What Was Your Grossest Find?

Years ago long before KT got interested in MD and CRH, a buddy and I went to a site on a local lake where we heard some arrowheads and bird points had been recovered. We were visually searching for bird points and found several when I came upon an old brown incisor, which I kept. Turned out when the Corps of Engineers built the picnic area, they bulldozed some dirt from some low mounds nearby and spread it to level both areas. The mounds were low Indian graves, so that was the source of both the projectile points and the tooth! I finally gave the points to an interested collector but have no idea what happened to that tooth!

That work was done in the early to mid-1950s, long before any archeological laws! Nowadays if one was there and looking around on the ground, a darned Corps cop would run you off! :laughing::laughing:
 
I found a Crematory token at the beach and not too far from it what appears to be a gold and platinum nugget from whatever ring that was melted in the process. Also I found a mobile phone.. it had an SD card in it.. Looked at the pics.. shouldn't have looked at them.. what has been seen cannot be unseen! but I also found phones that had very good pics on the memory sticks too :D - I was checking in order to try to return the phone ;)
 
Not MD-related, but years ago when I was collecting used veggie oil from a restaurant in WA state, one day I went to collect the oil, and in one of the barrels of oil (which I did have covers on) , I found a cat, yes a dead cat. I was like !!!? Figured someone was jealous possibly of me getting the used oil. Anyways, I threw the cat in the dumpster and called the local police to report it.
 
Well, I have a good one to post now. Was swinging my way around an old farmhouse, got beside a pickup bed trailer and saw these beauties. I was like"that taxidermy is going to get ruined by the rain" then I saw flies crawling on them. I guess somebody wants the skulls with the horns and is letting nature take its course.
 

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Crack wasn’t in use in the 70s. Not till about the mid-80s. Must’ve been a weed pipe. :cool3:


Yeah I was going to also point that out.

Guys, I feel left out! I've never really found anything gross while metal detecting...but...

...once when doing soil tests for an engineering company I worked for, later that day some detectives showed up at the office and asked some questions. Apparently just hours after we were there, someone found a human skeleton in a junk pile just a few feet from where we were working. It was wearing winter clothing , was male and had supposedly been there for about a year. Later on I caught wind that it might have been a retarded person who walked away from a care-facility, took a bus, and either got lost and froze or actually met with foul play.

Pretty freaky. I'm glad I never saw it and I hope to God I never ever find another while I'm traipsing through the woods. That's something I do alot of.

Edit: I managed to find an old follow-up article about that from a local paper. Sorry it's so blurry, but here it is.
 

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Mason jar full of urine buried 2 feet down beside a tree.
The lid sounded great on the Deus.

Reminds me of an old trapping trick. You bury a jar of fish heads and let them age all summer long. Dig up in the fall. A little goes a long way for bringin' in the 'coons. So it might have been animal urine being prepared by a canine or cat trapper. FWIW

I haven't found anything gross while detecting, but once while fishing a small stream I found a dog chain attached to a tree with what was left of the dog on the other end. Some people. :mad:
 
Reminds me of an old trapping trick. You bury a jar of fish heads and let them age all summer long. Dig up in the fall. A little goes a long way for bringin' in the 'coons. So it might have been animal urine being prepared by a canine or cat trapper. FWIW

I haven't found anything gross while detecting, but once while fishing a small stream I found a dog chain attached to a tree with what was left of the dog on the other end. Some people. :mad:

I'm not a tree hugger type or PETA fanatic, but that just plain sucks. I'd like to at least think it wasnt deliberate , like the owner had an accident or something and was taken away by rescuers and nobody knew the dog was tied to a tree. Once my uncle got a job as a ranger at a big park and this mutt started following him around and sort of became his dog and rode around in the truck with him. Then park management said "no way" to that so he had to figure out what to do. Nobody wanted the dog and it was out in the middle of nowhere. Well, he took a final walk with the dog and his pistol and it was lights out. At least it was over in an instant. I have no idea why someone would have to turn it into an experiment in cruelty as per your story. What the (expletive)!
 
worst thing i "found" was a seagull being half eaten by crabs while night hunting on the beach. It was super fogged in night. very Humid too. Could see about 3 ft in front of me and I nearly stepped on the guy. He was injured already and couldn't move and crabs were having a day of him while he was still alive. It was pretty sad and gross.
 
