Imagine walking into a house where the phone rings incessantly, but no one is allowed to answer it. Or discovering hidden rooms with padded walls that hold secrets you never expected. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the extraordinary tales we’re about to share. This is your ticket to a rollercoaster ride of oddities, peculiarities, and jaw-dropping moments that make you wonder, “Is this really happening?”
I had a friend in school whose parents had a very eclectic decorating design around the house. They’d been all over the world on trips so they had collected lots of unique really cool pieces. Part of the collection included weapons from different cultures. Well, being two 13-year-old boys we decided it would be fun to have a sword fight with some curved scimitars. Of course, we were too loud and eventually his dad came in and caught us. Rather than get mad and yell that we had notched up the blades, instead he grabbed a long sword off the wall and started swinging at us like he was literally going to duel to the death. We spent the next 30 minutes running around the house and deflecting blows from a grown-a** man with a sword.
When I was in high school, a friend asked me and two other friends to his house for dinner. His mom served homemade bean soup, which was very good. Toward the end of the main course, she brought out a chocolate cake for dessert. She cut each of us a slice and plopped it into our bowls… in which we each still had about an inch of soup. Us guests exchanged puzzled glances, but the family dug right in, so apparently chocolate cake soaked in bean soup was an ordinary thing for them.
This happened when I was like, 6. I needed to use the bathroom at a friend’s house and he led me to his parent’s bathroom. The place was filled with crap of all sorts. Boxes, magazines, an inflatable pool, and lots of other stuff. You could barely get in there. He pulled out a drawer from the installed cabinet by the entryway and said to pee in there. I thought he was joking until he went ahead and peed in there himself. I couldn’t argue with that, so I too peed right in there. Then he shut the drawer and we went and played more ninja turtles. I have no idea what became of that drawer/house/family.
When I was a kid the neighbors tv was always at 75 percent volume or higher. They’d literally sit in the living room and scream at each other over the tv on blast.
I had a friend in high school whose mother was from Jamaica. His family would colon cleanse together every year. I guess it was customary in his mom’s culture. So literally they’d take medicine to make themselves sh*t their brains out for a day or two every year. Notable mention- they only had one bathroom.
My friend and I all went to our rich friend’s house to play. Then they said they needed to do something and would be back in an hour. So we all just played in the room and waited. Turns out the entire family had lunch and just locked us up in the room so they wouldn’t have to feed us. Once we found out we all felt hurt and decided to never play at their house again.
My childhood best friend lived with his grandparents, his grandfather was a clockmaker (he mostly restored them.) Their large 2 story house walls were covered in old restored grandfather and cuckoo clocks. Each one had a small sticker with a number so he could keep track of them all, the highest number I saw was over 700. I would say 25% of them were wound so every hour you were treated to a symphony of clocks.
I didn’t appreciate it when I was a kid but those clocks were fantastic pieces of workmanship.
His Mom walked around topless barking a chore list while we just sat around the coffee table working on homework. She was a single Mom working multiple jobs. They were latchkey kids. They didn’t even bat an eyelash but the minute she saw a new face sitting on the rug boring a hole into the distant wall, she shifted on a dime. Ducked into the mudroom, threw on her bra and work shirt, and brought out a carton of Oreos from a secret stash and was pretty much shocked into silence. I think she was terrified I’d misappropriate it to my parents, but all we cared about was cookies.
My friend who’s Australian like me, has parents who emigrated to Australia from Scotland. She speaks with an Australian accent. I visited her parent’s house with her and she started speaking with a Scottish accent. I was like what the F are you doing? Found out that’s just how she speaks with her parents.
An old school friend of mine invited me over to eat. They ate noodles with sugar. That’s it. With a glass of water. He told me they are eating this pretty often.
A roughly 4 feet long python roams free around the room at a gathering with guests.
The snake was chill as f*ck but still…
First time I ever slept at a friend’s house in middle school we had the microwave White Castle burgers for breakfast the next day, and he said that is his normal breakfast. It blew my mind. Next time I slept over we had Elio’s frozen pizza. He also usually only ate breakfast, and would have fruit throughout the rest of the day. I normally only saw him eat fruit so it was that much more odd that we were having frozen White Castle for breakfast.
