Atlas Obscura

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars (travel audio):
And I am standing in the Galapagos in front of a congress of marine iguanas. They’re piled on top of each other. Occasionally, if you can make it through the sound of the waves and the wind, you can hear them spitting out salt water from their nose. They just sneeze on each other and lay on each other and they seem like they enjoy life pretty well.

Roman Mars:
Last week I was in the Galapagos islands, which for me is the ultimate travel destination.

Roman Mars (travel audio):
I’m on Fernandina Islands, where the marine iguanas are very plentiful. Also, the flightless cormorant, who keeps his wings open while he’s just standing on a lava rock. It’s really silly looking.

Roman Mars:
My family hiked and swam with these astounding creatures in this completely foreign landscape.

Roman Mars (travel audio):
The ground is black lava. The iguanas just match the lava. You can almost step on them. They don’t move, since there are no predators. They have no fear of humans at all and you can just walk right up to them. You don’t touch them but you can just walk real close to them and take a picture. And sometimes they sneeze on you.

Roman Mars:
It was life changing. I’ll probably end up doing this story about it someday, despite myself, but fundamentally I was there just to be there and it was amazing. For 40 years of my life, I could barely conceive of doing this kind of trip, but I have that privilege now. And after leaving the islands, my first thought was I have to do this more often. Experiencing as much of the world as possible is something that I need to place a little closer to the foundation of my hierarchy of needs. This is something the team at Atlas Obscura figured out a long time ago. Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world’s hidden wonders. They write books, they host experiences, they lead excursions and they have a podcast that I really enjoy. So in order for me to have enough time to take my life-changing trip, we are presenting a couple of life changing trips from Atlas Obscura that capture their adventurous and curious spirit.

Roman Mars:
This is the Beechey Island Graves.

——————————————

Dylan Thuras:
Way, way up north, far in the Canadian Arctic, there’s a lonely windswept island.

John Stewart:
No trees, nothing, just pebble beach backed by mountains.

Dylan Thuras:
Even in summer, it can be well below freezing on this island. Sheets of ice float by in the bay, a crisp wind whips across its pebble beaches and there are no signs of life. Out here, standing alone on this rock are four simple wooden headstones. These graves are the remnants of one of the most infamous Arctic expeditions of all time.

Dylan Thuras:
I’m Dylan Thuras and this is Atlas Obscura, an exploration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wonderous places. In this two-part series, we are going to venture out towards those frozen graves, following two groups of adventurers separated by more than 170 years, and we’ll play witness to the disasters that befell them all.

John Stewart:
Yeah. Yeah, so I had a great time.

ARCHIVAL TAPE:
Iron men in wooden ships, a description of heroism never more apt as when applied to those who brave the Arctic.

Dylan Thuras:
I have to admit that I am a sucker for true life adventure stories, the extraordinary tales, the human spirit against unforgiving odds. I kind of eat it up. My bookshelf is embarrassingly full of these kinds of stories. And included among them, of course, is one of the classics, one of the epics, the story of the Franklin expedition.

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[SIR JOHN FRANKLIN WAS, AT 59, A VETERAN OF TWO OVERLAND EXPEDITIONS IN THE NORTH AMERICAN ARCTIC.]

Dylan Thuras:
On the morning of May 19th, 1845, captain John Franklin said goodbye to his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, and stepped aboard his new ship. This was the beginning of his fourth Arctic mission. He already had a reputation for being tough. His nickname in the press was the man who ate his boots because during one of his previous Arctic expeditions, he and his crew had survived by eating lichen and their own boot leather. At nearly 60 years old, Franklin was embarking on one more mission, one that he knew would define him. Franklin was attempting the Victorian era’s version of the moonshot. Franklin was going to try and chart the Northwest Passage.

Dylan Thuras:
Finding the passage was all about money, about trade. European countries had wanted a faster route to Asia so that they could do more exporting and the expeditions to find this trade route date back to 1497. The voyage meant sailing up and over North America through the incredible expanse of Arctic ice, in order to ultimately reach the other side, the Pacific Ocean. And even as the route lost its luster as an economic possibility, the British stayed obsessed with charting it. By the time Franklin set sail in 1845, many had tried, failed, and died.

