The 6 Creepiest Things Discovered by New Homeowners

6 An Old Burial Ground

OK, based on what you have seen in horror movies/novels/TV shows, what is the one single thing that ensures your home will be infested with ghosts and/or poltergeists? Without question, it's building your house on top of a burial ground. You're angering not just one restless spirit, but dozens, who are sure to take vengeance on whoever has disturbed their sacred resting place.

So of all the possible things in the world you can find in your new home, none can be quite as unsettling as plunging a shovel into the floor of your basement only to have a child's skull come rolling out.

Wait, What?

That's exactly what happened to Helen Weisensel. And it turned out that, yes, her home had been built atop an old, long-forgotten cemetery-- one that archaeologists and local historians estimated to be among the earliest in Wisconsin's Jefferson County, which would make it a good 170 years old. Meaning the spirits could have theoretically been restless over slavery, Native American atrocities, you name it.

Weisensel's nightmare didn't just end with the bones of a child being unearthed from beneath where she slept. First, there were the pesky -- yet quite pertinent -- inquiries from the neighbors.

"Everybody asks me ... 'Did you have weird things happen in your home?' I say, 'No, my house is just fine,'" Weisensel said of her neighbors. And it's really not a surprise that nothing weird had happened: She probably hadn't made Them angry. Yet.

But then came the real curse known as bureaucracy. See, Weisensel's remodeling project involved her really trying to fix her house. As in, her house needed serious foundation work, which immediately became impossible the moment her home became an official historic burial ground. In order to go through with any renovations, she became legally bound to get the go ahead from the State Historical Society, which in turn would require the hiring of an archaeologist to oversee any and all work, which would cost her $100 an hour.

Before it was all over, Weisensel ended up having to wait 15 months before the state of Wisconsin finally gave her the green light to make those repairs to her home's foundation. Which would constitute a completely happy ending, if it weren't for the fact that she's still living directly atop the skeletons of dozens of slumber-disturbed dead people.

5 Walls Full of Snakes

Ah, small town Idaho. Is there any place on earth less likely to be host to unthinkable horror? Or anything else?

So, you've bought your idyllic new home, and you're prepared to live the quiet life.

One day, you find a snake in the yard. Well, no big deal. They help keep mice away, right? Then you find another. And then you find three dozen more.

And then you start to hear a rustling in your walls ...

Wait, What?

Meet Ben and Amber Sessions, who found out that what they thought was their dream home was actually what the locals had come to refer to as...

"THE SNAKE HOUSE"

Soon after moving in, Ben was finding more than 40 snakes in his yard in a single day, carrying them off his property in buckets.

Not long after that, the Sessionses spent a sleepless night listening to a noise ... almost a slithering in their walls.

When Ben removed a panel of siding, dozens of snakes came bursting out.

Ben's harrowing inspection beneath their crawlspace the next morning revealed the enormity of the situation: Their new dream home was sitting atop an enormous snake hibernaculum. Which is to say, they were living smack dab in the middle of Snake City.

All the implications instantly came crashing down around them. The curious taste of their tap water, which Ben initially described as "onion-like"? That's the musk that snakes release when frightened. A consultation with a herpetologist informed them that snakes also defecate when emitting their musk, and that snake feces is a good way to catch salmonella and tape worms. And so, to review, the Sessionses and their two children had been using snake shit water to drink, shower and bathe. And Amber was pregnant with their third child.

Then, just to make everything good and properly horror movie-worthy, Amber was watching TV one day when she saw a brief local story about another family that had fled their home due to a snake infestation. "We're not alone!" she must have thought, feeling at least somewhat relieved. Then she noticed the house was in the same town as hers. Then she noticed it was the same house as hers.

She was watching a TV program about her home's previous owners having fled her current house in terror.

Amber would later find out from the previous owners themselves that they'd abandoned it without thinking there was any way the real estate company would actually have the balls to try to sell that "Satan's lair" of a home.

In the end, it turned out the only way to neutralize the problem of such a massive, established snake den beneath their home would have been to raise the entire house off its current foundation so as to lay down a new concrete foundation beneath it. In their case, it was a job that would cost a minimum of $100,000. So the Sessionses also ended up abandoning the place, having to file for bankruptcy in the process. When they found out that a "For Sale" sign had gone up again, they went to the media in order to save the next victims from having their shit terrified.

4 A (Toxic) Hidden Room

You, your spouse and your adorable toddler score a sweet deal on a five-bedroom, two-bath house. You're just about to begin renovations when you scoot aside a book case to reveal ...

A secret corridor.

Holy shit! That's not creepy, that's awesome. Why would that story be in this article? Well, there's the deadly toxins in the air, for one ...

Wait, What?

In 2005, Jason and Kerri Brown followed their newfound corridor to a secret room. What would it hold? Torture equipment? Pirate treasure?

The first thing they found was a note from the previous owner:

Naively eager to begin their next adventure, the Browns continued reading:

"I owned this house for a short while, and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick, to the point that we had to move out."

It turned out that George Leventis, the note's author and previous owner of the home, had found out what the Browns were about to learn: The house was contaminated with black mold. When he'd lived there, one of the children he mentioned in the note had gotten so sick that she "was unable to hold any nutrition" and "couldn't breathe." With little money to his name and being unwilling to take the matter to court, Leventis simply stopped paying the mortgage and moved out. But he did at least leave the note to serve as some warning. Luckily, the Browns proceeded to take it very seriously.

