a friend’s house for dinner for the first time. They had 2 large dogs. I asked beforehand if I was allowed to feed them with food from the table. They told me that I could feed the dogs whatever I wanted, because all the plates were given to them anyway. So I finished my meal and laid my plate down for the dogs. They quickly cleaned it up. I picked it up to take to the kitchen and asked if I should put it into the sink or the dishwasher. The hosts said to put it back in the cabinet because the dogs had already cleaned it well enough. I laughed at the joke and reiterated my question. It wasn’t a joke! My friend walked into the kitchen and put her plate in the cabinet with the other “clean” dishes. I literally almost got sick. I stopped communicating with them at all after this situation. © ebil_lightbulb / Reddit

• I was in Iraq a couple of times, and I went to hundreds of houses. Keeping the Styrofoam packing on DVD players and other devices was a pretty common thing there. Maybe they thought that it was a part of the DVD player or wanted to prevent dust from getting inside... © Rentro85 / Reddit

• My friend refuses to vacuum and her carpet is covered with a layer of loose hair. © [deleted] / Reddit

• When I was a kid, I often stayed for dinner at my friend’s house. But his dad never ate with us. His mom would make a plate of food, take it down the hall, and slide it halfway under the door to the basement. And every weeknight at 7 PM on the dot, the family would clear out of the living room so the dad could come and watch Star Trek. Once the show was over, he would go back into the basement. The family thought that none of that was weird. My friend thought it was “funny” that my dad ate with us. © Fi3br / Reddit

• I saw a cat who knew how to use a toilet. She just walked in, flushed a minute later, and walked out. The owner didn’t even acknowledge it. © wry_silent_elk / Reddit

• I knew a girl. If she couldn’t finish a whole glass of water, she would dump the rest on the carpet because “it just absorbs it.” © knittedfleecesweater / Reddit

• We had a human skull in a glass case in our living room. It was years before I figured out that it was really weird. My mom got it from her doctor-friend. It was just some random head, not a relative’s. We called him Freddy and had to superglue his jaw back on every few years when it fell off. © rickscarf / Reddit

• My wife’s co-worker, who is a very accomplished doctor, invited us to a dinner party. As soon as we walked in the door, there was a life-size painting of him that one of his patients had given him as a gift. I noticed hundreds of photos in the living room. Every single one of those pictures was of the host. Not of his wife, not of his 4 children, not of his relatives, or of some other people he loves. The group photos were cropped in such a way so that only he could be seen. I went to the restroom, comfortably sat down, and grabbed one of the books from the shelf next to the toilet. The first book I picked up was written by our host. I picked another book, and it was also written by our host. I realized that all of them were written by him. I looked up and noticed there was a picture on a small table across from the toilet, and it was our host again... © castr0 / Reddit

• I went to high school with a girl whose family would set up their house like a model home being sold. The dining room table was set up with plastic food on nice plates. The bed in her bedroom was made with the top corner open, as if she had just gotten out of bed. There was a tray with a fake bowl of cereal and a fake glass of orange juice. On the floor, there were coloring books and crayons, as if a child lived in the room. Her parent’s bedroom had fake rose petals leading to the bed. © RCDagger / Reddit

• I dated a guy and his family was just very odd. They did things so differently that, sometimes, I wondered if they might be aliens. No one in the house knew how to use a stove. They used the microwave or ate out. Every cabinet and drawer in the house was always wide open like they had no idea you could close them. His parents would go to McDonald’s to watch TV, despite having a very nice satellite TV with cable channels. © bratchny / Reddit

• One house I went to had a room that was off-limits. It was made up like a living room, but you weren’t allowed to go іn there. © buffyshair / Reddit

• My friend David invited me to his house once. I had no idea that he came from a family of horrific hoarders. You couldn’t see the floor of his house, and I was literally stepping in bowls filled with cereal. At some point, I saw a snake who just slithered through the debris. I immediately made up an excuse that I felt sick and ran home. What a nightmare. © ev6464 / Reddit

• My friend and I were getting something out of his dad’s closet when I noticed there was a ton of expensive electrical equipment in the back of it, all still boxed up. I asked my friend about it. It turned out his dad keeps everything new that he gets for a year, before he unboxes and actually uses it. My friend didn’t know why, and I’m still curious. © dingobiscuits / Reddit

• My ex-boss put Post-it notes all over her refrigerator, nagging her husband about personal hygiene like, “Jim, I need you to brush your teeth for one full minute today and don’t forget to floss.” © mauxly / Reddit

• We wanted to buy an apartment and came across an advertisement that said, “Custom art included.” This apartment was below our price range. We got there, and the first thing we saw was a giant 8-foot ball in the center of the living room. There were little niches in the ball to hold trinkets and photographs. This ball took up more than half the room. My immediate thought was that it was plaster, but it was solid concrete. The bathroom had been made to look like a rain forest with thousands and thousands of plastic leaves glued to every surface in the bathroom. The effect could have been cool, except that they all had accumulated pounds of dirt, lint, and mildew. It was disgusting. However, the kitchen amazed me the most. The counters on both sides of the stove were angled at about 20 degrees toward the stove, so everything I’d put on them would slide down toward the stove. The entire backsplash around the kitchen was crushed glass and tile, and the pieces stuck out up to several inches in some places. I don’t know what they did with that apartment, but no sane person would be able to live there. © [deleted] / Reddit

This is what backsplash looked like.

• My friend and I were 12 years old. After swimming, he took his trunks off, put them on the clothesline, and just walked inside the house like it was nothing. He stopped at the fridge and poured us some iced tea. His mom was sitting there talking on the phone. It seemed so bizarre to me. © [deleted] / Reddit

• I was about 12-13 when I visited my friend’s house for the first time. After lunch, I got the urge to go to the restroom. So I went there, did my thing, tried to flush, but nothing happened. I tried again. Still nothing. I was standing there for 15 minutes, sweating and trying to figure out a plan. I finally decided to confess that had I broken the toilet. My friend’s mom started laughing, went into the bathroom, turned on the water flow to the toilet, waited a few minutes, and then flushed — easy peasy. They never missed an opportunity to laugh at me because I didn’t know it was “normal” to turn the water on/off whenever you need to use the bathroom. © HungryHawkeye / Reddit

• I went to my friend’s house and saw a bunch of grandfather clocks in their living room. This was a little weird, but nothing major. The weird part came when his dad told me, “I hope you won’t go around telling anybody about my clocks.” Now, I’ll never forget about his precious clocks. © PeterBernsteinSucks / Reddit

Have you ever encountered oddities at someone’s home and even stopped communicating with this person afterward? Or maybe, on the contrary, have your guests found something strange or unusual at your house?