Dylan Thuras:
The two ships on the expedition, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror had been reinforced to withstand the ice and they were being sailed by an experienced crew of 134 sailors and officers. They even had a monkey on board named Jacko, but most of all, they had lots and lots of food, 36,000 pounds of biscuits, 32,000 pounds of salted beef, 8,000 tins of preserved meat. They had a thousand pounds of just mustard and 3,600 gallons of booze. It was enough food to last every sailor for three years.

Dylan Thuras:
When did you decide to go to the Arctic? What incited you to want to take that trip?

John Stewart:
You know, I have no idea other than I like adventures. I was interested in the Franklin expedition.

Dylan Thuras:
That’s John Stewart and in 2018, 173 years after the Franklin expedition sailed, John Stewart of Thunder Bay, Canada climbed onto a little Zodiac – kind of inflatable boat – and motored out to a large cruise ship floating in the Arctic Bay. At 91 years old, John Stewart was almost certainly the oldest passenger on the expedition.

John Stewart:
Yeah. Well, I’m not one to go and sit in the beach down in Florida. I like to follow history if I can.

Dylan Thuras:
The ship John was boarding was called the Akademik Ioffe and it was part of an Arctic tourist cruise run by a company called One Ocean and sailed by an experienced Russian crew. The purpose of the cruise to follow in Franklin’s footsteps, to bring Franklin-obsessed travelers one step closer to the object of their historical fascination. And the ship, the Ioffe, was carrying a total of 126 people just about the size of Franklin’s original crew. Although, to be fair, the crew’s expedition that John Stewart was on was a little bit cushier than Franklin’s. Meals were served via a buffet line and there were optional yoga classes. John had opted for the cheaper shared bunk option.

John Stewart:
So I shared a cabin with somebody I had never met before and I was shown to my cabin and I was the only person there, but eventually this young good-looking spry fellow stepped in and… “I’m your bunk mate.”

Dylan Thuras:
And that fellow was me.

John Stewart:
I think we both hit it off pretty well. A very short period of time, I think we became good friends.

Dylan Thuras:
That’s right. That’s right.

Dylan Thuras:
I was there as part of an Atlas Obscura trip, helping to make sure our travelers got what they needed, but John wasn’t actually one of our Atlas Obscura travelers. He was just my delightful, unexpected 91-year-old bunk mate. But that first night, John and I stayed up talking and he told me all about his wife and their three sons.

John Stewart:
Matter of fact, when they were young, we did a lot of canoeing around here. Great canoe country up here, but they were quite adventurous trips and I really enjoyed them…

Dylan Thuras:
He told me all about his adventures and about how he’d been traveling alone more since his wife passed away. And even how just a short time before our trip, he’d actually lost one of his three sons in a biking accident.

John Stewart:
It’s a sad thing, but it’s life. You can’t think about it. We had some wonderful times together and almost every year we went on some major holiday somewhere.

Dylan Thuras:
That evening, I made a note to myself. John and I were going to stick together on this trip. He was the hardiest 91-year-old I had ever met, but I figured we could both use a good crew mate.

Dylan Thuras:
On July 6th, 1845, Captain John Franklin wrote home from the Whale Fish Islands, just off the coast of Greenland. It was a letter to his wife and daughter telling them not to worry, even if he was gone for many years. Part of the plan was for the Franklin expedition to spend multiple winters in the Arctic and the ship was provisioned to last that long. As the Franklin expedition left the coast of Greenland, one of Franklin’s drew a pencil sketch of the Greenland Bay, a lovely image of a single ship floating alone, surrounded by ice and rock. And with that, the crew began to sail up and over the very top of the globe.

