What’s on your shopping list today? A wedding dress, a 1930s French newspaper and some vacuum-packed frogs? Better head to the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama then.
Everything on sale in this huge, sprawling shop-come-museum has been unpacked from suitcases and bags lost by passengers on commercial airlines. The result is a quirky retail adventure full of treasures and surprises for the bargain-hunter – or just the downright curious.
As you’d expect there are mountains of clothes, glasses, books, cameras, laptops, golf clubs and snowboards, but there is also an astonishing amount of peculiar things. Since the Owens family opened the store in 1970, items on display have included: a suit of armour, a zebra skin with ears and tail, some McDonalds golden arches signs, a live rattlesnake, an engraved headstone and Hoggle, a puppet created for the film Labyrinth.
“People will pack anything that fits in a bag – alive, dead, stinky or illegal,” says Mr. Owens.
Did I mention the shrunken heads?
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