Aww... Well, my grossest find was a poor little crab. The scoop picked him up and he was going frantic, so I just placed him back in the ocean. Then a seagull comes and says adios. Poor crab...
 
Aww... Well, my grossest find was a poor little crab. The scoop picked him up and he was going frantic, so I just placed him back in the ocean. Then a seagull comes and says adios. Poor crab...


What goes around, comes around :yes:
 
Once found small box full of ashes in the recently bulldozed backyard of a house they tore down. Kinda thinking it was human remains......
 
There was a park scrape renovation going on, in a certain big city in CA years ago. The location of this park had previously been a cemetery. But by the turn-of-century-ish, the city moved all the graves out of the city, and turned the land into a park.

Apparently they didn't do an extensive job of removing all the graves, because we found ample copper hinges and clasps and such, for the coffins. And we saw various bones. As if that wasn't enough, I got a ring with some sort of curious stubble stick sticking trough it. Turns out it was a human finger bone ! The ring was some sort of un-precious metal (not gold or silver), so I just pitched it. :shock:

I wonder if that ring was aluminum. Big money back in the day before they figured out how to extract it from the ore.
 
I don't know if it is the gross factor or absence of gross that bothers me in this situation but we were metal detecting an old campsite that we were staying at doing an archaeology dig. I dug up a full jar of ca 1950s peanut butter. It still looked good and opened it up and didn't smell or anything. I was not daring enough to taste it but the stuff was indestructible I guess.
 
This is an easy one for me.

While I have unfortunately dug a few pet graves on accident (none fresh THANK GOD), due to the collar/dog tag, those bad experiences pale compared this:

I got a permission a few years back in a very rural area on land that had been a generational homestead dating to the early 1700's.
To my chagrin the property was thoroughly overgrown by weeds, stickers, small trees etc. when I arrived, so I wasn't able to give it much of a hunt, at all. Thus, I explored.

I had read that a family cemetery existed on the property, so I was pretty interested in at least taking a look.
Unfortunately I found it.

Upon discovery I immediately noticed a large burough, roughly 3 feet in diameter, right next to a headstone and leading down to where a body would have been.
Being from the area, imo, it was a badger den.

Off to the side (maybe 3 -4 feet) was what was clearly a bone, in my opinion a human femur, with bite marks all over it.

I bee lined back to the SUV, and left wishing I'd just went cladding :lol:

I notified local authorities the next day and never went back.
 
I once dug a little cache of coins in the wet sand at a beach. The only problem is that it was inside a rotted Santeria fruit offering. Grossest thing I have dug to this day. And yes, I got all the coins and then went to the water and washed my hands. :lol:
 
Not a find, but the grossest hunt was on a beach with a dead whale on it. It was fine detecting the water side of the whale and I thought it wouldn't be too bad walking through the dry sand sitting areas on the way back.

I hit that wall of dead whale stench and immediately started gagging. I thought, "it can't be that far till I get out. Maybe I can hold my breath." No I could not. It was certainly one of the longer walks of my life getting out of the stink zone, gagging the whole stretch.

I called it quits and went home. Worst thing is I've been around rotting whales before and KNOW how putrid they are and that being downwind is going to stink.:lol:
 
Found the bullet to a gun a 18 year old used taking his own life with. He went to the Pier watched the sun rise then kill him self. A few months later found the bullet. Where the bullet was found was about where the police said it should have been.
Other than that I found dental gold all the time.
 
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