Dylan Thuras:
Of course, Franklin and his crew were not actually the first explorers to make it this far into the Northwest Passage and the idea that they could even discover it was wrong. The Arctic waterways running from Greenland to Alaska had already been home to Arctic and Inuit peoples for over 4,000 years. By the time Franklin came to find it, the Northwest Passage had been thoroughly explored by Inuit tribes, as they hunted, fished, and settled across thousands of miles of Arctic coastline. Then as Franklin’s expedition headed deeper and deeper into the Arctic, the Inuit watched from afar, observing his progress through the passage and into the dangers that they already knew.

ARCHIVAL TAPE
[HERE ON BEECHEY ISLAND, AT THE UPPER REACHES OF THE PASSAGE, ARE THE GRAVES OF THREE ORDINARY SAILORS DOOMED BY EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES.]

Dylan Thuras:
During the first winter in the Arctic, the Franklin expedition hit an impasse, a frozen expanse of ice that they couldn’t sail through. So they tried to turn around, but they were stuck. The way back had frozen solid. That in and of itself wasn’t the end of the world. They were in the Arctic. It was full of ice and they had expected something like this to happen, so they settled in for the first winter. And during that winter, the first touch of death visited the expedition. Three men, 20-year-old John Torrington, 32-year-old William Braine, and 25-year-old John Hartnell all died from some combination of pneumonia, malnourishment, zinc deficiency, and lead poisoning. In fact, they may well have been ill when they first boarded the ship. When he died, 20-year-old John Torrington only weighed 85 pounds. All three were buried on Beechey Island. The very graves John and I were sailing off to see.

Dylan Thuras:
On the second day aboard the Akademik Ioffe, John and I woke up and along with all the other new passengers, we went into what was called the mud room, where we practiced putting on our foul weather gear, basically just huge waterproof waders and boots. The ocean water temperature was around 28 degrees or just below freezing. So these weren’t going to do you much good if you actually fell into the water, but they were meant to keep you from getting soaked when you went out on one of the little Zodiac boats. After that, we clomped our way up onto the deck where we all got trained in the use of the lifeboats. As we listened to the instructions, we stood along the bow of the ship and looked out at this new landscape in front of us. The wind was overpowering. The Arctic Ocean lapped against bare rocks. There were no trees, just water and stone. To my unfamiliar eyes the landscape felt inhospitable and barren. Just about done with our introductory training, we all filed down below to watch a PowerPoint about how to avoid getting eaten by polar bears.

John Stewart:
And I remember the room was dark, so he must have been showing PowerPoints, but as we were sitting there listening to this, all of a sudden, there was a huge crash. I can still hear it. It was just like somebody was beating an oil drum with steel bars. And then we were thrown forward off our chairs and obviously, we had hit something. And I think you could say we were between a rock and a hard place because we had hit a rock. We were all sent to our cabins and told to stay there.

Dylan Thuras:
The ship was listing at an angle that made it hard to walk. And as John and I slowly made our way back up the stairs, we saw the Russian crew, which up until this point, we hadn’t seen that much of, now running all over the place, shouting in Russian, all wearing their life jackets and the ship continued to sway at this nauseating angle. John and I made it back to our room and we put on the foul weather gear we had just been trained to use, ready, potentially, to go back out on deck and lower those lifeboats down into the water. And then we just sat awaiting further instructions, waiting to hear whether we needed to abandon ship.

John Stewart (tour audio):
So anyway, been fun being with you, Dylan.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
You too, John.

John Stewart (tour audio):
Take care!

Dylan Thuras:
We were keeping our spirits high, but truth be told, I was pretty nervous.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
Now I can’t remember his name. I can only think of Franklin. Franklin’s the wrong one to think of. We don’t want to think of Franklin. We want to think of-

John Stewart (tour audio):
Amundsen.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
… Amundsen. Perry would be okay.

John Stewart (tour audio):
Shackleton.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
Shackleton.

John Stewart (tour audio):
Pray for Shackleton.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
Pray for Shackleton, not Franklin.