I was meeting my boyfriend’s parents for the very first time. He had told me they didn’t get along, but everything seemed okay enough until the morning of the second day. We were all getting ready to go out somewhere outdoorsy in winter and his dad was already ready and waiting, fully dressed, in the foyer. I remember the Pom Pom on the top of his toque. I was on the steps with my boyfriend and his mom and she was speaking to me warmly about something or other. Then the dad said something about leaving soon — a very mild comment, I didn’t even really hear it. Suddenly the mom, who had been speaking to me in a normal tone of voice, turns to her husband and SHRIEKS at him at the TOP OF HER LUNGS! I don’t even remember what she said, but he’d made her suddenly murderously angry, just by mentioning that we should probably leave soon. Dude’s Pom Pom shakes a little, but he says nothing in response to her, zero, and she turns back to me and rolls her eyes, trying to get me to side with her over what a f*cking a**hole her husband clearly is??? I kinda smiled nervously. Here’s the thing. Everyone went back to normal as if Mom hadn’t just suddenly gone off like a grenade. That man’s life must have been pure h*ll.
I had a friend whose parents really were not that interested in taking care of him. He lived with his dad and he pretty much had the rule of the house. We were about 6 and we ate whatever we wanted. We went outside and played in the street late at night. He even went and woke up his dad and asked him to make us bacon. It was like 1 am and when his dad said no he threw a fit until his dad just bent over so he could go back to sleep. One time he even rode his bike to my house and we live miles away. Not to mention he had to cross a highway on his bike. We didn’t even invite him. He just said he wanted to come and his dad said whatever.
I watched my then-friend’s dog die of a brain tumor during her birthday party.
Literally.
The dog reeked like it was already dead, could hardly stand up, and when it could it just kept going in circles aimlessly.
The family refused to euthanize her for no discernible reason- they were well off and had a decent chunk of land, so it’s not like they couldn’t afford it and it wasn’t like it wasn’t clear their pet was suffering.
It was a sleepover party, and the afternoon after the party, the dog had died.
They acted like it was the most average thing, just.. going about the party like their dog wasn’t occasionally convulsing in front of them. No panic, no attempt to calm the dog, just acted like it was a normal thing.
Went to a friend’s house around 10 years old and went to the bathroom and they had four towels hanging on a towel bar near the toilet with brown marks. I asked what it was and my friend said they don’t have toilet paper. They each had their own sh*t towel and hung them up after each use.
When I mentioned it to my mom I was told I couldn’t go to Joey’s house anymore.
This crazy batty lady was our neighbor when I was a kid. We lived in a small town that still had party lines even in the early 90s and fortunately for us, we were on her party line. She was rude and nasty and always hogged up the phone, anytime she’d be on the phone (which was often) and you tried to pick up the phone she’d yell at you to get off the phone, yet if you were on the phone and she wanted it she’d barge in on your conversation and yell at you to get off so she could use it. Why we tolerated it I never understood.
Her son was in my class at school, she also was crazy religious and didn’t believe children should have any toys, they could only play outside, never inside, so of course that meant he’d always come over to our house to play of course we didn’t tell on him. His mom was rude, not just on the phone but even just going into her house you could tell she was a very rude and miserable person, I cannot ever recall a single pleasant word she ever said to anyone. No one liked her, at all.
Went to a friend’s house in 6th grade. I found it odd that his parents weren’t there the entire weekend, I thought they were just in their room the whole time or something.
Nope, he didn’t have a mom, and his dad was working oil 20 days on and 10 days off. Dudes still my best friend to this day, but I’ve only met his dad a handful of times. I can’t imagine having to grow up without parents.
At a sleepover for a friend’s birthday, her mom made us spaghetti and after dinner, she threw the rest of the leftover spaghetti in the pot in the trash!
Maybe I just grew up with frugal parents but we saved that kinda leftover in a Tupperware for lunches and stuff. I was shocked to see it wasted.
I had a friend in middle school whose family was really into trophy hunting, something I didn’t know until I went to a sleepover at her house. Animal heads were everywhere, but the weirdest part was she didn’t have sheets on her bed, just animal fur. She slept n*ked on the fur and had no idea it was weird. I faked a stomach ache and had my mom pick me up.
