Bills, packages, letters, flyers. Mail is often things that we are somewhat expecting.
But, sometimes, you get something in the mail that is downright bizarre. Below are stories of the absolute craziest things that people have found in the mail. Check them out!
Skirt overload over here!
I once ordered a skirt online. It came in the mail shortly. Then again. And again. After a month I had five identical skirts and they kept coming. I emailed the seller, got no response, but at some point it stopped. I think I ended up getting 8 or 9 of them in separate packages.
barhanita
That is sincerely a random present.
A box full of sand from the Sahara Desert.
Friends visiting there sent it to me with a note saying, “Use this Sahara sand at the bottom of your aquarium as a base for your tank ornaments – it’s thirsty.”
Back2Bach
That is pure genius.
A number of years ago I was in my house having a good time with a friend. We got some pizza delivered. Later we thought it would be a good idea to post a slice of pizza to another friend.
Stuck that bad boy in a brown envelope, put a stamp on it, and fired it into a postbox. Friend mentioned that he got a slice of pizza in the post a few days later. I acted surprised and amused. Have still never admitted it was me and that was 17 years ago.
Queef__ledger
That… actually kind of worked out…
I ordered American History X on DVD and got a Shaggy’s Greatest Hits CD instead. I wasn’t even mad.
snapcracklePOPPOP
Ok this is why we need a breathalyzer on our credit cards!
After a night of partying, I apparently ordered a very large dreamcatcher with a picture of a bald eagle on it. I don’t think I’ve ever been more bewildered than when I was opening that package.
It’s still hanging on the wall in my living room.
choadspanker
Ok well… I guess I can clean the house now!
My dad got a vacuum. Had his name on the package. We didn’t order a vacuum. Made some phone calls and checked credit cards and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Got a free vacuum.
impactmirror
OMG brownies make everything better.
When I was in college I was friends with the old lady who ran the front desk of my dormitory. When I went home for Christmas at the end of the term I received a lumpy brown paper wrapped package. She’d made a plate of brownies (stacked neatly on a normal ceramic plate), wrapped the whole thing in brown paper, put my home address on it and mailed it.
They were delicious.
FedoraFugitive
Pizza could never be evil…
I worked at a pizza place and I ended up in the newspaper because we did a parade.
I received a letter from someone telling me to seek the lord and that the pizza place was evil.
MrRambles
Wait, how does that even…. what?
When I was about 20, I got a package in the mail. It was addressed to me in Seattle with no return address and a postmark from Plano, Texas.
In the box, wrapped in a circular from a grocery store (presumably local to Texas) was a cheap plastic magnifying glass and one of those plastic pipes you blow bubbles with. Nothing else.
I always assumed the pipe and magnifying glass were supposed to signify Sherlock Holmes and perhaps a mystery to be solved. I scoured the box and contents for additional clues but to no avail.
This was nearly 20 years ago. No other packages or clues ever arrived. It’s been a mystery ever since and I have never and will never forget about it.
m_mf_w
I hope you’ve recovered…
I was at a roadside welcome center somewhere in the Midwest many years ago. There was a soda machine and a locked wooden box next to it that said to write a note with your address in case the machine ate your money.
As a joke my friend wrote, “Put dollar in machine. Flames came shooting out of machine and burned my face severely,” and wrote my name and address.
Six months later, maybe more, I received in the mail an envelope with an official return address on it from whatever state we had been in, with a crumpled up dollar bill and a handwritten note that said, “sorry about your face.
captain2man
TY! TY! TY! TY!
We got a pack of thank you notes. Didn’t know who they were from or why we got them until we checked one of online store accounts a few days later to see an unauthorized purchase of a cell phone and a package of thank you cards. Well played, well played.
Mrferg101
That would be extremely helpful…
STD learning material. It was addressed to a guy with the same name as me, and who lived right down the street. To make a long story short, I moved.
paulskins
Ok, well as long as it’s well done.
I got a letter that said, “From your secret admirer.” It was a sheet of paper with the word “jerk” colored on it. It was a nice drawing.
GimGar
That is not the ideal piece of mail.
A bag of white powder sealed in a safety envelope saying that they could not confirm the contents and that the original package had been destroyed. About a week later I got a call from a friend asking if I had received the hot dog bun they had put in a standard envelope and mailed from across the country.
