[Closed] Strangest thing(s) you have stolen

A set of keys for our school.
Nicked from the wood store room.
We went in & nicked loads of stuff.

Circa 1971 though.

Someone's glasses. Wasn't drunk or anything, was at work.

SaxonRider - Member

I once stole the gun off my friend's X-Wing Fighter because I needed it for mine.

Completely reasonable

A friend's crutches after he broke his ankle.
I didn't exactly steal them, just relocated them. 😈

I once nicked a lads sandwiches at school when he had an epileptic fit.
I'm not proud of it, but he wasn't going to be eating them.

A packet of Frazzles and a yo-yo from a shop because somebody dared me to. I was about 12 at the time.

The only phone at a house party I crashed in my teens. The older brother of the girl throwing the party came home unexpectedly and threw everyone out. I hung around in the garden, very drunk.

He came out and told me he was calling the police. His face was a picture when I declared "no you're not because I've got the phone" whilst proceeding to pull the phone and all cabling out of my coat.

Teenaged drinking FTW!

To my eternal shame I stole a reverse-thread nut of the stub axle of a Mini Metro that had been abandoned in the street outside our house in London. To be fair, it had been there a couple of weeks and was covered in Police stickers. And I did need the nut to fix my mates car. Anyway, the council sent a lorry and dragged it off to the scrappy the next day.

To my eternal shame I stole a reverse-thread nut of the stub axle of a Mini Metro that had been abandoned in the street outside our house in London. To be fair, it had been there a couple of weeks and was covered in Police stickers. And I did need the nut to fix my mates car. Anyway, the council sent a lorry and dragged it off to the scrappy the next day.

In this day and age you can consider that 'recycling'

When I was about 6 and my brother 8, we stole all the spare buttons we could from the pocket of suit jackets in M&S one boring shopping trip with my mum.

She found the buttons a few weeks later and made us take them back and write a letter of apology to the shop manager.

My mate stole a 9v battery sized lump of potassium at school.
The police were called when the technicians realised it was missing.

On the weekend we went down to the pit and threw it in the lake. Was quite exciting compared to the small 1/4 pea sized lumps the teacher was dropping into the bowl.

Me and my mates used to hide in the bushes near the green of a par 3 at the Glamorganshire and steel the balls as they arrived.

A better variant was to pop the ball in the hole. Much looking from the players ensued followed by an inevitable, incredulous shout of 'Hey Dave, you've only got a hole-in-one!' Probably cost a few guys a few pints!

some ones guide dog....

only for 5 minutes though, man that thing loved steak mckoys!

A sausage. It's a long story that started in Blackpool with an ill-planned stag-crawl and finished with us all scattered and me legging (pursued by owners) among a zig-zag 1/2 mile of parked cars. I had ordered a large sausage from the hotdog and chips stand. I had a minor seizure of drunken unreason and so ran without paying.

I escaped, and the adrenalin was so high that I couldn't face eating the sausage.

Whoever you were, I'm sorry, OK? Karma has bitten pretty hard since then so I'll take it as time paid and some. Think that's all I ever knicked. Oh, and that box of kit-kats from the offie when I was teen. I had an accomplice too.

So am two-time junk-food klepto.

A length of 3x2 off my neighbours driveway . There were 4 lengths but I only needed 1 😉

To my eternal shame I stole a reverse-thread nut of the stub axle of a Mini Metro that had been abandoned in the street outside our house in London. To be fair, it had been there a couple of weeks and was covered in Police stickers. And I did need the nut to fix my mates car. Anyway, the council sent a lorry and dragged it off to the scrappy the next day.

I'd also be ashamed of knowing someone that owned a Metro

A cooked chicken from a girl guides camp site catering tent when in our teens .

we did an SAS raid sneaking up and under the tent then ate said chicken in the woods .

But someone saw us and told the local gestapa who went round to my mates house and under intense pressure and torture he confesses and also implicated me .

result in an appearance before the magistrate and £20 fine each
and not to forget the piss taking from all our mates which still happens even now
a prank that went very wrong as £20 was over a weeks wages at the time but they did let us pay £5 a week

A US marine's helmet
A bust of Queen Victoria
Numerous road signs
A small dog
There's plenty more but my memory appears to be unwilling to release the details at the minute.

My only excuses are beer and growing up in a small village with nothing to do.

On the way home from School, me and a couple of mates popped into woolworths. I spotted a set of flights for my darts. They were red and had a picture of a pair of massive tits. They were 55p and I had 40p. Took my chance, slipped them into my pocket and walked out. Bus stop directly across the road and I could see our bus coming in the distance. Tried to cross the road and got wasted by a hit and run driver. Instant Karma.

