20 people who clean up after music festivals share the weirdest things they've found left behind.

Music festivals are goldmines for debauchery and memorable stories. People often attend festivals to shed their professional exteriors and let loose to their favorite musicians, and with this comes a lot of intoxication and unbridled mess.While braving Coachella can be a blast if you're rolling through to get messy with your pals, the staff cleaning up have a completely different experience. In many cases, their job entails tidying a hectic crime scene (literally), which of course leads to another brand of festival story.In a popular Reddit thread, people who clean up festivals shared some of the weirdest stuff they've found, and the necessity of gloves cannot be underestimated.1. enelprinceofthemoon found their pet fish at work. I'm an usher at my neighbourhood movie theatre so idk if this counts but I found a plastic bag under a seat with 6 guppies swimming around inside so I kept the guppies for myself lol. I had to Google how to take care of fish but it was fun and I still have them today. 2. Beth-a-knee made a handful of cash. I was down in Galveston, Texas for Mardi Gras as float security for the parade. Thought I saw a strand of nice beads on the ground, when I bent to pick them up I noticed they were pearls with a golden clasp. Turned out to be worth over $300. 3. lazytranch has a coworker who found $5000. Ha! I actually oversee the trash/sanitation contract for a large music festival. Luckily, I don't do the sorting, but I do know some of the outliers people have found in the aftermath: -so much poop -1000s of perfectly good floaties -a rock of cocaine the size of a golf ball -once, a backpack with $5000 in it and nothing else. 4. meh89 found a whole stash. $300 in all ten dollar bills and a sandwich sized bag with 23 MDMA caps leftover. It was a good night. 5. nfkk knows how to find the goldmine. I work recycling for a few music festivals and have seen some good ones. At Bonnaroo 07 I found a tent full of burnt spoons, needles and blood all over the place (Glad no one was sleeping in it, as per an earlier comment). Another good one was a dirty, dirty jock strap pounded into the ground, no one wanted to pick it up. But finally someone broke down and picked it up, had a roll of money in it. Like $1500. Saw another guy find a backpack in the dumpster with almost an ounce of cocaine and a couple hundred dollars. Back when I was 19-20 I used to just gather up as much good shit as I could find and take it to the next festival and sell it at the gate to afford my ticket. Things like a generator, wheelbarrows, drugs and boring things like tents, chairs, coolers, easy-ups and tarps. Once I found a fork that was just one thick tine (like if you just didn't cut out the tines), never seen anything like it to this day. Edit: there is no spoon! It's true! http://imgur.com/r9UkALA (not the best pictures but you get the idea) 6. chickachickayeah1776 has two memorable Burning Man stories. I've worked on the production crew for Burning Man. Two stories: Came across an abandoned "art project" named the "Temple of Piss". It was a seven-foot long vertical clear tube filled with sample jars of human waste. The idea was that event participants on a spiritual quest that managed to find this tube and the pile of sample jars next to it could take one of the jars, piss in it, seal it, and drop it in the tube. Of course whoever owned the thing left it there for us to find after the event. Yes, one of the jars had poop in it. During the post-event cleanup process, when the desert is nearly empty of anything or anyone at all, a guy on our crew finds an abandoned tent, which he determined after checking inside to be chock-full of garbage and piss bottles. He was preparing the tent to be lifted up by a forklift into a dumpster, when the tent started THRASHING. A very dazed individual pokes his head out and remarks, "Oh shit, sorry dude - is this your tent?" Turns out he had found himself without an exit strategy after the event ended, and some folks had offered him a ride and told him to wait at a red tent they'd set up for him, with fresh sleeping bags, pillows, water, and food. Well, he overshot that red tent's location by a quarter mile, found an entirely different red tent full of garbage and piss bottles, assumed that was the tent they set up for him, proceeded to try to sleep off his bender within the pile of trash and urine, and nearly got forked into a dumpster. 7. Dear_Occupant got the best gig. Late to this thread, but I volunteered to help clean up after the one and only Grateful Dead show in our town after the time they came in the 1960s. There's this thing at Dead shows called Shakedown Street, where vendors set up and pitch their wares. Holy sh*t I found so much stuff that day. I thought I was just signing up for a cleanup job. There was so much of it that I was giving it away. Bags of weed, wads of money (one of which we found the owner of, he correctly identified the exact value and quantity of the bills), pipes, endless packs of cigarettes, baggies full of pills, I mean you name it. It was as if my city had played host to the annual convention of the International Federation of Clumsy Leprechauns. There was literally just money and drugs lying on the ground everywhere that next morning. 8. ThePublikon found the trinity of swag. Approximately £3000 in crumpled bills in a bumbag, along with some wraps of unidentified white powder and one of those troll toys with crazy hair from the 90s. 9. irish91 was almost victimized by a Haribo explosion. Oxegen 2006. Everyone who went decided to leave their tent at the campsite. Some decided to set theirs on fire. This meant there was random fires in a field that did hold 80,000 people. Full cans of deodorant that were probably bought just for the weekend left in most tents. This meant there was loud explosions every couple of seconds. I had to try wake up my drunk friend because there was a row of fire getting closer to our tents. Even after telling him "the tents next to us are on fire" he was asking for a few more minutes of sleep! When I finally got my friend out of the soon to be inflamed tent we walked through the campsite trying to avoid fire and explosions. My friend saw a couple full (share size) bags of Haribo in the porch of a burning tent. He thought it would only take 2 seconds to grab them but as he went to pick one up an aerosol can exploded in they sleeping part of the tent and I thought I just witnessed my drunk friend get blown up over Haribo. My friend turned out to be fine but regretted almost dying for a bag of semi-melted jellys. The festival learned from their mistakes, so now in Ireland after a music festival you can leave your tent and they have teams if people who disassemble them and send them to people who need them. 10. wewladdyboi found the remains of a heroin session at a children's concert. Heroin needles after a Yo Gabba Gabba concert. 