In HS I had a friend whose family was nudist. The first time I went over, he warned me first and it didn’t bother me. Mom was in the kitchen topless and Dad was watching TV nude in the living room. His brother was in his own room nude watching TV.
We became good friends and I was comfortable hanging nude with the family. Sometimes they took us all to the nude beach.
I told my parents about it all and they checked to make sure nothing else weird was going on and that I was cool with it.
The weird thing was when they invited my parents over for drinks and my parents were so uptight, wondering whether they should join in or not and what to expect. They were totally stressed and when we showed up the family was all dressed normally and my parents were the ones acting weird the whole time.
I was the only Asian kid in my neighborhood (Detroit). A white friend invited me over to his house. When I arrived, I started to remove my shoes. He said, “What are you doing? Come on in.” I stepped inside with my shoes on (and wasn’t too shocked at this point, as my parents and TV shows gave me a heads up that wearing shoes indoors was common in America). The big surprise was when my friend invited me to his bedroom and then jumped into his bed with his shoes on. He then ran to his sister’s room, pulling me along, and, lo and behold, she was playing in her bed…with her shoes on. I was floored by the shoes-in-bed; still think about it to this day. (Sorry if I’ve insulted the shoes-in-bed folks, but this struck me as super weird…still does. To be fair, it’s not nearly as bad as barefoot airplane passengers who nonchalantly shuffle in and out of airplane bathrooms. Apparently, this makes the flight attendants gag, too.)
I had a friend with a big family, I believe they ended up with 6 kids, all with names that started with S. Everyone was super nice, but the father was (still is, I hope) Mr Fun-Loving BBQ Dad, to an extreme degree. He was a 2-beer-helmet sort of guy, not in a reckless alcoholic way, more in an “80s muscle pants/about to cannonball into the pool at any moment” kind of way. The dude had a different giant display with custom-made masked figures stuffed with hay annually for Halloween, like 20 dudes creeping around his lawn, house, roof, and he’d work on them in between downs as the quarterback in the neighborhood street football game. I think you get the picture. One day my friend and I are standing around his driveway, just figuring out what we wanted to do, and the guy comes up and hands me (maybe 12 y/o at the time) one of those giant novelty plastic cups from Yankee Stadium, brimmed with coke & ice. I neither asked for nor wanted it, but I said thank you, took a sip, and put it down, probably visibly unsure of what to do with it. My friend’s dad “corrected” me and handed the cup to his son/my friend, who took a sip and passed it back to the father, who then took a sip and passed it back to me. We stood there drinking this giant, unsolicited Coke for 10 minutes, one sip at a time. It wasn’t harmful in any kind of way, but I’ve been thinking of how weird that seemed to me for 20+ years. I never knew if I was the weirdo for having a family that barely even spoke if they were the weirdos for expecting me to know they planned to pass a drink back and forth, or if we’re all just a bunch of weirdos and maybe I should just think about something else.
I went over to my now ex’s parent’s house while I was getting to know him. His parents live in one of those gated golf course communities – big, retiree house, very nice. I made him dinner and then realized that they didn’t have a trash can inside the house. There was a small recycling bin in the pantry (a good 30 feet from the stove, fridge, and sink) and two giant trash cans in the garage.
I asked him about it – like, where was I supposed to put vegetable peels or food packaging? He fetched a grocery bag from the pantry, collected the detritus, and then threw it away outside. There were also no trash cans in their bathrooms, so I am really glad I never went over there on my period. He said it kept things “more sanitary”, but all I could think was what a huge hassle it was to have to haul out to the garage every time I needed to throw anything away.
I had a friend in 4th grade and it was my first time going to his house. I took my shoes off outside as that was indicated clearly by all the shoes in a shoe rack outside.
Before I stepped in the front door I was literally blocked by his mom while she yelled at him in their native language and then she slammed the door.
I asked him what she said and he told me ‘I forgot to tell you the rules. You needed to have a clean pair of socks to change into before you walk in the house.’
I said ‘Oh… well, I can definitely do that next time… we don’t do that at my house. ‘
I then asked if he’d rather go to my house and he said that he couldn’t. His mom also just grounded him for 2 weeks.
Shoes outside… normal for some households. But can’t even go back inside without clean socks or freshly washed feet? What the F?
