ETA: added the Hogfather film still I found a bit later.
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Isn’t finding NO Razor Blades slightly more unnerving? I mean, where have they all gone?
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Some friends of some friends bought a small, rural property called “Tanning Pits Cottage”. One day, while gardening, a hole opened up in the flowerbed… a very deep hole. They called in some professionals to investigate, and it turned out that, when the tanning pit went out of business, the pit itself was covered over with thick balks of timber, and the cottage had been built partly on the timbers and partly in the surrounding ground. A hundred or so years later, the timbers were rotting. Filling in the pit to stop the cottage falling in to the hole was an expensive process.
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Actually seems like a reasonable idea. Better to have them all in one place rather than scattered blade by blade through the garbage ready to cut people who dare go dumpster diving. Someone doing demolition is going to be wearing heavy gloves or else is used to cuts.
But we can all be glad that disposable syringes were not a thing back then.
oh yes - both the medicine cabinets in my house c1948 have razor blade slots. I’ve had one of the cabinets out of the wall, and there were no blades. This year I’m updating the other bathroom and will be pulling the cabinet - I’m expecting lots of blades in this one, it was next to the master bedroom.
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Lookit all those outside bones. Gross.
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What is this, a tanning pit for Giant Giraffes?
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About 10 years ago a small town near me had most of their sidewalks downtown ripped up and replaced with textured concrete in a “street scape” project to beautify the downtown area. When they got to the area where there was historically (back in the 1800s) a dentist shop, the unearthed an apothecary-type jar filled with pulled teeth. I guess the dentist must have just kept them in the jar whenever he pulled them, kind of like the tire shop keeps nails and other things that get stuck in tires. They also found a lot of old coins, old bottles, other historical trinkets when they pulled up the sidewalks, but hands down the giant jar of rotted teeth was the weirdest thing.
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I never knew about razor blade slots until someone posted about it here on BB, and now I know what the mysterious slots in the medicine cabinets of my old house are for. And I hope I never have to renovate my walls.
George Washington had teeth pulled from his enslaved people for at least one set of dentures. Remember, please, that ether, laughing gas, and novocaine were not used back then. Probably didn’t even let them have whiskey.
Can you imagine the odor that hundreds of rotten teeth could produce? Or the bacteria? Told y’all that Georgia is crazy.
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My south Georgia granny used to tell the story of {name redacted}, a noted local hellraiser, who kept the piece of his nose – which someone had once bitten off in a fight – in a pickle jar.
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We also need this here.
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I took out several five gallon buckets full (of rusted razor blades, not teeth!) when I rebuilt the upstairs bath. There were also the skeletal remains of some mice that had managed to blunder into the pile of razors.
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Our 1940s house in Austin TX had a slot in the medicine cabinet, and I found a pile of razor blades in the crawl space. I’m not sure how they came out, or how many were still in the bathroom wall.
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My housemate grew up in an old New England house on a parcel of land that’d been in the family for generations; when they had to do some work on the basement they discovered huge buried piles of oyster shells under the house. Turns out that it was the site of an old Revolutionary War era tavern; oysters and beer were pretty much their menu, and they’d just dump all the shells in a ditch every night.
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I think it was industrial sized tanning; whole herds of cows at a go.
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That sounds like a potentially nasty surprise.
Still disappointed that this is about leather and not nice brown giraffes 
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I hear that giraffes are cheapskates and use fake tan; hence the spottiness of their coverage.
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