11. bellyfold wishes they could unsee that mess. A babydoll with a condom sticking out of a hole in the crotch. 12. Supercaptaincat found misplaced human ashes. I was working an info booth as a large music festival when I caught radio chatter about "patrons turning what they believe to be human remains in the misting tent". Turns out someone had died and requested their ashes scattered at said festival and their friends lost them. They ended up in the lost and found before getting claimed only a few hours later. 13. lordperiwinkle saw a woman who has found her favorite hobby. I actually do festivals...I sell art at things like renn fairs, comic cons, & music fests. After breaking down a show the last thing I do is head back to where my booth is and make sure I got all my stuff. After one show there was a woman scooting through the hall. She was muttering in a sing song voice, "scavenge, scrounge, find, scavenge, scrounge, find!!" over and over as she picked stuff up. 14. punkwalrus still doesn't know where that kid's mom was. 30+ years in the sci-fi/anime/comic convention biz. Prosthetic arm. Did you know you can't just throw it away? It's deemed medical waste. A sled. An expensive one. A nice, handmade cane made of some kind of black, thorned wood, with a Sterling silver skull with ruby (probably fake) eyes as a pommel. Not the cheap costume stuff. A set of police car lights. A nice set of first edition books of various classic sci-fi. We knew the owner, but despite repeated promises to pick them up, he never showed. Someone's 4 year old kid wearing a velvet party dress was left in our video room with a can of Dr. Pepper and instructions not to speak to strangers. We were showing adult anime (not hentai, though, thank god, but Arcadia My Youth). Minutes before we decided to call social services, "grandmama" showed up to claim her. She got chewed out by our division head, but she blew him off. Later that night, at about 11pm at a gay-themed Woldcon bid party, same kid was left there with another can of Dr. Pepper. 15. pm-me-puppypics's friend found a prosthetic leg. A friend of mine runs a campground and always has interesting stories and pictures after the big camping holidays (4th of July, Memorial day, etc). Once, she posted a photo of an overflowing dumpster, which had a prosthetic leg laying in front of it. I mean...how? I know there's a lot of alcohol involved in those weekends, but it's not exactly something you can walk away without! I think my response was something along the lines of "the guy who lost that isn't in the dumpster, is he?" 16. Jsdestroy found trash from some condom culprits. There is a small carnival that happens once a year and I would volunteer with my church to clean it up. I found three used condoms in the same pathway, not hidden or covered just three used condoms that people had to walk over, and also a needle in some bushes. As a 11 year old I picked them up as normal trash but older me is a little grossed out now. 17. newguyneal fell upon the spirit of ICP. More empty whipit cartridges than you could ever imagine. 18. AWrenchAndTwoNuts scored some good swag. We used to help with the nightly clean up at a 4 day country music festival years ago. From reading the rest of the tread it seems like I was pretty lucky. The grossest thing we usually cleaned up were beer cans or pop bottles full of chew spit. I have a whole list of things I have brought home with me though. Coolers, many many coolers in every shape and size. From cheap ones to $200 top of the line jobs. Folding/Camp chairs, same as the coolers. Probably gave away 50 or 75 to friends and family, most were brand new. In lesser amounts I have found tarps, sunglasses, hats, keys, cash, a few pipes, a bong, umbrellas, wagons, mobility scooters, a coffin, oh and we once found a portable oxygen thing. Most of those items I turned into the office. Any unclaimed items and cash were split up among the cleaning crews at the end of the show usually. Except coolers and chairs, we got so many of those we could take what we wanted when we found them, they were too big to store at the lost and found and there were just too many. 19. Sickmknasty cleaned up the ashes of someone's friend. I work cleaning a large music venue. A fan had brought a vial of his friends ashes to a Papa Roach show, and subsequently lost it in the mosh pit. When I came in for my shift he was looking for it with security and was very distraught. We told him we'd let him know if we found it. We didn't have the heart to tell him, but later I found his friend. He was all over the dance floor. I cleaned up a mans friend that night, but his friend used to be a Papa Roach fan so maybe he wanted it that way. 20. ignoramusaurus almost scored an Ipod. At Leeds and Reading festivals a lot of people like to take shits in their tents before they leave, not sure why but it's disgusting. Once found one of those big 16 man tents with a room in the middle, that middle room had been used as a bathroom. There was a canvas chair in the middle with a hole cut out, a pile of shit underneath and a stack of porn magazines. Tend to find a LOT of drugs, booze and clothes at any festival as you'll imagine, one girl made a beeline for this tent just as we were about to pack up and found a brand new, working iPod (this was a while ago). When I was younger I would see it as a second hand shop for clothes and still have a couple of bits I found like this awesome shirt thing that looks like a parker coat.