Renovating is a pain in the ass, but it has to be done: That sex dungeon isn't just suddenly going to appear in your basement. It takes hard work and commitment to properly mount a humpswing. Besides, it's not all bad: Sometimes you find some neat stuff when you're working. Maybe you pull up that carpet and find some nice hardwood floors, or knock down that wall and uncover a cache of filthy old Playboy magazines, or look behind the couch and find a million-dollar painting, or clear out the attic and find unrelenting nightmares that will pursue you to your grave ...

5 A 400-Year-Old Severed Head

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Cleaning out the attic is like banging a geriatric: It's dank, it's dusty, and there are probably spiders hiding somewhere in there. But as with all unpleasant chores, the shock fades with exposure. Stay in there a few hours and you'll no longer care when you move those curtains aside and find the corpse of a rat king (we're, uh ... we're no longer talking about boning geriatrics here). Then, just as you get into a no-longer-caring-if-spiders-touch-my-hands attic-cleaning groove, you find something a bit unexpected:

The Guardian

"Oh no, Avery! I just thought you were really good at hide-and-seek."

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Stephane Gabet, a TV production company journalist, went fishing around the attic of retired tax collector Jacques Bellanger and pulled out the 400-year-old head of a French monarch. That's right: Where us common folk might stash the occasional broken vacuum cleaner or embarrassing Beanie Baby collection up our house's shame-hole, Jacques haphazardly stowed and then promptly forgot about the head of King Henry IV, who ruled France until his death in 1610.

As unbelievable as that sounds, scientists were able to verify that the skull belonged to King Henry IV based on a dark lesion above the right nostril, a healed bone fracture above the jaw that matched a stab wound he received during an assassination attempt in 1594, and the fact that the entire skull was wrapped in a breakfast croissant and an indefinable air of haughtiness.

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"Why did I eat the croissant?"

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The entire timeline of how the head wound up in Bellanger's attic is still a partial mystery. However, we do know that 183 years after the king's assassination, royalist-hating revolutionaries (or perhaps just thorough, if not very punctual, zombie hunters) ransacked Henry's grave and lopped his head clean off. Then, in the early 1900s, a French couple purchased the head from an auction house. Finally, in 1955, Bellanger bought it from the couple for 5,000 francs ... aaand proceeded to chuck it into his attic behind a broken chair and a box of old electric bills.