My mate acquired a giant cut out Shrek, from a cinema, at 7am in the morning, walked it through Newcastle city centre, with a snake in a hessian sack over one shoulder, off his tits, trying to to find the after party we were at.

A giant Shrek head appeared at the window of the party, was his grand entrance, before he whopped his snake onto the table.

A fully decorated Christmas tree. Woke Christmas morning by my Mum dragging me out of bed by my ear shouting at me to take it back from where I had found it. I had no idea, so hung over I dragged to the local shops and left it. Still no idea where it came from nearly 30 yrs later!

My mates and I once stole a for sale sign from outside a house on our way home from the pub. It took up a surprisingly large amount of space in our front room!

A couple of days later a girl came round her house and she happened to be the daughter of the estate agent. Her reaction was pretty funny.

I knew a student house in Newcastle with a set of four way traffic lights setup in it, in different rooms.

I don't know how they managed to steal them, get them home, and get them running.

Someone broke into my car and stole the hazard warning light switch out of the dash once.

A chaise lounge from the cock hotel in stony Stratford.
To this day I have no idea how me and the other fella got this thing out of their main lobby up the high street and into our flat without being wrestled to the floor by staff or the law enforcement!

Once woke up in the company of a life-sized cardboard cut out of Maureen Lipman.

I once nicked a lads sandwiches at school when he had an epileptic fit.
I'm not proud of it, but he wasn't going to be eating them

genuine lol there.I don't know what's better about this, that it happened at all or that you owned up to it 😆

Someone broke into my car and stole the hazard warning light switch out of the dash once.

picked up by the fuzz later that night for 'flashing'?

I lost the nose pad from a pair of Oakley's a few years ago, made a trip to the optician, asked the optician to open the cabinet and relieved a pair of glasses of their nose pad.

Nearly 20 years ago and I still feel guilty about it.

picked up by the fuzz later that night for 'flashing

😯 painful !

As a student we went through a phrase of taking garden gates. We had 20 or 30 when we left the house. The landlord was not impressed.

I borrowed (not stole, technicality) one of those A-frame pub signs from outside a Guildford City Centre pub. It was about 5 foot tall x 3 foot wide and took two of us to carry it, stretcher style, between us through Guildford. We then stashed it in a side alley and went for a curry, before retrieving it and taking it home, in a taxi. The genius bit, and how we managed to get the taxi driver to agree to carry it (he had to fold the seats down and my mate lie across it in the back) was because it had a misspelling on it courtesy of the signwriter -

15th Centruy Coaching Inn,
Good Food
Fine Ales

and we 'convinced' him we'd been given it because it was worthless as was.

We got it home, set it up SAS style in my bedroom and then with a 'TADA!' revealed it to my sleeping girlfriend.

She was in honesty, slightly less pleased with it than we'd imagined she would be, and I can't put it entirely down to the fact that it was about 2am by this point.

She made me take it back the next morning, well before opening hours, so I don't suppose it was ever actually missed. Hence not technically stolen.

Also as a student in Durham, we stole (again, borrowed really) one of those traffic bollard things - 3 foot tall with a cast iron City crest on it, that blocks off the pedestrian areas but can be removed for fire engine access, etc. I plucked it from the ground like a giant picking an ear of corn, swung it over my shoulder and we headed into Moatside Court whereupon we demanded one of our ladyfriends make us a cup of tea. Again, being well after closing time she was already asleep and so refused but undeterred, we used the bulbous end of our sturdy implement as a battering ram, forcing her to yield entry and to furnish us all, one after the other, with our victuals (2 teas and a coffee for me please). In the 1980's this was considered perfectly normal and not at all threatening behaviour, BTW.

We them deposited the bollard under her bed and bade our farewells.

This time it was a combination of the cleaning lady and her forcing us to return the object. Except it took 3 of us to lift the thing when sober, just proving that beer does make you much strong, grrrrr!!

A giant restaurant pepper mill. must be at least 18 inches high. my ex still uses it, and will tell everyone that it's the proceeds of crime

A lump of blasting gelatine.

Sadly, it was only a dummy display sample.

A bookmark with a topless lady on from a cheapo book shop in York. My mate nicked one too.

This was about 25/30 years ago. Not quite sure why we didn't just pay the 20p for them or whatever they cost.

My brother and I came out of the Waterside Inn in Summerseat that was washed down the Irwell by storm Desmond, and saw that the chef had left three rolled joints of meat to cool on the window sill that was low down at car exhaust level beside the bridge. My brother reached in, took one of the joints and hid it under his coat and we walked home to my house 100 yards away. When we got home we looked at the joint and realised that we actually felt quite bad about it despite the chef's stupidity so we nipped back and reversed the operation. I sometimes wonder what nasty bacteria the joint picked up during its short trip and whether they affected anybody who ate the meat the next day.

