Inside the giant shop where you can buy millions of items lost on planes
Countless sex toys, shrunken heads and a live rattlesnake are just some of the weird and wonderful things found in bags left at major airports.
Last summer travel hubs across the world descended into chaos as demand for air travel following coronavirus lockdowns outstripped the capacity of cutback staffing numbers, leading to huge queues, delays and many lost items of luggage.
The number of missing bags reached a 10-year high in the UK, where 26 million were lost and concourses were given over to store great mounds of items separated from their owners.
In the US, millions of bags whose owners can't be tracked down after three months are sent to Unclaimed Baggage - an absolutely vast, multi-warehouse shop filled with big bargains and weird trinkets.
A massive bag sign hangs over the shop's car park (Daily Mirror)Like all things in the state of Alabama the shop is massive.
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In fact, it is much quicker to list what you can't buy at Unclaimed Baggage, given the shop pretty much sells it all.
"We don't sell anything that has had skin to skin contact," explains public relations manager Sonni Hood, who welcomed the Mirror to her hometown with all the warm hospitality the South is so famous for.
That means sex toys are thrown away, as are diaries, human ashes, used make-up and guns.
"We go through everything to ensure there's nothing harmful, dangerous or too embarrassing inside," Sonni continues.
"Thrifts stores are full of things people want to throw away, but these are things people liked so much they wanted to take away with them on holiday."
Inside one of the multiple warehouses which make up the shop (Daily Mirror)When you turn off the dual-carriageway into the shop's several hundred capacity big car park an enormous orange sign hangs above you - making it very clear you've not travelled to the wrong Scottsboro.
For a "small town" of 15,000 people (small in the American sense only, given it stretches out across miles and miles of parking lots and mega-stores), Scottsboro is blessed with a major tourist attraction that draws in more than a million visitors every year.
What they're coming for is the opportunity to score themselves a huge bargain, whether that be a massively cut price designer coat, an as-new iPhone for a fraction of the RRP, or a whole new set of golf clubs.
Sonni Hood and her cousin Adam outside the shopGiven the store has contracts with all the major US airlines and brings 7,000 new items onto the floor each day - as well as 5,000 more onto the website - one of those things is bound to be up your street if you look hard enough.
When I visited a beautiful Burberry coat for just $70 jumped out at me from one of the hangers, as did a $1.50 (£1.20) Baggu lunch box, which typically retails at £50 and made a perfect holiday gift for my girlfriend.
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Unclaimed Baggage goes even fancier still, having flogged one particularly nice Rolex watch for £50,000 and sold on two lost Birkins - infamously hard-to-get-hold-of fashion bags that sell for tens of thousands of pounds.
It also deals in the weird.
Why not take a moment to pose against the iconic truck which helped start the whole venture off?A small museum has recently been set up in the shop displaying some of the odder things that have been unearthed by Unclaimed Baggage's team of hardworking luggage checkers.
Pride of place among them is Hoggle, the actual puppet that starred in the David Bowie hit film Labyrinth, who was found rotting and partially faceless in a suitcase.
Happily for the sake of those with an aversion to decomposing goblin-looking creatures from weird 80s films, he is now restored back to his former splendour and safely tucked away in a glass case.
Hoggle sits just next to a signed Michael Jordan basketball, purses made out of dried cane toads, suits of armour and a rattle snake.
That one is a model, there to represent a real venomous critter an unfortunate member of staff discovered slithering around a bag.
Hoggle the puppet turned up at Unclaimed Baggage (Daily Mirror)"We think maybe in transit it snuck in there. We did not sell the live rattlesnake," Sonni explained. "It was released. We have also found real shrunken heads."
Remarkably, given the enormous popularity of Unclaimed Baggage, it is the only place doing what it does in the whole of the US - something Sonni puts down to the relationships it's belt up with airlines, and how long they've had to become the place to go.
It all began in 1970 when founder Doyle Owens borrowed a pick-up truck and $300, drove up to Washington, D.C. and bought 300 lost bags.
When back in Scottsboro the go-getter realised he was on to something when the trestle tables he'd set up in his garden were empty after just one day.
It is clear not everyone agrees with the idea of flogging once loved and now tragically lost items.
Later on in the day a trip to Scottsboro's main street takes me to Paynes, a class American milkshake diner where a server tells me "a lot of people round here don't think what they do is right".
Something about the wrack of once treasured wedding dresses, presumably once destined for the happiest day of someone's life before they got lost on the way to the wedding and now on sale for around $40, does make the heart pang a little.
Some more of the weird and wonderful items found in the museum (Daily Mirror)Hometown girl Sonni has clearly heard a lot of the criticism before and is quick to push back against it.
Just 0.03% of all checked bags are deemed 'orphaned' after extensive searches, she explains. Of the ones Unclaimed Baggage then buys, one is donated for each that it sells.
"We're trying to give a new life to each item that we find inside," Sonni said.
While many people are disappointed to learn the shop isn't there to reunite passengers with their lost bags, it has happened before by chance.
One man dropped by the yearly skiwear sale to pick up some boots for his wife, only to bring them home and discover her name written on the tongue, scrawled on before she'd lost them years before.
Another big misconception is that customers are buying the bags unseen, like the reality show Storage Wars.
Although that can't happen due to the store's commitment to cleaning, sorting and cleansing bags of certain goods (crystal meth and cocaine being other items that occasionally pop up), at 2pm each day one lucky customer does get to enjoy this experience.
When I am there one young girl is chosen from the crowd crack open a pre-checked and then reclosed case. She positively beams with delight as she lifts each item aloft, carefully and lovingly popping them down in either the recycle, donate or sell piles.
To find out more and visit the online shop, go to unclaimedbaggage.com. The shop's nearest airport in Huntsville, which can be reached via daily flights from London via Atlanta with British Airways and American Airlines.
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