Upon further testing by an environmental engineer, the toxicity levels were determined to be so high as to permanently cancel the Browns' move-in plans, and it provoked them to do what the previous owner should have done from the start: sue the pinstriped pants off the Fannie Mae broker who'd sold them that slow death trap of a house to begin with.

3 Walls That Ooze

Walls that ooze blood has to be one of the top three signs of household demonic possession. If your walls start oozing slime, that's not much better -- you're clearly in a Ghostbusters ectoplasm situation. Really, under non-ghost circumstances, your walls shouldn't be oozing anything.

But when Debbie Hill moved into her Colorado home, on a hot summer day something brown and sticky started running from her walls.

Wait, What?

At first she was unsure what the mysterious, sticky liquid was. But then, after deciding to take the leap and give it a taste (finally putting a face to the formerly ambiguous category of people we have to thank for knowing which mushrooms are safe to eat) she found out it was ... honey.

There was some foreshadowing for this situation. Before buying the home, she had heard about how the previous owners had to exterminate a massive beehive that had been found in the walls. Hill wisely called Gregg McMahon (apparently Denver's Bee Guru), who swooped in with the full explanation:

"Bees' wings in summer act as fans, which keep the hive and its honey cool in warm weather. With this string of 90-degree-plus weather and no bees to keep the honey cool it begins to, in effect, pour as if at a Saturday morning pancake breakfast."

So, Debbie Hill's new life in her new home had become a Saturday morning pancake breakfast, upon which a golden shower of honey was being drizzled. Which is one of those things that would be awesome in a cartoon, but in real life mice and ants love Saturday morning pancake breakfasts, so her home was on the verge of being a massive hunk of bait for an apocalyptic swarm of vermin.

It's the sort of thing that's not easy to fix, either; it involves the massive cost of nothing less than tearing out the freaking walls and rebuilding. A cost that the local news outlet at least tried to help out with by putting out a collection for Hill.

2 An Old But Live Artillery Shell

The thing about finding slime or corpses or snakes in your home is that, while weird, none of those things are going to kill you. As far as "terrifying things to find in your home" goes, really they're all better than finding, say, a bomb.

So you can imagine what it would be like to be sweeping through your new home, only to go into the basement and find something green, heavy and distinctly bomb-shaped.

Wait, What?

Linda DeForest of Goshen, Indiana, is the one who found a foot-long piece of hot ordnance that she at first informed her husband was a torpedo.

Upon going downstairs to inspect what he probably thought was just another stereotypical case of the missus getting all worked up for nothing, he found out that she was totally right, and then proceeded to dutifully fulfill his bungling husband stereotype by picking it up and toying with it a little, reporting: "I knew it was official because it was so heavy."

The DeForests consulted family friend and army veteran Joshua Blankenship, who kindly explained that it was either a round for a mortar or a lightweight anti-tank weapon and, more importantly, that it showed no signs of ever having been disassembled and disarmed. Finally, and most helpfully, he advised them to put the fucking thing down and not touch it.

And so that's what the DeForests finally did, allowing an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit to come in and take it away, after evacuating the family to a neighbor's house down the street. In the end the DeForests chalked the incident up to a previous resident who must have been an avid war memorabilia collector, who on moving day presumably said, "Damn, I'm not packing up that one! That shit could explode at any moment! Better just leave it so the next owners can start their own collection."

1 The Mummified Body of the Previous Owner

OK, so earlier we pointed out how horrifying it would to be to find out your house was built on top of a bunch of centuries-old corpses. What could possibly be worse than that?

How about walking into your new home and finding a mummified corpse staring at you?

Wait, What?

Imagine you're Jorge Giro. You buy your new house in the seaside town of Roses, Spain. And what a deal you got on it, too. It was a foreclosure, after the previous owner mysteriously disappeared years ago.

So you twist the key and cross the threshold of your new home. As you step into the living room to admire the view of the Mediterranean, you realize that someone is already there: the dried-up corpse of the previous owner.

Yeah, when we said "mysteriously disappeared" it turns out that means "passed away peacefully and nobody bothered to check in on her." You'd think the bank in Barcelona would have done a basic walk-through after they seized the house for failure to make mortgage payments. Or, you'd think someone from the real estate office would have taken a look around the place before they resold the house at auction. But you'd think wrong. Because basic procedures such as that would have fallen out of line with the greater cosmic scheme ... to terrify the shit out of Jorge Giro.

No one knows how long the corpse sat there, but the mortgage payments had stopped six years prior. Then, the home's proximity to the coast and salty sea air contributed to the natural mummification of the former owner's body. So it was there for years, untouched, just waiting for the unfortunate new owner to stumble upon it. Enjoy your mummy curse, Mr. Giro!

Jason Edward Harrington is a writer based in Chicago. For more, follow him on Twitter or check out his blog.

For more on disturbing homes, check out 6 Real People Who Turned Their Homes Into Death Traps. Or check out the coolest house ever.

And be sure to check out Cracked's Page of Horror for hilariously horrifying articles like 6 Signs You're About to be Attacked by Zombies and Dealing With The Guy Who's Clearly Hiding a Zombie Bite.