We had roadworks in our street, which is used as a rat-run and the street was closed giving us three months of glorious peace. Just before it reopened I drove up to each end and pinched the "Road Closed" signs. When they reopened the road I re-erected the signs and chained them to street furniture. We enjoyed another four or five days of peace while drivers carried on unaware that their rat-run was open again but in the end the council realised and removed them. A cycling buddy of mine worked in the highways department at the time; I think he suspected I was behind the wheeze and he told me his boss was absolutely fuming, saying: "We can't have residents setting up road diversions!"

Communion wine...and a bunch of the wafer host things

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In ibiza in 1997 I was filling up the car and forgot to take nozzle out after I'd paid. As I drove off I heard a huge crash and realised that the whole petrol pump had come off and I had dragged it across the forecourt. Eventually it got caught against another pump and came off but I drove off at great speed with the nozzle and rubber hose still attached to the car. I dumped it a couple of miles up the road and quickly changed my hire car....

[i]A bust of Queen Victoria[/i]..

Oh blimey, I forgot, but that reminded me. In my front garden is an angel's head. For 1 year exactly I lived in the back of a big house next to a grave yard. One drunken night my housemates and I ventured into the graveyard and I stole a broken (it was!) head that was lying on the ground.
A few weeks later this made the local paper after that church was vandalised "Gravestones SMASHED! And REMOVED!" 😳
This must've been 1985 and about 10 house moves later I've still got the head. 😆

There was a "Scavenger Hunt" at college around 98-99 that resulted in the car pack to be full of gravestones, various farm animals, cannons, the blue lights from jam sandwiches and a combine harvester amongst other things. I remember hanging out the window of a 205 holding onto a 25ft flag pole as we belted back through the lanes.

Youth of [s]today[/s] yesterday... Don't know what the world's [s]coming to[/s] coming from...

Oh, and an inflatable toy dinosaur on a school trip which I still feel guilty for 😳

In my front garden is an angel's head.

Don't blink.

A statue from the maplin art gallery, sheffied.

I didn't steal it (I don't steal and get a major frisson reading some of the kids stealing stuff above. People are so [i]bad[/i]...) But it was in my student house. Kind of allowed as the main stealer was some kind of artist.

Life sizeish statue of a naked man. He was decapitated and a black and white portable (the house telly) was stuck on his shoulders. This at the time seemed quite cool. Wonder where he is now?

Stole a full size Foster's Lager parasol from the "tropical" themed student disco at Bradford uni in the early 1990s. Quite a feat as the main hall was below ground level. I've a vague memory of going out of the fire exit and up the amphitheatre, then propping it up behind me while we ate in the Shabina (ooo, aaaah, shah-bee-na, say ooh-ah-sha-bee-na). I think it was finally abandoned to rot in the shed of a rented house in tooting Bec

Also ended up with the pump light from a John Smith's tap from the Shearbridge pub, the bar was so packed I was hanging onto it to try to stay close t the bar and it came away in my hand so I kept it. No idea what happened to that though

In the day when satalite dishes were rare, I borrowed one and tried to use it as a giant wok on a barbeque......

Some lengths of scaffolding so I could make my own custom chopper bike along with my mate Richard (see the other thread and my apple stealing with him). We would ride around town on these beasts (the forks were probably 3ft long). Mine was red feathered into silver on the butts, his was painted up the same way but black and gold.

I am [b]*GUTTED*[/b] that I don't have any photographic record of it.

A mini digger.

In Châtel in summer 2002. My mate and I were walking back to the apartment we were staying in from the pub where we had unsuccessfully been trying to chat up teenage Parisien girls using our schoolboy French.

The mini digger was parked on the side of the road at the end of someone's drive. For some reason the keys were in the ignition. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so I fired it up and walked it a few hundred metres down the road to the car park outside our apartment where I did a spot of light excavation while shouting "je suis désolée" up to our unimpressed neighbours who the digger had woken and were watching from their balcony.

My mate convinced me I should take it back to where we had found it, so I did, and left it parked exactly as it had been.

The next night on the way home from the pub the keys were in the ignition again, so evidently the owner hadn't noticed that it had been for an adventure.

A garden table and two benches, plus umbrella, from a pub in Abersoch which wouldn't serve a bunch of scruffy Mancs.

Looked great on the campsite and burned well.
We kept the umbrella.

My wife's heart. 🙄

Stole a handful of tampons from a supermarket when I was very young.

