I had been out of the country for 3 days at a music festival. Came home to my front door crowbarred in, and my entire house trashed. They had taken my TV, DVD’s, laptops, etc. But the cherry on top of the s**t cake: they emptied my box of sex toys so the forensics team had to dust my dildos for finger prints.

I was 13 and came home from school. My mother was walking around the house naked and delirious. Randomly picking objects up and dropping them. Calling me by a name that wasn’t mine. I called 911 and a neighbor. She had a fever of 104. It was bacterial meningitis. She was in a medically induced coma after that, required brain surgery and then months of antibiotics. She had amnesia after that and was never really the same.

8 billion baby praying mantises in my house. Over the fall, my daughter went out into the woods and collected every praying mantis cocoon she could find and put them in a shoebox in her bedroom. They all hatched in the early spring while we were visiting my parents for the day...

I go to turn on the light and...nothing. The electricity is off. Go to the electricity box outside and turn it on and go back inside: house has been cleared out of all valuable things. I hear a whirring sound and realise it's the old VCR video tape rewinder rewinding the video tape I put in it in the morning as I left home with my baby son. And then it dawns on me: that tape only takes about 3 minutes to rewind... The burglars must have turned off the electricity seconds after I left home with my baby in the morning. They were watching me leave from inside the garden.....

Came home and found my front door wide open, my parents missing, my neighbors on my front lawn (we don't talk to my neighbors) and blood all over our grass and the nearby wall. Turned out my father, who knows how to do professional landscaping/tree trimming/gardening etc, was trimming the tree in our front yard when a branch broke and he lost his balance. He fell backwards and ended up landing on our neighbor's fence, which is topped by steel spikes. One of the spikes went into his leg, though he apparently didn't even notice or feel it so he pulled himself off the fence without a problem, but when he tried to stand he collapsed onto the lawn. He lost a lot of blood and had to have emergency surgery, but survived. His wound was so bad that when he made it to the hospital, a police officer and doctor confronted him because they figured he had to have been shot and tried to get him to admit it so that they could find the culprit. It was an incredibly scary moment, but that was 17 years ago and he is fine today, though he did end up eventually getting his revenge by chopping that tree down.

Aged 15; coming home to my dad confronting me about the gay porn he discovered on my phone which I had mistakenly left at home.

Me and my siblings were sent home early from school to learn from my mom that my dad had committed suicide

When I was around 7, I came home from a family weekend away, I walked into my room towards my cove. I had this hanging chain that you put your beanie babies on. As I passed it, it seemed like there was a bunch of dust particles in the air around me. I started moving my hands in front of my face as if to push the dust particles from blocking my view... that was when I realized. These were not dust particles, but rather hundreds upon hundreds of tiny baby spiders. While we were gone tons of eggs hatched and I was walking in all of them hanging from the ceiling on web strings. I immediately ran screaming into the shower and refused to go back in for days after my dad killed them all. That was the end of me having beanie babies, time to grow up.

An old dog of mine had become sick after getting ahold of a large batch of double fudge brownies at some point during the day, and by the time I got home, I walked into a house with no less than 25 separate puddles (yes, puddles) of s**t. Poor fella had to eat bland boiled chicken and rice for a week.

Meth lab bust. I was raised by my grandparents (they were wonderful people who adopted a bunch of sh**ty kids) and they'd let my aunt and her boyfriend move their RV onto the property because they got kicked out of wherever they were staying. The worthless a**holes were trying to cook meth in it and it caught on fire so they ran off and left it there burning. The neighbors called 911 and the fire department got the fire out before it got to the house. It was nice coming home from school to that. It was a huge s**t storm. My grandparents were almost arrested and they almost lost their house and land. Pretty much the only thing that saved them was that the meth lab was in a vehicle registered to the boyfriend. Even though we didn't get into any legal trouble it was still a pain in the a*s because the whole house had to be tested and they had to hire someone to clean up the mess and have the property test clean before we could move back in. And my childhood home is listed as a former meth lab on the National Clandestine Laboratory Register. My grandparents never recovered financially.

My dad came home to find a wasp in the house. And then another. And then another. He investigated. Heard a buzzing coming from the dining room. An entire nest of wasps had been living in the walls and chewed through the sheetrock (or whatever it is they did) and were now pouring into the house through the hole.

My 1 year old son's empty room after his mother and I split up. We planned on 50/50 custody but she took everything. I closed the door and didn't open it for the three months that I had to live there. I came from a broken home and promised myself I'd never do that to my child; I'd felt like such a failure.

One morning when we were leaving for work, my wife noticed that the dog had eaten half a pack of sugarless gum. At the time, we did not know that the sweetener in sugarless gum, xylitol, is dangerous for dogs. We just went to work. We were fortunate in that her health was fine, as xylitol can be deadly. She was OK, but we came home to a ghastly smell in the house. The dog was sitting in 0.5 in. / 1.3 cm deep liquid s**t in her crate. She was coated head to toe in it, and was excited to see us and wagging her tail, sending a spray 4 feet / 120 cm in every direction. It took hours to clean her and the room up, and days to get rid of the smell.

My casual boyfriend doing full-demolition on my master bathroom. I had mentioned I would like to remodel it someday...

