Interesting thread! I've had many such feelings about things and places over the years. Not so much in recent times, but it still happens. Years ago, I was killing time in a big second hand store near our home at the time. I came across a vinyl covered case that looked interesting, and the price was $6 or something. I use things like that for tool storage, the odd project enclosure, and such. Turned out it had housed a child's phonograph, but all the metal parts were long gone, and someone had carefully lined the inside with some kind of plastic tape. They had gone around all the wood blocks glued in there to fasten the turntable to. There was a drawing of a clown's face on the inside cover. I did an image search on the web and found the model, along with other versions. Clowns don't bother me; I get why some people have strong negative reactions to them, but I've never had any kind of emotional investment either way.
As soon as I got the thing home, I noticed a strong energy about it, as though someone did not want me messing with it. Like maybe it didn't belong in the thrift store, and I was meddling somehow with my ideas for remodeling it into something useful. I stuck it on a shelf in the basement, sort of a very low budget version of that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every now and then, I'd be looking for a case for one thing or another, and see it and think maybe I could use that for whatever I was making. The "aura" would assert itself, and I would decide I didn't want to deal with it.
Eventually we moved to another town, and I took loads of stuff to various thrift stores, much of it in a catch-and-release way by taking it back where I got it. The phonograph case went back to the store where I'd found it a couple of years earlier. This seemed to make it happy.
I have a chunk of concrete from the Berlin Wall, with a fancy certificate full of proclamations in German, ribbons glued on, official looking stamps, and a photograph of a section of the wall. It was given to me by a family member who was stationed in Germany at the time the wall was demolished. It doesn't seem to hold any sort of charge for me. It could, of course, be a lump of debris from a sidewalk in front of a café in Munich that was being remodeled, but my relative said she looked around for a legitimate piece of the abomination. I remember for what seemed like two weeks I'd come home from work and turn on the TV to watch Germans around my age partying on top of the wall. Very, very distant cousins, I'm sure, celebrating the end of that particular bit of stupidity. That's the association for me with that chunk of concrete, a victory over fear and loathing.