Box had split and spilled.

I thought they were sweets.

About 6 bottles of whisky / gin / brandy (can't really remember exactly what) from a hotel bar in Lincolnshire. No idea why, I was very, very drunk. Woke up in my room with my 'bar' ready to go on the side table....

I returned them to the back door of the bar (in a corridor) then walked through into breakfast. Quite amusing watching the morning staff trying to work out what had happened as the bottle were put back behind the bar!

Four absolutely [i]massive[/i][i] pipes from a church pipe organ. They were laid out waiting for the scrap man, so technically it was recycling. Couldn't get a note out of them.

stole building supplies from building site so me and my mates could build a tree house

stole new window frames from an old factory because we needed wood for our bonfire...2 grands worth we later found out

Concrete donkey.

Concrete donkey.

You is one stone-cold hard-ass gangsta.

Too many to mention due to stupid abuse of alcohol as a youngster.
But, in my early teens:
A porn mag. Thought I went for something classy like playboy and put it inside a broadsheet. Once home with my booty I realised I'd snatched Readers Wives. The memory of "EggWina" the old lady, covered in raw eggs, will never leave me.

We repeatedly stole the pub bench/tables on a Friday night, put them in a war canoe and made a slow escape with someone on the drum for good measure. The landlord always made us return them on Saturday morning. It wasn't as if he didn't know where they had gone. I think they were eventually screwed down as our 'game' had got tiresome.

As a student we went through a phrase of taking garden gates

I've been stealing wage for almost 20 years now.

Don't know how I've got away with it for so long.

part of the gun sight off a scorpion tank. Coming back from town with a friend a little to worse for wear, there was a "join the army thing" going on in the park with a cheiftain and a scorpion parked up. So as you do we climb up and got in.... quite tricky to see in the dark but the sight seemed to have some kind of passive ir which was fun with the manual turret traverse.... suffice to say I took a memento

Both when about 15:

A "Danger Of Death, Keep Off" sign obtained by..... climbing the pylon it was attached to.

I tried to steal an abandoned Ford Escort, twice. It was lying in a ditch with a stream trickling through the bodywork. The first time I waited in it for my friend who was more car-savvy to arrive. I waited there 3 hours, in the dark, in a ditch, on it's side, while the snow gently fell through the broken windows. Eventually I sodded off.

The second time we decided to drive there. In a 1950's hand-start Lister Diesel dumper. First I was nearly shot waiting for my friend to wake up [we always snuck out at night for out misbehavin']. His father heard the dogs bark and stood on the balcony with his modified 5 shot narrow choke repeating shotgun, scanning for an intruder. He was a shoot-first ask questions later kinda guy so I was probably dribbling piss the whole time I hid behind their car. When my buddy finally managed to sneak out, we had to hand crank the dumper up the lane in gear to get off the property without getting shot. After cranking the thing a few hundred meters we started it and with just a single squeeze of the throttle and the momentum of the flywheel we shot up the lane. Pulling onto the road with bike lights held overhead, a flashing red red LED light and a 50W halogen in the bucket with a load of lifting tackle we set out to drive the 10km to drag the thing out of the ditch. After just a few KM we get a puncture and had to pull into the local garage for air. This attracted such strange looks that we thought they might call the police. We were stoned-as, uninsured, incorrectly lit, without licences and on the way to steal something. Point of fact, we were also without brakes!

Turning back we drove along towards Loe Beach again, and along the way we had to descend a hill. My buddy, thinking he wanted to get back home quick before we were arrested decided it would be a good idea to take the truck out of gear as it would roll faster than it would rev. Down the hill we went, building speed. As we approached the bottom of the hill we realised we were going waaay to fast to get around the corner, and it was at this moment we knew we'd ****ed up. On the outside of the corner was one of Cornwall's older and very attractive pubs..... we were heading on a path to demolish it.

At this point it became obvious that we had overlooked the importance of synchromesh.... we couldn't get the thing back into gear to decelerate! As I prepared to bail out of the vehicle my buddy put one foot against the gear stick and the other flat to the floor on the accelerator - at the very last moment we got it into gear, released the gofasterpedal and rounded the corner on two wheels [well, it felt like it].

At least I didn't spend the night sitting alone in the car again.....

I took a pee first thing this morning. 😆

A rather naughty associate stole a painting from an arty pub in Newcastle, he had overheard a conversation that it was worth a few grand.

So as the gig was happening downstairs he went up and nicked the painting.

Got out of the pub and realised he had no idea what to do with it, so swapped it for an 8th coke and a couple of spliffs.

The theft made it into the local paper, the painting still hangs on a dealer's wall.