Dylan Thuras:
As my 91-year-old bunk mate and I sat in our cabin, we were very much aware that we and John Franklin were exploring the same Arctic. The water and rocks outside my windows were just like what Franklin had sailed past himself. And everyone on my boat, including us, knew how the Franklin expedition had ended.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
So yeah, we’re in the Arctic and we run the ship aground. We’re literally stuck on a rock. It’s a very exciting journey, probably too exciting for everybody here.

Dylan Thuras:
Sometime in the early 1900s in the Northern Islands of the Canadian Arctic, an Inuit girl named Humahuk was out with her father walking across the ice and rocks. She was about seven or eight at the time. And Humahuk and her father were out looking for driftwood when something bright caught her eye, a glint of light, the sun reflecting off of an odd, metal object. And there, laying in the snow of the vast Arctic plane, she found a single engraved dinner knife. It was a relic of a long-lost crew and one key in unlocking the fate of the Franklin expedition.

John Stewart (tour audio):
There was a huge bump. This is about 15, 20 minutes after the big bump. And it feels like the ship is trying to pull itself off a rock.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
That’s what they said. They said we’ve grounded.

John Stewart (tour audio):
We’ve actually grounded the ship, so…

Dylan Thuras:
That’s John Stewart of Thunder Bay, Canada. He was my 91-year-old bunk mate on the Akademik Ioffe, an Arctic cruise ship that was following in the path of the Franklin expedition. The Franklin expedition was a famous Arctic voyage that left in 1845 to chart the Northwest Passage, but instead, found themselves stuck in the ice. And on my trip, to follow in the footsteps of an Arctic voyage where things had gone incredibly wrong, things had gone incredibly wrong. As John said, about 15 minutes earlier, our cruise ship had hit a rock with an enormous crash, throwing people to the ground. Outside on the deck, you could hear the Arctic wind absolutely howling. The Russian crew was running around with their life jackets already on, shouting in Russian. John and I sat in our cabin, waiting.

John Stewart (tour audio):
We’ve been told at this time to get into our heavy gear. And that’s about where we are right now, just waiting for our next set of instructions…

Dylan Thuras:
Inside, people were beginning to mill about. The crews had shut the bar down, but the buffet line was still operating. It had to be the most awkward, nervous buffet I have ever been a part of. And wherever you were on the ship, inside or out, you could hear and feel the engines grinding as they struggled to pull us off this rock, at least until they shut them down and the ship went quiet.

John Stewart:
I can remember sitting in the cabin waiting to be told what we were going to do. I don’t think anybody panicked, that I saw. Everybody was calm and accepted what had happened and I think everybody accepted their fate.

Dylan Thuras:
In September of 1847, John Franklin and his Arctic expedition had been gone for over two years. Franklin had known before he left that it would take years to get through the Arctic and no one expected to hear from him within a year and two years didn’t seem that far out of the ordinary. But Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane Franklin, she was beginning to worry. She wrote to another famous Arctic explorer, Sir John Ross, and urged him onward in a rescue mission. She wrote, “Should it be you to rescue them from peril or death? You will have your reward.” Sir John Ross, the explorer Lady Franklin was hoping would rescue her husband, had himself spent four years surviving in the Arctic and he was a long time friend of the Franklins. In 1848, more than three years after the Franklin expedition had departed, Ross set out alongside two other expeditions, each approaching from a different angle, all in the hopes of the Franklin expedition. Instead, they found nothing.

[FOLKSONG BALLAD]

Dylan Thuras:
Those would be the first rescue expeditions of many, many to follow, often with Lady Franklin as the motivating force behind them. The English public followed along with bated breath finding Sir John Franklin and has lost expedition become a nationwide obsession, Lady Franklin searching through the Arctic for her lost husband. In taverns across the country, ballads were sung of Lady Franklin’s lament.