Everyone uses the same bathwater. I was made to bathe in the same water the grandpa, sister brother, and other sisters had used. The parents went last.
Before you ask no it wasn’t on a property, this was in a house with electricity and a shower.
Man, I remember a thread like this a couple of years back, and the one guy’s story was that every time he went over to a friend’s house, they were watching the exact same movie.
Except it wasn’t just that they were watching the exact same movie. He said they would react the exact same way every time they watched it. Like, they would exclaim at certain scenes or act surprised at other ones, exactly like it was the first time they’d ever seen it. Moreover, this wasn’t a comedy or a blockbuster movie. It was one of those weird dramas about someone overcoming child m*l*station.
He also said they were just weird in general. Like, whenever the father would come home, they’d all go to the door, greet him, and stand around for like a minute not saying anything.
The dude made it sound like he’d stumbled upon a group of undercover aliens pretending to be human.
9th grade. Friends with a big group of people, mixed genders. My mom gets a call from the mom of one of the guys in the group. My mom calls up to me like, “Uh, it’s S_’s mom calling to… schedule a play date? Do you wanna go over to S_’s house on Saturday?” I say sure. S_ is nice. Seems weird that his mom is calling, but maybe he’s shy. We don’t know each other as well as other kids in the group.
I bike over there on Saturday. S_’s mom greets me at the door. Acts surprised I got there on my own. I go upstairs to S_’s room and ask what he wants to do. He’s like, “Do you wanna play with these?” And proceeds to open up toy chests full of well-loved plushies and action figures. A little odd, but still, I’m not gonna knock a little nostalgic make-believe time, so I say, “Sure. How do we play with them?” And he was like, “We make them fight!”
So I sat on this 14 or 15-year-old’s bed, holding out toys so he could bonk other toys against them and make “pow” noises for THREE HOURS. I suggested we do something else about every 10 minutes, but he kept saying, “Just wait ‘til after we make THESE guys fight!”
I did not go over there again. I told my parents it felt like one of my babysitting gigs. He was fine at school, though. So, we just kept it to that.
For me, it was the reverse, of what my friend saw at my house. My friend, let’s call him D, often hung out with me after school. One day, when we were 9, he wanted to spend the night. Our parents both said it was fine. My mom called for dinner and D nearly jumped up and hit the ceiling. “He must be really hungry,” I thought. So we go to the kitchen and my mom hands him a plate with some pizza on it.
He turns to go sit down and stumbles. The plate falls and breaks. I saw him turn white as a ghost and back away from my dad, who was sitting at the table. Then he bursts out into tears and starts apologizing right away, begging us to forgive him. My mom, a little surprised says, “Oh don’t worry, we will get you some more.”. She kept looking at my dad and once D sat down, Mom asked my sister to go eat in the living room.
My parents realized it right away, but I was only 9 and didn’t understand what was going on. After we finished eating, my mom started asking him questions. It turns out his dad was beating him whenever his mom wasn’t around. His dad was apparently very good at hiding it, but it’s also why he spent more time at my house than I did at his.
Friend’s parents swore the CIA was listening in on them, this was the early 90s to mid-90s. Said most of the insects around the house were listening devices. Also said they were cleaning a closet, and a voice said back away. They claimed a listening device was there, and they must have almost found it. He had worked secret service before retiring (non-classified pic evidence in the house), which probably drove some of the paranoia.
They would not let any of the kids watch any show that depicted the future unless it followed revelations exactly. No XMen, no Demolition Man, no Star Trek, etc.
In high school, a friend invites me over. He has some chores to do before we can hang out, so he asks me to help. Sure bud, no problem. We go up to his bedroom and he has me help haul one-gallon plastic jugs full of apple juice outside where he dumps them out. There must have been a dozen jugs of apple juice. I just assumed his mom was making juice, storing it in his room and it went bad so we were hauling it out and dumping it.
Of course, he never said it was apple juice, I just assumed… On the last trip down I asked why he had all this apple juice. He looks at me with this incredulous look and says, “Apple juice? Nah, these are piss jugs!”
