● If you dig down deep enough, you will find traces of history, covered by the sands
of time.
But what treasures lie waiting to be discovered in your backyard?
What strange items have been thrown over your garden fence?
Here are the most bizarre things found in people’s backyards.
15 - Prehistoric shark ● While digging the foundations for a new
conservatory, a family near Washington DC unearthed a section of vertebrae and a large
tooth.
Even though it was Halloween night, paleontologists from the local museum drove out immediately
and confirmed the find as a 15-million year old snaggletooth shark skeleton, a species
which remarkably still exists today.
It was the most complete fossil of its kind, and provided a great insight into its evolutionary
changes 14 - Lois Lane
● In 1996, a family in California spent an afternoon waiting for Superman, when they
found Lois Lane frightened and cowering in their back garden.
Margot Kidder, the actress from the 70s and 80s Superman movies had suffered a manic breakdown
after losing the copy of her autobiography due to a computer virus.
She was found in a paranoid state, and was picked up by the police.
She made a recovery after some time in mental care.
13 - Giant worm ● Worms are gross.
But at least they’re small, unless you live in Southern China, apparently.
Forestry worker Li Zhiwei found an earthworm measuring nineteen inches long, which is roughly
the length of your arm.
Zhiwei says he initially mistook the creature for a snake, but now has taken a shine to
the worm and adopted it as a pet.
Biologists are now eager to study how the critter became so large.
12 - Victorian murder victim ● In 1879, widowed schoolteacher Julia Martha
Thomas was murdered in her London house by her maid, Kate Webster.
Webster, who had a long history of crime, killed the old woman and dumped most of her
body in the river Thames.
But for over 130 years, the location of the head remained a mystery until famous British
naturalist Sir David Attenborough found the skull in his garden when renovating his property
nearby in 2010.
11 - Buried Ferrari ● Kids playing outside a house in LA in
1978 heard a metallic thud as they poked into the soil.
They flagged down a police officer, who scrabbled away the dirt to reveal the roof of a car.
An excavation team came in to dig up what turned out to be a Dino 246 GTS Ferrari, valued
at around $70,000 in today’s money.
The car had been stolen four years before, but to this day it remains a mystery how and
why the thieves buried it.
10 - WW2 shelter ● During World War Two, German bombers devastated
countless homes across the UK in air raids that left countless people dead or homeless.
To protect themselves against the raids, citizens built corrugated steel bunkers known as Anderson
shelters to hide in at night.
A man in the city of Norwich unearthed one of these shelters in his backyard in 2012,
which contained newspaper cuttings from the era, showing that it had once been occupied
by a frightened family.
9 - $175,000 of weed ● When trying to install solar panels, LA
resident Mack Reed removed the service panel to his hot tub and found a large bundle of
jars containing 175,000 dollars worth of marijuana, sealed and labeled.
Rather than trying to shift the goods himself, he wisely chose to call the police.
After removing the drugs, he taped a poster over the hole, apologising for finding the
stash, and reminding the smuggler that his house was under surveillance.
8 - Cheetah ● Julie-Ann Taylor was busy in her kitchen
in Cambridgeshire, England, when her nine-year-old son came running in shouting “Mummy, there’s
a cheetah in the garden”.
Julie was surprised to discover that he was telling the truth when she looked out and
saw the 66 pound African cat ripping shreds out of the boy’s bicycle.
A call to the police summoned zookeepers who returned the predator the nearby zoo where
it had escaped, hoping to find a tasty human meal.
7 - Her son’s remains ● Police in Cleveland received a call from
Pakistan, informing them that the body of a five-year-old boy was buried in the backyard
of Larissa Rodriguez, a 34-year-old mother of nine.
The call came from Larissa’s boyfriend’s brother, and a police investigation found
the corpse after a three hour dig.
The couple were accused of abuse and neglect of the disabled child, who they hid in their
yard when he passed away, according to court documents.
6 - Roman villa ● In yet another example of the rich, buried
history of Britain, a Englishman found the remains of a 2000-year old Roman villa while
preparing to lay an electricity cable under his farm in rural Wiltshire. 18 inches beneath
the muddy topsoil lay a near-perfect example of Roman mosaic-work, an elaborate pattern
reserved only for the houses of the richest Roman governors.
Further digging found coins, jewellery and other artefacts which give a glimpse into
the lives of the Roman occupiers. 5 - Six meteorites
● A man in Bosnia has become convinced that his house is under attack from alien invaders.
Radivoke Lajic, a 50-year-old from a village in the north, has been bombarded by six meteorites
over a three year period from 2007.
Scientists at the University of Belgrade have confirmed that the man is, in fact, not crazy,
and that the fragments really are space rocks.
They have begun investigating whether local magnetic fields are responsible for this strange
attraction.
4 - South American Coati ● For a British person, finding a cheetah
is pretty crazy, but a resident of Buckinghamshire managed to capture film of an even stranger
wild animal.
The South American coati is found only in the jungles of the Amazon, and, in this case,
in the suburban middle-class neighbour of Marlow.
The cuddly creature was seen climbing up trees in the woman’s garden and experts believe
it is one of many exotic animals roaming wild through the countryside of the UK.
3 - 18th century cemetery ● New Orleans, the city of voodoo and black
magic was founded in 1718 by French colonialists.
The early city was small, and had a small cemetery outside the city walls for burying
the dead, but this was eventually built over by the Spanish government fifty years later.
Flash-forward two hundred years to a city resident digging a hole for his pool in 2011,
instead finding one of the oldest graveyards in America’s history.
2 - Apocalypse bunker ● The Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s
was a tense moment of Cold War history, which had American families anxious at the threat
of imminent nuclear apocalypse.
But it was great business for companies like Whitaker Pools, who offered nuclear bunker
construction services around Arizona.
A man from Tucson unearthed a gigantic one in his yard, complete with a blast hatch,
spiral staircases and a ten-foot high room.
The owner now plans to refurbish the bunker into a classic fallout shelter.
1 - Egyptian relic ● A woman from Derby in the UK brought a
boring-looking stone jar to an antique store to see if she could get something for it,
and was surprised to discover that her garden ornament was in fact a 3000-year old Egyptian
burial jar, used to store the organs of the dead.
A few years a later a man in Derby found a pharaoh’s head sculpture worth £10,000
buried in his backyard.
So if you’re looking to make a few bucks, pack your shovel and head to England.