Finding out my father had been diagnosed with cancer.

Once my family returned from dinner out (a few hours at least!) and upon entry back into the house we noticed water leaking from the garage roof. Turns out our top floor toilet tank had cracked and water had been continuously pouring and was cascading down the stairs, through all three floors. A ridiculous amount of damage.

Came home from visiting my wife's family over Christmas break. She had asked a friend to come by and feed our cats, and the friend agreed. When we got back home, there was no food or water in any of the cat bowls, and one of our cats was sitting in the corner foaming at the mouth. This cat was a terror and never just "sat in the corner" so we knew something was wrong. We took him to the emergency vet where the vet said he was severely dehydrated. Unfortunately he had some sort of brain damage and we had to put him down. When we confronted the friend she said she went by every day, we have determined that to be a lie. RIP Ace.

Got off work about 7 am, rounded the corner with my McDonald’s breakfast in hand to see 2 cops standing over a dead body on my welcome Mat.

Maggots in the summer. I was at the cottage for a week and had forgotten to throw out the garbage before leaving. They were everywhere...everywhere. I’ll never forget that day.

My Brothers (20 and 22) and I (20M) came home from college for winter break. The next day my mom wakes me up asking if I planned on going with the rest of the family to put my childhood dog (13F) down. She had told everyone weeks before that this was going to happen when we got home for break... but forgot to tell me.

Coming home just wanting to collapse in bed and cuddle my girlfriend of two years before she had to leave for another 5 days, only to be told that she didn't love me anymore and that she was moving out when I walked in. Devastating.

When I was in about sixth grade or so, my family and I adopted a dog--Sally--we had found abandoned with her pups. We found the pups a home and decided to keep Sally, little did we know the mom had separation anxiety. Before I left for the school bus one morning after my parents had gone to work, I was to put Sally in her kennel, but she absolutely REFUSED to get in. Knowing I was already running late, I just gave up and left. When I came home that afternoon, it was pure destruction. The blinds had been destroyed, she had scattered all my things on my desk on the floor--including a small fish tank--and the house had a myriad of broken objects throughout. Let's just say my parents weren't too thrilled, but I managed to persuade them to keep her. To this day she was one of my absolute favorite dogs. Who woulda thought?

Kid decided to remove diaper after pooping, then smear the poop everywhere. Wife was covered in it and everyone was screaming. When I walked in, I assumed someone was severely injured.

Thousands of ladybugs that hatched, were swarming around and on the white siding of the house. And then I went inside and a couple hundred were hanging out in my livingroom on the ceiling.

I think it would be coming home after working from 8am - 11pm in college. Walking in completely exhausted from the weekend and hoping to crash before your 8am class, only to find that there is a massive party going on in your house. Also, when you finally get to your room there are strangers in your room smoking.

Towards the end of 6th grade, I found my mom waiting at the door for me when I got home. She had to explain to me that my grandfather - her father - was going through cardiac arrest and likely wouldn’t make it. He passed a few hours later.

I went on an exchange study trip abroad. The university helped me sublet my student accommodation to [an] exchange student while I was away. Before returning home, I called the department secretary for some study-related stuff, and she quietly asked, "How much have you heard?" It turned out the student had trashed the apartment, then ran away to another country without a trace. The janitor had to get in there because of the smell to remove some garbage, and of course the rent had not been paid. It was only due to the department secretary putting a lot of pressure on the company that sponsored the student to pay my rent that I was able to keep my place. I still had to spend a week cleaning and had to throw away a lot of stuff.

My house has been broken into. I got home, and there were two police cars in the driveway. A neighbor reported it. The house was trashed. I have no idea why, I'm not material and don't keep much on hand. The guy got away, and I cleaned up. Not a good day.

I came out from work on a heavy rain day in late autumn to find my new used car flooded. The sun roof didn't seal properly and leaked. A lot. At first I didn't notice because I had parked facing downward on a hill. I started up the car, pulled out, and, upon hitting level ground, a four inch wave of icy cold water sloshed over my feet from under the dash. I couldn't get my head around it, just couldn't grasp what was happening. Stopping in the middle of traffic, I just sat there staring down at the wading pool on the floor of my new used car. After a few moments someone honked, so I drove home. Yes, I knew I should go directly to the dealership, or a repair shop, or somewhere other than my own garage. But I didn't. I drove across town with water sloshing back and forth around my feet like in a sinking ship. I remember laughing out loud at one point, thinking, "Maybe I can dry it out with the leaf blower." In the end, I sucked it out with the shop vac and manhandled a full-sized dehumidifier into the backseat, rigged up to extension cords to run all night. I went out every couple of hours to empty it, and the next day I parked it in the sun and left all the windows down. After a few days it was dry, so I took it in to have the sunroof repaired. To this day I have no idea why I didn't want anyone to know what happened. It's not as if it were my fault or anything. Maybe just that the experience was so weirdly surreal that I couldn't break the spell.

Dog had had surgery on both paws. Husband decided after a few days that he trusted him without the cone of shame. Arrived home to find bits of white cotton scattered down the hall. Followed them to find the living room floor covered in blood and the dog in his bed with a paw swollen to twice its usual size after he'd shredded the bandages and ripped out his stitches. Worst treasure hunt ever.