When I (boy) was 10 I went to visit a friend (girl), we played for a few hours and then we sat down to eat dinner. As soon as we sat down, her mother asked me if I was in love with her daughter and I said “no”, so she said I was lying and that I am in love with her because “how can you not be in love with such a beautiful girl”, I remember how at that specific moment I started to feel uncomfortable and wanted to go home. The really weird part was that later the father came and sat down with us to eat and after something like 2 minutes her mother turned to me again and told me that I should kiss he daughter “like that” The kiss lasted 5 minutes and in the end, they just move to the living room and made out in front of me and their daughter. That was super awkward and I never visited her again.
When I was in senior high, I went to this girl’s house after school to work on an assignment together. The house was built on a hill and you entered on the bottom story which had a garage and a laundry plus internal stairs up to the main level. There was also a small room down there and I asked what it was. It had nothing in it. The walls and floor were padded. She said her parents lock her and her sister in there when they do the wrong thing. Looking back I should have told my parents.
When I was in high school, I had a friend whose parents would yell non-stop at each other, pretty aggressively, and use words like c*nt, wh*re, etc. Could hear it from the basement. The wife would sit on the computer while the husband walked around the house and they would just scream at each other… Then they’d peacefully go to sleep on the same bed. In the mornings they would pound on my friend’s door and yell at him to get a job. This happened almost every time I hung out over there. Pretty interesting family dynamic.
Oh and once his mom blamed me for eating a whole chocolate cake by myself. I didn’t even know they had cake. The cake was a lie.
I had a friend that had a wealthy father. He lived in a big fancy house on a nearby island. I had never met her dad but had hung out with her at her mom’s house many times. So I get invited to go to her dad’s for a weekend and I’m so excited as I know he lives on a beach, has fancy electronics, etc.
Well her dad turns out to be a total female hating power tripping bozo. He kept tabs on us and refused to let us even be alone in their backyard chatting or whatever. (We were about 12-13 at the time). He told me my shoes were dirty and made my friend and I get cleaning supplies out of the closet and clean our shoes.
At dinner, all the women and girls had to wash their faces, and hands, and put their hair up. We had to wait until her dad started eating to eat and after eating the women were expected to pick up and clean everything.
No wonder her parents were divorced. I declined to go to her Dad’s after that.
I use to be friends with two sisters in middle school. Their stepdad ran the funeral home in a small town. They also lived in the funeral home.
I would go spend the night with them from time to time. Their stepdad had padlocks on everything. Especially the pantry and fridge. The kids weren’t allowed in any food or drinks unless he said okay.
The girl’s bio dad gave them a cell phone to share so he could call them. They had to hide it or they would get in serious trouble for having it. This was in 2008-2009 so it was just a flip phone.
Having padlocks on the pantry and fridge was weird to me, but then one day one of the girls told me that he would lock them in their room sometimes. I never went back after that.
I hung out at a friend’s house all the time in 8th grade.
We’d be at each other’s houses like every weekend, and for several days at a time over the summer.
One day his mother overheard me say that I wished I had a TV in my room. I didn’t, not because we were poor or I wasn’t allowed to, I just never thought about it much.
Well, his mother offered to buy me a TV. I was absolutely shocked since I could tell they weren’t exactly in a great financial state.
Well, she took us to Best Buy and as she grabbed one 32-inch flat screen, she asked if my mom had a TV in her room.
I wasn’t sure. I knew my mom had a TV, but I thought it was smaller than 32 inches.
So my friend’s mom bought us 2 TVs. One for me, one for my mom. It was crazy!
My mom refused her TV since she already had one, but she let me keep mine. I still can’t believe that happened.
There was a girl who openly liked me in high school, but I wasn’t attracted to her. However, we had lots of classes together, and it was basically impossible to avoid her. She was nice enough, but extremely quirky. One time she invited me over to her house to hang out, and I said sure because I was young, dumb, and fully incapable of deliberately hurting someone’s feelings. So I go over to her house, and everything seems normal. We are just talking in the living room when her younger sister (whom I’ve never seen or met before, and I’m guessing was like 10 years old…) walks up to us with a strange, wide-eyed, unblinking doll look on her face. She just stands there. Then without warning she then let out one of the loudest farts I had ever heard. I just couldn’t believe it. Normally I probably would have laughed, but the girl who had invited me over didn’t react at all. She was literally in mid-sentence when this happened, and didn’t skip a beat or even acknowledge her sister’s presence, let alone the fact that Hiroshima just got wiped off the face of the Earth right in front of us. She just kept talking, and the younger sister just walked off. I simply couldn’t process this and was extremely weirded out. Not so much because of the fart, but because no one even acknowledged it, let alone how unbelievably epic it was. Hilarity turned to horror, and I noped the f*ck out of there as quickly and politely as I could.