[FOLKSONG BALLAD]

Dylan Thuras:
In 1854, nearly a decade after the Franklin expedition had first set out and after more than a dozen rescue expeditions, one rescue mission leader, Captain Rae, returned from the Arctic with particularly grim news. He had spoken at length with the local Inuit tribes and their stories of the expedition’s fate were pretty clear. Captain Rae wrote that the unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin had met with a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine. The bodies of some 30 persons were discovered on the continent. From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of their kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource, cannibalism, as a means of prolonging existence. In England, this news was met with absolute refusal. No one wanted to even entertain the idea that their noble hero and his crew might have resorted to cannibalism, least of all his wife, Lady Franklin. Captain Rae, who brought back the story from the Inuit, was defamed and a wave of racism was unleashed against the Inuit. Charles Dickens referred to the stories as the vague babble of savages.

Dylan Thuras:
But the evidence that John Franklin and his men were dead was hard to dismiss. The gravestones had already been found on Beechey Island and later, a note was discovered under a cairn, saying that Admiral John Franklin had actually died in 1847, long before the first rescue mission had ever even departed. But even so, much remained mysterious. None of the dozens of missions to find the Franklin expedition was ever able to find out exactly where the men had gone, much less find the wreckage of the ships. And discovering that would have to wait another 170 years and for the world to actually listen to Inuit stories.

Louie Kamookak (Archival Audio):
My name is Louie Kamookak. I live in Gjoa Haven. I was born and raised here and I’m known as a local historian.

Dylan Thuras:
That’s Louie Kamookak. Louie had been collecting Inuit stories for his whole life and Humahuk, that Inuit girl who found the dinner knife, the one left behind by the Franklin expedition, that was actually Louie’s great-grandmother. This is from a video that McQueen’s, a Canadian news magazine, made about Louie.

Louie Kamookak (Archival Audio):
There was one story that my great-grandmother told me. They start finding all kinds of artifacts. She said they noticed that there was a big chain going into the ocean. Her story was always in my mind, but I didn’t have a clue till I started going to school. The teacher started teaching history and he started talking about the Franklin expedition.

Dylan Thuras:
Louie’s knowledge of the traditional Inuit stories and of the Franklin expedition made him a unique expert on the subject and led him to believe that he might also know the location of the missing ships.

Louie Kamookak (Archival Audio):
When I got old enough to travel, I start reading more and I start asking more questions to the elders about the oral history, start trying to put the puzzle together and go out to the known sites that were mentioned by the elders.

Dylan Thuras:
For nearly 160 years, the whereabouts of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror remained a mystery. But in 2014, using Inuit testimony to guide them, Louie Kamookak led a team from Parks Canada to the site of the HMS Erebus. And recorded on a map from the 1860s is the Inuit name of the area where the ship was found and translated, it reads, “The boat sank here.”

Louie Kamookak (Archival Audio):
When I heard the news about one of the ship being found, I think it was emotional for me to think about the elders that I’ve been interviewed. They have been right all along and Inuit oral history was powerful and it was the only way that everything was passed down through generations.

Dylan Thuras:
Louie Kamookak died just a couple of years after the second ship, the HMS Terror, was discovered. Finding it was the result of a lifetime of his work collecting Inuit stories. The Royal Canadian geographic society called him the last great Franklin searcher. We also know more about what happened to the Franklin expedition all of those years stuck in the ice, thanks largely to stories from the Inuit. Franklin died early, but the rest of the sailors died a longer, slower death, one by one succumbing to scurvy, starvation, zinc deficiency, hypothermia. Some of the sailors may have lived as long as six or seven years out on the ice. But in the end, none of them ever made it back home. Over the course of a decade, almost 32 expeditions went out searching for Franklin. Though those rescue expeditions never found Franklin, they did end up doing what Franklin was unable to. They effectively charted the Northwest Passage and it was successfully navigated by Norwegian Explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906.

Dylan Thuras:
Luckily for John and I, we didn’t suffer quite the same fate as Franklin. We were eventually rescued. It was really only 24 hours later, but it was a long 24 hours. And the real possibility of disaster had hung over all of us, just the sense that we had come to a place without really knowing how to survive there. As we took our Zodiacs across the ocean and loaded onto our new ship, relief washed over everyone.

Woman (tour audio):
That one doesn’t have a hole in it?

Dylan Thuras:
It was only 8:00 AM in the morning, but the bar was open and John and I made ample use of it. It was glorious.

