Picking up my New Vegas game again, I went back to Nipton after chatting with the rangers at the Mojave Outpost. I went into the house with the "caged Bark Scorpions" and found a room with a locked cabinet, a locked footlocker, and one other locked container. After I picked them, nothing was inside of them. None of them!

There were some unlocked containers that had loot like a fridge, stove, and footlocker but the locked ones had nothing.

Is this a bug or just a bad set of "loot rolls?"

The only mods I am using are:

YUP Patch

NVSE with 4GB patch

ENB vanilla

Novac Campfire

Real Smokes

Goodsprings shack

and a few (4) texture mods like Poco Bueno.

I recall some loot containers that were locked to have utter crap or nothing in them. To be honest, I think it is just random bad luck.

That is what I fear, too

You have to look at the context of the area. I'm guessing you picked up that note from the metal cabinet in the kitchen? The person who lived in that home was hopelessly paranoid, it makes perfect sense that he/she would have the containers locked up tight. As for finding stuff in them, that's just determined by the random value of the levelled lists. Aside from being locked they're just ordinary containers, and there's always a chance that you'll find nothing in them.

Gun runners has one for sure, a locker in the back. As i recall there was one or two like that in that house in Nipton, with the essence lmao. Always thought that was wierd, but i cannot remember an ammo container ever being empty, until after me of course.

Ahhh... that makes sense as one of the containers was a fridge!

In that note, the person mentions that they thought other people were trying to steal their "vital essence" Or their soul in other words. They were clearly the tin foil hat type of paranoid, so all those locked containers make perfect sense, even if there was nothing in them. Though that's not always the case. It all depends on the random factor of the levelled lists used for them.