Finding America In
Unclaimed Baggage
Unclaimed Baggage in Scottsboro, Ala.,
should be on everybody’s bucket list.
I have family in Huntsville, Ala. Huntsville is an absolutely delightful place. The entire city is blanketed underneath a thin patina of legit rocket scientists. You can tell you are getting close when the towering Saturn V at the Space and Rocket Center gradually peeks over the horizon.
Huntsville’s U.S. Veterans Memorial Museum is an obscure, out-of-the-way place that is absolutely fantastic. Its collection of small arms and armored vehicles is Smithsonian-grade, yet few have even heard of it. If you’re passing through, it is worth a couple of hours. And then, there’s Unclaimed Baggage.
Located about an hour east of Huntsville in Scottsboro, Ala., Unclaimed Baggage is neither conveniently located nor really on the way to anyplace. It is, however, definitely worth the trip. Unclaimed Baggage is a national treasure.
Folks come from literally all over the world to paw
over stuff people have abandoned on airplanes.
The selection is truly world-class.
Believe it or not, Unclaimed Baggage has a booming business selling used swimwear.
Apparently a lot of people leave their Bibles on airplanes.
Origin Story
Unclaimed Baggage began back in 1970 with one man and a dream. Doyle Owens borrowed a pickup truck and $300 before striking out for Washington, D.C. with an idea. There, he bought his first load of unclaimed luggage from Trailways Bus Lines and sold the contents back home off of card tables in an old, rented house. In so doing, he birthed an empire. In short order, Owens quit his job selling insurance and threw himself into hawking other people’s abandoned stuff.
At first, Owens, his wife and their two sons processed abandoned luggage for sale on Wednesdays and Saturdays. His first large-scale contract was with Eastern Airlines. As word of this quirky little enterprise grew, Owens cemented connections with all the domestic carriers. Over time, Unclaimed Baggage became the country’s sole purveyor of lost luggage.
In 1981, Owens held his first formal Ski Sale. His inventory of winter sports equipment was stacking up, so he put the word out and cut his prices. Nowadays, on the first Saturday of every November, tiny little Scottsboro is crawling with folks camping out in his parking lot to be first in the door and get their mitts on other people’s cut-rate abandoned ski equipment.
In 1995, Owens’ son and his wife purchased the business, expanding it to cover more than a city block. Along the way, they opened an Unclaimed Baggage museum to showcase the weirdest stuff collected from other folks’ luggage over the decades. The Museum of Found Treasures has become a tourist destination in its own right.
The Museum of Found Treasures includes a suit of Roman legionnaire’s armor, a stuffed rattlesnake, some shrunken human heads, and a life-size audio-animatronic troll from the 1986 David Bowie movie Labyrinth. How anybody could forget and leave a five-foot robotic monster in an airport escapes me, but imagining the stories behind this stuff is half the fun.
Word spread of this quirky place in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, and folks flowed in. Today, Unclaimed Baggage hosts more than a million visitors per year. They process thousands of new items each week that are sorted, cleaned and repurposed for sale both in their store and online. Their inventory is strange beyond description. The really weird bit is that it is simply a reflection of all of us.
How many times have you gotten home after a long
flight and realized you left your stuffed rattlesnake back
on the airplane. We’ve all been there.
I am at a loss as to how it is physically possible to misplace
a five-foot animated monster.
A Few Random Examples …
There are racks of skimpy women’s swimwear and similar delicates … that, apparently, ladies are literally waiting in line to purchase. There were a couple of $4,000 designer purses alongside a full orthodox Jewish outfit, including the iconic black hat. The designer dresses would be adequate to outfit a battalion’s worth of prom queens. Tragically, there was an entire rack devoted to wedding gowns.
Hats, boots, sunglasses, jackets, coats, pants and shorts pack the main space. Expensive jewelry resides in big glass display cases. There is an entire wing that is nothing but electronics — abandoned laptops, tablets, headsets and phones. Sports equipment aplenty lines one wall along with, naturally, a giant inflatable unicorn.
The deeper you get into the store, the stranger it gets. Once you navigate the labyrinthine space to the metaphorical basement, you find unopened pharmaceuticals, uncategorizable trinkets, and auto parts. Somebody had abandoned a car axle. I saw a woman speaking German purchase a deer antler. The main showroom is neat and tidy as might be any well-maintained American department store. The subterranean bit where I found the car parts seemed like it also might have played home to trolls.
Need an air purifier, a set of free weights or a vacuum cleaner? Some lunatic has apparently abandoned all of that on an airplane. Nowadays, thanks to the miracle of the internet, you need not even trek to Scottsboro to metaphorically paw over this stuff. Thousands of items are for sale on the Unclaimed Baggage website. However, you’re missing a treat if you don’t lay your eyeballs on this place yourself.
Need some slightly used hair-growth medication?
Unclaimed Baggage is one-stop shopping.
A nice German lady seemed very excited
to have landed this treasure.
This is apparently a $4,000 handbag. Unclaimed
Baggage had two of them for sale.
Personal Conquests
Before we put Unclaimed Baggage to our stern, I landed a GI Multicam combat uniform, two pairs of sunglasses, a big rubber exercise ball and a pair of unused beach shoes still hooked together by the little plastic thingy. On our way out of town, we stopped by a simply magnificent local restaurant called Fifty Taters for some epic southern food. My serum cholesterol jumped ten points just walking through the door, but it was worth it.
Folks gripe about America quite a lot these days. The implication is that other places are somehow better. Europe has culture, Africa has terrifying animals, Asia has history stretching back millennia, and the Middle East has more violence than it can manage. However, only we have Unclaimed Baggage. It’s a big city block-sized building full of America.
