You now know:
...some previous homeowner was a DIY electrician.
...they screwed up on the wiring to the timer for the security flood lamps in the back pasture.
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Now you have to wonder “what else did they screw up on?”...
Actually, the electrician said the way the light timer was wired isn’t wrong, it’s just not used/recommended any more. They wired the ground to neutral, which is fine if you know that downstream neutral is ground. For my purposes, it’s a case of picking the wrong damn cable.
What with what we’ve seen in the houses we’ve looked at and purchased, we just operate on the assumption now that whatever we’re looking at was screwed up somehow.