When you drive by a storage unit, nothing seems out of the ordinary. You see corridors of green or blue garage doors, all closed and hiding their contents. Have you ever wondered what people keep in their storage units?
Most storage units are full of usual stuff—furniture, bins of decorations or old photos, and so on. But some storage units have a different story to tell. Here are ten of the strangest things found in a storage unit.
Vehicles
When storage companies have abandoned storage units, they usually either auction off the entire container, or auction the individual items found inside. People bid for these storage units, hoping the contents will include some valuable items.
One man in Long Island lucked out when he bought a storage unit for $100 and found the famous Lotus submarine car from the 1977 James Bond film. The vehicle was worth about $1- $1.5 million dollars.
Another man in Kansas found a 1966 Shelby Mustang in near-perfect condition. Finding rare vehicles in storage units is not unheard of. Talk about a great return on your investment!
Cash
Speaking of great investment returns, a man in San Jose bought an abandoned storage unit for $1,100. Inside he found more than half a million dollars’ worth of cash, rare coins, and silver and gold bricks. The fortune was stored in a plastic Rubbermaid container.
Used Diapers
A lot of parents preserve memories from their children’s lives. You may have heard about parents who keep strange things like locks of hair from their child’s first haircut, or school art projects nobody is ever going to look at again.
Those items are quite normal and acceptable, especially when compared to the findings in one storage unit—a bad of used diapers. To top it off, the unit was not air-conditioned.
A Used Toilet Collection
Thankfully the bidder on this empty unit only spent $5. There really aren’t any more words to describe this finding. Maybe just one more: gross.
A Mannequin
A mannequin certainly isn’t the weirdest thing to find in a storage unit, but don’t be too quick to judge. This mannequin was splattered in red paint and had multiple stab wounds. Underneath the mannequin was a kitchen knife—also splattered with paint.
Ghosts
When you have units full of family heirlooms and past memories, it’s not surprising to hear stories of ghosts and supernatural occurrences. There have been many reports of haunted units and facilities from storage unit owners, facility managers, and employees. Don’t believe me? Just type “haunted storage units” into any search engine.
A Barbecue
There’s nothing strange about finding a barbeque in a storage unit, right? What if the barbecue was made from a metal coffin? A coffin-turned-meat-smoker contained about twenty pounds of brisket.
Pets
All kinds of pets have been found in storage units. Usually the pets haven’t survived the dark, cold, and starvation they experience when left in a garage. Here’s a list of only some of the pets found in abandoned units:
- Petrified fish in their tank
- Two dried-out husks that used to be iguanas
- A live python (it had been lying dormant for who knows how long)
- Live tarantulas (they appeared to have survived by eating the other tarantulas in the enclosure)
- Dead pythons. 32 of them!
Body Parts
If you were expecting to hear about body parts found in storage units, you won’t be disappointed to know that body parts indeed have shown up in abandoned storage facilities.
Abandoned unit buyers have reported finding everything from collections of baby teeth to fully preserved brains and other organs.
People
There really seems to be no limit to the kind of things you can find in a storage unit. Even people—both dead and alive—have been found in these units.
In Clearwater, Florida, the facility manager found a blue coffin in one of the units. The coffin held the fully embalmed remains of a woman born in 1900. She had died in 1995, and had been in the storage unit for the past 17 years.
One vice president of a storage unit in St. Petersburg has even found people trying to live in their storage unit.
Whether you live in Washington, DC, or Victoria, BC, storage units seem to hold so much potential mystery. According to information from storage unit companies, nobody has access to a unit except the owner…unless the owner doesn’t pay the rent and his items get marked for auction.
What can we learn from this list of strange items? Either 1) don’t use a storage unit to store your weird collections, or 2) if you do use a storage unit, pay your rent! For more interesting stories like this one, check out Top 10 Jungle.