15 years later talking to another school friend who is now a respected artist, he told me the story of one of his paintings being stolen from the pub!

My older brother managed to get one of these out of a local pub once 😯

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A harmonica from a garden centre about 3 years ago. Sorry.

A plastic Dalek from Woolies. Well we all did.

Oh then there was the huge sign off the side of the Dover Calais boat train which had to be folded up to stick in a rucsac. I still have the smaller steel sign "Voiture 30" off one of the carriages.

RAC signboard for the British Grand Prix 1981.

School gates went missing once on mischief night. They were heavy buggers.

EDIT - just remembered. This wasn't theft honest. I had an invitation through the local rugby club to a games night in the sergeant's mess at the local barracks. Suit and tie do, amazing buffet, great curry.

Several months later I put my suit on again and there in the inside pocket was a KFS set - regimental silver!! Oops.

I have a metal sign exactly like this one in my office at home.
It was stolen from the Falkland Islands. My mate brought me it back as he thought it would be a nice souvenir.

The Argentinians laid minefields which are now penguin sanctuarys as the penguins are too light to activate the mines and the cost of removal is prohibitive.

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Omg, live penguin mines! 😆

First present I gave to my then girlfriend (now wife) was a stolen rocking duck from a chalet in Morzine.

Pound a pint night as a skint student followed by wondering to the packed local greasy food establishment (Jakes in Plymouth). Walked in, guy behind the counter shouted what I planned on ordering so without any hesitation I took it and then received some change... Took me a while in the morning to figure out how my wallet had more money in it than I'd started the evening with.

Cardboard from my primary school stationery cupboard. I was into drawing (a lot) and it was nice smooth white card. I remember you could only use one side as the other had stuff printed on it. It may be been unused punch cards.
In the early 90s, my hockey team 'liberated' some broken wall mounted deer antlers and some dirty dinner plates from Formby Cricket club; all spirited away in the goalie's kit bag.

My criminal career is pretty lightweight. When I was very young (still at junior school, but old enough to walk home from school so maybe aged 10-ish?), under peer pressure I stole a scented pencil eraser from a corner shop. I spent the next two weeks papping myself that I'd get caught, every time the doorbell went I thought it was the police coming to arrest me.

Oh, I've thought of another, but to this day I hold that it was justified.

At high school, our CDT lessons consisted of the teacher taking a register, sodding off to the staff room to chain smoke for an hour, then coming back ten minutes before the end of class to tell us to tidy up. Only on rare occasions would he actually teach a lesson. Coming up to GCSE time I knew next to nothing about the subject and my project consisted of a rudimentary frame and a bunch of scribbled notes.

A couple of weeks before the exams, I suddenly realised I was surely going to fail. So I broke into the CDT lab, and stole one of each of the text books covering the subject (I think there was about eight in total), then crammed two years' of study into the next fortnight, it was the only subject I revised for.

I remember going back up to school to get my results like it was resterday. The receptionist read them out, one by one. "CDT Technology," she said, and then paused as she saw me wince. "Go on..." I said. "... B" she replied. "Bloody hell!" said I, and she burst out laughing.

2 come to mind
My mate JS and I borrowed a large loudspeaker from the waiting room of a small local line train station. He hid it under his bed and funnily enough his mum found it and we were made to replace it.
A Russian Star, from the gates of Nimon air base in the Czech republic. It was a nuclear equipped bomber base during the cold war and packed with cool stuff, so I nicked the gate emblem. Russians had done one a few years before so I wasnt at risk of being shot

The blue lights from the grill of a police riot van, 2 traffic lights, one which we dumped in a mates front garden and the other remains hidden behind a shed 15 years later. Several horns from breakers yard vehicles, wired in parallel they would make a fearsome noise and cause the lights of a metro to dim worryingly.

All the catseyes from about 200M of road along from my house, aged 12 - 13 ish. Poke a pair of pliers in the end, twist and pull the rubbery shiny goodness out.
Then put them in a heap, not quite knowing what to do with them...

And a fancy calligraphy pen set from the pharmacy when I was a few years older. My writing was/is crap, I must have thought that would improve it. 🙂

Went on a cruise a few years ago . They take a lot of pictures during your stay and display them for you to buy at stupid prices .

we took them all to the counter to choose which ones we wanted . Chose a couple and somehow , the other 20 ended up in my bag .

We paid full price for 2 and got a big discount on the others ........

I might/might not have pinched quite a few Duracell batteries from a supermarket because they were running a promotion to get a toy dinasaur.
Never did get it though.

I stole a cast iron frying pan from a public amenities site . It was for sale for £1 but nobody was about . I think my ex wife still has it 25 years on .