I stayed at a friend’s house on a Saturday. And their family tried to force me to go to church with them in the morning.
My family wasn’t church going and I got scared and ran.
Then my friend brought a handwritten letter to the school on Monday for me from his parents explaining why god is good and why I should open up to the church.
Not a friend, but a certain extended family of mine leave all their lights on when they sleep. I once slept over with my cousins, and I fell asleep last, so before I fell asleep…. I got up and turned off all the lights then proceeded to go to bed…
then like a few moments later, my aunt comes in and starts turning everything on, and I go…. “What’s wrong?” And she tells me “Oh we leave all the lights on”.
That’s when I looked over at one of my many cousins in the room and realize why they had those eye covers on….so that the light doesn’t annoy them while they sleep.
Had a hard time falling asleep that night honestly.
When I was in high school I slept at a friend’s place one night. Back then I was a big midnight snacker, so I got up in the middle of the night to go scrounge a bite to eat. I turned on the kitchen light and there were roaches everywhere, just thousands of them, crawling all over the dishes from the previous evening’s dinner. I was so f*cking grossed out I just turned it off and went back to bed, but I didn’t sleep the rest of the night for fear of them crawling on me. In the morning I mentioned it in sort of a half-casual way and he was like, ‘Yeah, we just don’t go into the kitchen at night,’ like it was perfectly normal. Needless to say, I never went back.
As much as my mom complained that our house was a disaster, this person’s house was a garbage dump. I gained an immediate and visceral understanding of why my mom made such a big deal about cleaning the house, and I’ve been something of a neat freak ever since.
I absolutely refused to live with bugs of any kind in the house. If I see one or even evidence of them, I go full-on bug-apocalypse, foggers in every room, etc. Just the thought of that sh*t grosses me out even today.
Every time there was a family gathering the three brothers were made to go to the garden and fight it out as soon as they all arrived, so there was no petty bickering or things getting broken inside. Once this happened it was relatively calm over Christmas dinner etc. This might seem normal but the eldest brother is now 50 and it still happens. I was at their house on boxing day a few years ago and I noticed a fat lip, scratches etc. on the accountant brother. I am an only child so often don’t understand interactions between siblings, but Christmas fight club is probably the strangest.
Took my younger brother (who was a 7th grader) with me to a new friend’s house for dinner and to hang out one evening when I was a sophomore in high school. We had moved to this part of town during the summer before my High school freshman year so I had zero friends. A new Friend lived in our neighborhood and we had become friends because we were both in JROTC, so I was happy to have a new friend nearby.
We arrive and meet him and his parents as they welcome us to join them for Pizza Hut and Pepsi. Nothing out of the ordinary so far.
After dinner, they say “Hey, how about some TV?”
My brother and I are like “Sure, what else is there to do?”
And we join them in the living room.
Friend’s father shuffles through some DVDs on their entertainment stand and selects one, pops it into the DVD player and takes his seat alongside his wife.
The movie begins playing and I suddenly realize it’s a “Faces of Death” DVD.
We watch a SWAT/hostage situation go wrong and see graphic footage of the armed assailant getting his stomach blown open with buckshot from a SWAT guy’s shotgun.
My friend, his younger brother, and both his parents laugh their a**es off, exchange high fives, and are looking around at us to gauge our reactions.
My brother and I are horrified.
I’m obviously sick to my stomach, and immediately call our mother to come pick us up.
Weirdest f*cking family I’ve ever met.
At my friends’ house, no one ever answered the phone. Their dad had a rule that no one was allowed to answer the phone except him — this included their mom. Their dad was a pharmaceutical sales rep that often traveled and would never be home. Their phone would constantly ring off the hook for hours – during dinner, at night, and all day. Of course, they had a phone in almost every room so you could never escape the ringing. But my friends would just sit there completely desensitized to the constant ringing.
As we got older, come to find out, his dad had MULTIPLE mistresses (mostly doctor office managers and female colleagues) and they were the ones calling.