Nitroglycerin

I recently moved to a new apartment, and I keep remembering things that were left behind. Today I wanted to pick up some stuff, and as the old place is on my walk from the bus stop to my current home, I figured I drop by. The street ended up being blocked off, and there were police cars, a fire truck, a paramedic van and even a bomb squad. Turns out 12oz of nitroglycerin had been found in the basement when the new girls were cleaning.

Nitroglycerin. As in the stuff dynamite is made of.

When nitroglycerin crystalizes, the slightest movement can cause it to explode. Luckily this bottle hadn't fully crystalized (though it had started crystalizing). In its partially-crystalized state, if it had been knocked and the bottle cracked, though, it could have blown the whole house up.

While we're still not sure how it got to be there in the first place, I have my theories that it came from the geologist grad students that lived there before me. At any rate, nobody got hurt, and I get to tell a great story about how I could have died.

UPDATE: I talked to my officemate Micah (who lived at the apartment before me). Neither he nor the roommate he talked to had any idea it was there, and it's highly unlikely that the third roommate did either. Which means it was probably there before even they moved in (a few years ago!).