SaddestClown
Free is free, though.
I received a box of literally thousands of coupons for a free chicken biscuit sent by some corporate place in Florida. I have no ties to the place at all so I was clueless as to why I was shipped a five lifetime supply of chicken biscuits. There is a street in our city that is notorious for homeless people to hang out at and beg for food and money, so I just took the box up there and gave it to them to share.
pnutbutterjellyfine
Well… were they wrong?
Work for a newspaper. Once wrote a column complaining how bad my favorite sports team was playing. Must have hit a nerve because a few days later a reader sent me a letter written on toilet paper telling me I was a “piece of crap” for bashing our city’s team. I respected that. He later called and we had a good chat.
bflo091986
Love me some peanut butter!
AARP sends me stuff on a regular basis.
I’m 25. They want me to register but I am a bit too young.
Also on an unrelated note if you email companies and say you love their product they will send you free food!! I have received so much free peanut butter this way!
airportluvr416
Those gummies come in handy.
I guess normally it wouldn’t be super weird but when I was in Iraq my mom sent me a care package with gummy sharks in it. Just your every day two color gummy. The top half was that normal gummy consistency and blue. The bottom half was that foamy type gummy and white. Turns out, when you mail meltable things to a desert they tend to melt. Especially if it has to go through the military’s in-country mail sorting process where everything needs to sit in a steel box for a week just to make sure everything that can melt does. When I got the gummies they had melted into a single gummy and apparently had been a liquid for long enough that the relative densities of the two gummy types caused them to separate back out into a single slab of gummy with one white side and one blue side.
A_Fainting_Goat
Well, that’s one way to run your life.
One time my dad received a black box in the mail about the size of a book. He seemed excited since he wasn’t expecting a package. I didn’t see him open it but about a half hour later he was pretty angry at me and he wouldn’t say why. I assumed it was about the package, he must have either been disappointed in the contents or it contained something personal. He didn’t talk to me the rest of the day.
I ordered an adult diaper sample pack in his name two weeks earlier.
Brandonono
This calls for a celebration!
I have some family in France (I’m Canadian). One year they sent their usual Christmas care package full of stuff for us and the box arrived damaged; big hole in the side.
Upon opening it, we saw that a bottle of champagne had made its way to us, and were happy that they had sent such an amazing gift (and that it had survived what was obviously a rough journey).
We thanked them for the thoughtful gift, to which they replied “we didn’t send that.”
Although we aren’t sure exactly what happened, we’re fairly certain that some unknown number of packages must have taken a tumble, spilling their various contents (probably somewhere in France), and some postal worker went “oh crap this must belong HERE” and jammed the bottle through the hole in the box, and sent it on its way.
Good bottle, that was.
djryanj
Yo, free letter so don’t complain.
I got a letter (mailed from Egypt) at my university address, which was a brochure to encourage me to explore Islam in California.
I have no idea why they thought I was a prospect worth international mail for this.
unkilbeeg
You are a scholar and a gentleman.
Bag of weed, when I lived in a student flat many years ago. It was for the previous tenants, also students, who had moved out at least eight months before.
There was a note in shaky handwriting, saying how much they missed the former occupants and wanted them to ‘have a smoke on them’.
Not wanting to attract the attention of Johnny Law, me and my flatmates disposed of these dangerous drugs.
size_matters_not
Yeah but THIS happened, though…
A delusional conspiracy theorist looked up every employee at my employer (~5000 employees, we have a public directory) and wrote a personally addressed letter to each of us talking about how our bosses were part of a murderous Satan-worshipping conspiracy and begging for help in defeating them from the inside.
snow_big_deal
Now you can calculate things of any size!
When I was in college, I realized I really needed a TI-83 calculator for my math class. So, I called my mom and asked her to send me one, because I didn’t have any money. I had to keep borrowing my friends’, and using Google on my homework, until the next week I finally got a package in the mail. Phew!
It was a lot bigger than I’d thought it would be, but who cares, I could finally do my work without inconveniencing either others or myself. I opened the package, and there was no calculator. There was a “Build a Bear.” A “Build A Bear” wolf, to be exact. My old suite mates still joke about that freak out, and it’s been almost 10 years.
