The Thrift Store Where You Can Buy People’s Unclaimed Luggage

From Jim Henson muppets to shrunken heads, an enterprising Alabama business sells the items people forget and leave behind while traveling. 

By Riley Blake

Oh the weird and random things you’ll find at the Unclaimed Baggage Center. (Art by Trav)

Have you ever gotten on a plane, arrived at your destination, and simply strolled out of the airport without any of your baggage? Yeah, me neither. 

I don’t know who would but apparently there are enough people leaving behind luggage to keep a 40,000 square-foot thrift store afloat in Scottsboro, Alabama. 

With less than 15,000 people and the closest Starbucks an hour away, Scottsboro is not the most fast-paced of places. But thanks to the Unclaimed Baggage Center, which sells items leftover from airports, this podunk town has become an unwitting tourist destination, “hosting over a million visitors a year from every state and over 40 foreign countries” just because of this one store, according to their website. 

Just by name itself, it’s clear the Unclaimed Baggage Center isn’t your run-of-the-mill thrift shop. While many thrift stores across the U.S. and beyond profit from selling people’s intentionally donated belongings, the Unclaimed Baggage Center sells stuff that was never intended to be given away in the first place. Most of it was simply just left behind.

Credit: Unclaimed Baggage Center

After 90 days at most airports, if no claim form has been submitted reporting the loss and the airline has been unable to locate the owner, the contents of whatever luggage has been left behind are either donated to charity, sold at auction through the airline, or, more often than not for U.S. airlines, sold in bulk to the Unclaimed Baggage Center. 

They purchase the suitcases sight unseen, meaning they have no idea what’s inside of them or what will eventually end up on the shelves of their store. 

Stuff that isn’t deemed worthy of being sold is either chucked, or, depending on the item — if, say, it’s an iPad, a pair of glasses, or a wheelchair — donated to a charity that has a use for them. 

The Unclaimed Baggage Center began 49 years ago as the brainchild of Alabama native and insurance salesman, Doyle Owens. Using a $300 loan and a borrowed pickup truck, Owens headed to Washington, D.C., after a friend working for Trailways bus company tipped him off about their collection of lost luggage, the Seattle Times reports. 

With help from his wife, Mollie Sue, the two rented a home in Scottsboro as a location for shoppers to buy unclaimed luggage. Setting up a few tables, the Owens’ sold out their first day. By 1978, the couple had turned selling forgotten items into an incorporated business.

Owens, who passed away in 2016 of natural causes, remarked of his odd business in 1978, saying, “We never know what’s in those suitcases until we open them. It’s like buying a pig in a poke.” 

In the nearly 50 years since it opened, the Unclaimed Baggage Center has expanded well beyond its original truckload of Trailways baggage to include items from airline carriers. They reportedly receive more than 7,000 new items a day.

Functionally, the Unclaimed Baggage Center is a thrift shop in the same vein as a Goodwill or Salvation Army. Prices tend to be low and you can find pretty much anything there, including clothing, electronics, jewelry, and shoes. 

Seriously, who forgets their suitcase and never remembers to ask for it back?

But, as part of a unique daily celebration, the Unclaimed Baggage Center also holds an opening event each day where one customer is selected to take on the role of an employee and open a suitcase of lost luggage. To insure that the lucky customer doesn’t end up coming across 50 vacuum-packed frogs — which has actually happened before — each bag’s contents are sterilized and repacked prior to their public reveal. 

As such, the Unclaimed Baggage Center is "one of the largest cleaning and dry-cleaning facilities in Alabama," Brenda Cantrell, a spokeswoman for the center, told ABC News.

There’s even a portion of their website dedicated to the most memorable oddities employees have unwittingly stumbled across. Top on the list are a live rattlesnake, a shrunken head, a full suit of armor, and a $60,000 platinum Rolex.

Just to add to the bizarre nature of the Unclaimed Baggage Center, it has its own café, as well as an attached museum showing some of the more memorable strange items they’ve come across. There, you’ll find things such as “Hoggle,” an original puppet from Jim Henson’s 1986 David Bowie-starring film, Labyrinth. 

You’ll also find a renaissance period art piece of John the Baptist’s severed head, a cured zebra skin, and an Eskimo face carved into the spine-marrow of a vertebra taken from a humpback whale. How anyone could forget items like these in their suitcases is hard to believe, and yet, it happens. 

While the Unclaimed Baggage Center is first and foremost a business that sells things, it’s clear that not all who come here are actually in the market to buy something. 

“Even if you don't purchase anything, it is still an adventure going through all the misfit items someone left behind,” an Indianapolis woman named Mariam wrote in a 2014 Yelp review. 

Her favorite unclaimed luggage purchase to date? A Tibetan dung-chen horn.  

“I personally carried two back to the U.S. from Bhutan,” she wrote. “And I have absolutely no idea how you leave behind a horn that's taller than most adults.”

The mystery behind how these things ended up unclaimed and forgotten in the first place, combined with the fact that you never know what you’ll find — be it a 40.95-carat natural emerald or a Las Vegas showgirl costume — are likely the reasons why this thrift store in the middle-of-nowhere has lasted all of these decades. 

And, so long as travelers continue forgetting their luggage and leaving it behind, the unique thrift store will continue to exist, one unclaimed bag at a time.

RILEY BLAKE IS AN OREGON-BASED WRITER. IF HE'S NOT WRITING, HE CAN BE FOUND PAINTING WITH ABSURD AMOUNTS OF COLOR, SNOWBOARDING, COOKING STRANGE MEATS, OR LOVING ON HIS ADORABLE CAT.

Trav is an artist who lives in the U.K. near the beach. He enjoys swimming naked in cold water and skateboarding a lot.

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