Home safes: they aren’t just for jewelry anymore. Or cash. Or small pets (note: PLEASE DON’T PUT YOUR PETS IN A SAFE). People are finding more and more…let’s say, “creative” uses for them. Here’s a list of the top five weirdest things we’ve heard of people keeping in their home safes.*

5. Nothing. Seriously—just nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what one user on Yahoo Answers suggests, anyway: setting up an inexpensive home safe in a particularly obvious part of your dwelling, to serve as a decoy for any would be robbers. The thieves grab the safe, and leave your valuables—hidden and scattered in various other parts of your house—behind. …Of course, this only works for lazy robbers who just go straight for the safe and don’t bother looking for anything else. We make no guarantees that this is typically the case.

4. Guns. This actually makes sense, if you think about it—fire and guns don’t go well together, and in the case of a home emergency, you wouldn’t want the additional concern of firearms…well, firing off. A number of gun collectors buy lock boxes that are specifically made to hold their preciouses, although in a pinch, many standard home safes will work just as well. But do your research before putting any money down; you wouldn’t want to end up with a safe that takes in enough heat to set off your ammo.

3. Beanie Baby Cards and Arrowheads. As one poster on Arrowheadology puts it, “I’m getting nervous [about] putting so many ‘nicer’ points up on the wall in display cases,” for fear that someone might be tempted to pilfer them. Everyone has a collection, and everyone has certain pieces from that collection that are worth more than others. It’s not the worst idea in the world to try to secure them. (The Beanie Baby cards idea comes from personal experience. My wife keeps a collection of them—not the dolls themselves, mind you, but trading cards with pictures of the dolls—inside one of our own home safes.)

2. A “Prepper” Kit. This handy tip comes to us from the writers of Modern Survival Blog, who suggest that home safes are the perfect place to keep items such as band-aids, bottles of water, batteries, and other things you’d need to keep on hand in order to ensure your survival during the apocalypse. Just make sure it’s not an electronic safe dependent on a wall outlet—if most of the planet’s been destroyed by freak weather storms, social unrest or the living dead, there’s a good chance that your power is out, too.

1. Other, Smaller Safes. I swear I’m not making this up. I have a friend who, inside her safe—keeps another safe, with its own, separate combination. Inside that safe is a smaller box with a lock and key, and inside that is her most valuable jewelry: an heirloom diamond bracelet from her grandmother. It sounds like a goofy Matryoshka doll-style approach to home security, but it works; it would take quite an enterprising thief to get through all those layers of protection.

* Or, as it turns out, freezers. While researching this article, I also found a comments thread on biblemoneymatters.com which suggest that, if you don’t have any home safes, you should consider putting all your most important documents “in a ziplock bag in your freezer.” This is perhaps ill-advised, as 1) most freezers do not, by default, have locks, and 2) if your power goes out, your food-stuffs might melt all over the title to your car.

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