Eltotsira
It’s the thought that counts!
I once received a handwritten letter from some church congratulating me on the recent birth on my child along with some religious brochures. I’ve never had a child. It made me wonder if they go through the newspaper looking for recent births and then try to find the parents’ address somehow.
mastiii
Ok, well… I’m confused, but ok.
Shoes. I wasn’t expecting shoes so I googled the return address. It was someone I had never heard of. Not only was it someone I had never heard of but the name on the box was my real last name and not the one I have adopted for work that everyone knows me by. That suggested real stuff was going down.
Being involved in…sketchier… enterprises at the time I took the soles out etc to look for drugs. Nada. Now I was getting freaked out.
So I asked a PI friend to look this guy up and see if we could figure out why they would have been sent to me.
They had been sent by a 70-year-old sex offender.
A few days later my buddy who lives abroad and sometimes gets specialty products delivered to me hit me up asking “did you get those shoes I ordered?”
grimbold292
Well, I’m sure she would have appreciated it.
Not me, but Angelina Jolie. When I was around 7, there was something on MTV or somewhere about how she liked to wear nude color lipstick better than other colors.
I got a half used tube of nude lipstick from my mom’s makeup box and promptly mailed it to the address she used for fan mail. No note or anything. Just a tube of clearly half used lipstick.
To be fair, she probably never opened it/saw it…but sometimes now, as an adult, I like to think that an assistant or someone opened it and got weirded out. Also, to be fair, that is probably hardly the weirdest thing Angelina Jolie received as fan mail.
Tedfred-tumbles
A wonderful surprise indeed!
It’s not exactly weird, but cool and unexpected. I ordered an Xbox 360 way after it was cool to have one because I got addicted to Borderlands games. The box came and was ridiculously heavy for just an xbox console and some wires.
Opened the box and found a Borderlands themed Xbox with a ton of Borderlands gear. Stickers, posters, about 7 different t-shirts, strategy book, a Borderlands controller.. Turns out seller was moving away and when we talked about the console, I said I’m only buying it to play Borderlands, so he gifted me this stuff he won in a contest. A wonderful surprise for me.
Bmutha****inMagic
You really need all those pills?
Pills! Thousands of pills.
It was supposed to be scrapbook supplies, but there was a mistake at the sorting facility and a bunch of boxes got destroyed.
A new employee, instead of admitting to their supervisor what had happened, just threw the stuff in new boxes and copied the shipping labels and sent it on its way. There was a official note on the box explaining that the box had been damaged in shipping and they had to replace it, please contact them if the contents are in any way damaged.
I mean, the pills were in good shape. I just didn’t want to have that kind of possession charge. Local post office didn’t believe me, so I brought the whole box in to them. I like to imagine that there was a pharmacy out that that was like, “I didn’t order any dinosaur stickers, but they’re mine now!”
Another time I ordered a laptop and it arrived with a bullet in it. I insisted on opening it before I accepted the delivery because I saw the hole on the outside of the box. The police came and collected it, apparently there was a shooting at the sorting facility but they hadn’t recovered any bullets. I was the first one to find one, and because there was an unbroken chain of evidence they were able to use it in the trial.
It was a huge hassle to get a new laptop, though. No one wanted to admit that they had to pay for it.
LadySmuag
Then you’re going to have a geese problem.
48 full bodied honkers. What’s a full bodied honker you ask? A goose decoy as we found out upon opening the box. Imagine our surprise when we opened a mostly unmarked box to find four goose heads staring at you. There were 12 boxes.
After calling to clarify the situation, they said they’d send someone out to get them. They did not. After a second call they told us we had to bring them to the store. Screw that. Those boxes were huge. We kept them and told them they’d be here if they ever wanted to come get them. Somewhere, some hunter is fuming mad that they messed up his order of hundreds of dollars worth of honkers.
This being senior year of college the only thing left to do was start an epic, three month long game of “hide a honker.” Nowhere was sacred.
Shower? Honker.
Closet? Honker.
Laundry room? Honker.
Wake up hungover Saturday morning? Honker. Honkers everywhere.
We eventually gave most of them away and now every one of our friends from college has a matching full bodied honker commemorating that year.
Mal_Adjusted
(Source)