When my sister was in high school she wrote letters to Charles Manson. He wrote her back. My dad intercepted the letters in the mail. He never opened them, but still has them. My sister never knew he wrote back.

sloth_the_syd

A packaged stick from Afghanistan that claims to cure all known illnesses, including cancer, if you rub it on you.

I traded an energy drink for it.

I think it’s pretty controversial since I now own the cure for all ailments.

isnoe

A small diary/journal written in Japanese with small letters also in Japanese in it. My grandfather fought in WW2 in the Pacific. He gave the journal to my father before he died. He said it was from a Japanese officer that he killed. My father said he was very shaken and seemed deeply disturbed by the memory. He made my father promise that he would never look to return the journal to the family or try to look into it.

My father has now passed and I have the journal. Creeps me out. Wtf.

junkyarddag

5 grams of uranium metal, stored under oil in a glass vial.

ScienceAndNonsense

A ceramic jar with “c**aine” written on it.

My father is a contractor and he got it from a client who was descended from a relatively prominent US President.

It was headed for the trash, my father didn’t steal it, of course.

Apprehensive_Goal811

My family owns a petrified walrus private part, my grandmother took it to get it identified at the Smithsonian several decades ago. Apparently her grandfather or maybe it was her great-grandfather brought it home after he spent several years on some type of expedition up around northern Alaska and points north. It has been loaned out to several museums at different times. The family has talked about selling it but everyone has to agree and so far there is no agreement about selling it. So I own 1/67th of a petrified walrus private part.

Robyn_withaY

9" angle grinder from Harbor Freight

Crayonalyst

Kony 2012 Kit. It’s a whole thing and I don’t want to talk about it.

XDXkenlee

As a joke I told my mom I wanted my dogs balls in a jar after we had him neutered…. She took it seriously and now I have had my dogs balls in a jar for almost a decade

GhostBoy301

My great grandpa was a medic in ww2 and we own a little chest with his personal belongings, including his diary, some old bandages

And 3 vials of 1940s morphine

i_wanted_memes

A SS officers dagger and a Hitlers youth ceremony bayonet. A friend gave them to me days before he died of cancer. They belonged to his dad.

OkEngineering9441

Not me, my parents growing up..

they had an actual elephant foot turned into a table.

Like an actual foot cut from an elephant and taxidermied made into an end table. Had a glass table top. You could feel the thin hairs on it. Haunted my dreams man.

bobsux1234

An uncut DVD of Caligula.

I am not sure if it is still banned or not.

EnigmaCA

I have an old Iraqi bill with Saddam Hussein's face on it. It's worth about 17 cents according to Google.

postsingularity

Umm mortuary toe tags from an asylum in New York ....like twenty or so of them ... I think they could be the only things left showing that these people actually lived

ironviking13

A file called "rule34" filled with nothing but geography maps to hide the fact I make world maps for hours on end.

FrostyTerraBytes

When I was 18, I bought a print of a 1918 German zoo advertisement from a thrift store. I thought the artwork was neat. It had a leopard on it and I was completely cat-obsessed at the time. Turns out the artwork was by Ludwig Hohlwien. He would go on to produce Nazi propaganda.

wolfmoral

My 26.5” scale 8 string guitar is apparently super controversial to every guitarist I’ve ever shown it to.

yokaishinigami

I have a few Ivory jewellery pieces from the early 70s my parents bought back from Botswana, and a poison arrow kit. Mum has the 3-metre long python skin she just put in her luggage from back then too.

Icy_Hippo

A first print edition of Batman Damned #1, the one featuring Batman's "little batman". (From DC Black Label featuring more adult content. Violence and swearing are totally fine, but a shadowy Batmember profile made people flip out enough they removed it from subsequent print runs)

1nd1anaCroft

A copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook

Ihadacow

An original Asteroids arcade machine.

But my brother and I removed the original (burned-in) oscilloscope screen and replaced it with an LCD panel, replaced the controls with six-button arcade fighter sticks, and hooked the whole thing up to a hacked Xbox with thousands of dumped ROMs on it. The original board was gone before we got the cab, donated to another machine that did have a working monitor.

Controversial because some arcade historians would prefer to see these cabs preserved rather than hacked. But with a burned screen and no board, this cab was pretty useless.

Adventurer_By_Trade

I bought a used Bill Cosby comedy album on vinyl and the next week everything started coming out about the horrible things he had done

alpal05144

My wedding ring, according to my MIL

WillowAranthi

A very, VERY large rubber male member. Like, unreasonably large. My friend had it sent to me as a joke on a random day for no reason at all. Spent $300 for the sake of a joke. I was like bro something is very wrong with you lol

liquid_sandwich