John Stewart (tour audio):
So anyway, be fun being with you, Dylan.

Dylan Thuras (tour audio):
You, too, John.

John Stewart (tour audio):
Take care. Don’t forget. Pray for Amundsen.

Dylan Thuras:
That was almost three years ago.

Dylan Thuras:
Calling John. So lucky he wrote down his information on a index card and then I took a picture of it.

John Stewart:
Hello?

Dylan Thuras:
Hi. Is this John Stewart?

John Stewart:
It is John Stewart.

Dylan Thuras:
Oh, my word, John. Okay. Let me tell you. My name is Dylan and we were shipwrecked together.

John Stewart:
Oh, yeah. For heaven’s sake, how are you doing?

Dylan Thuras:
I’m doing fine. How are you doing?

John Stewart:
Well, I’m doing okay. I clicked over to the 93 the other day…

Dylan Thuras:
When I was writing this story, I knew I needed to give John a call. And when I talked to him, what I found out was that wasn’t John’s last trip. Franklin never made it to Beechey Island and back, and I never even made it to Beechey Island. But you know who did?

John Stewart:
I took the next cruise.

Dylan Thuras:
You went back out? You went back out on another ship?

John Stewart:
Yeah, so I had a great time, but I was hoping that you would be there and we’d be cabin mates again.

Dylan Thuras:
I would’ve loved that. Oh, that would’ve been great. Well, I’m so glad to hear that you made it.

John Stewart:
Yeah. We were up above the Arctic circle, actually. Then we went ashore, landed at the grave site. There were just four wooden slab headstones there with a brass plaque on each one.

Dylan Thuras:
At 93, you’ve lived quite a full life. Do you have any advice for … I’m 38 now, which, to me, feels like well on in my years. I’ve got two young kids. Do you have any advice for me or anyone else?

John Stewart:
Always be kind to people. Learn to forgive. Have purpose in life and friends are one of your most important assets. Cherish them.

Dylan Thuras:
I have a memory of John that I will never forget. That last time at the bar when the two of us were together in person, having just been rescued from a stranded ship, drinking a beer at 8:00 in the morning and in the background, someone put on a famous song about Franklin. People in the bar began singing along.

[NORTHWEST PASSAGE BY STAN ROGERS]

Dylan Thuras:
Whether we meant to or not, we had truly gotten to experience a tiny bit of what it felt like to be out on the Franklin expedition, to follow our curiosity, to embark in the spirit of adventure and to sail out in Franklin’s path to take one last trip.

[NORTHWEST PASSAGE BY STAN ROGERS]

Roman Mars:
More Atlas Obscura after this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
Here, again, is Atlas Obscura on 99% Invisible.

Dylan Thuras:
In the late 1980s, a suitcase arrived at a warehouse in Scottsboro, Alabama. That wasn’t so unusual. A lot of suitcases end up at this particular warehouse, but inside this bag was something special.

Jennifer Kritner:
They opened the suitcase and this troll face is staring back at them.

Dylan Thuras:
A four-foot tall goblin puppet with a giant head, a huge nose, and piercing blue eyes.

Hoggle doll:
I’m Hoggle. Who are you?

Dylan Thuras:
Inside the bag was the real original Hoggle doll, this beloved character from the Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth.

Jennifer Kritner:
I get tickled every time I think about how funny and astonishing that must have been. We were just amazed at— “We have Hoggle!”

Dylan Thuras:
If you lose your luggage while traveling, you’re probably going to get it back. 99.5% of lost bags ultimately make their way back to their owners. But once in a while, that other 0.5% bags slip through the cracks. And when that happens, airlines will hang onto the luggage for 90 days, they do their best to reunite bag and owner. But after that 90 days, the bag legally becomes the airline’s property and that is when the Unclaimed Baggage Center steps in. The Unclaimed Baggage Center buys orphan bags from the airlines and then either donates, recycles, or resells their contents. And they’ve got contracts with all the domestic airlines and they go and load up these lost bags on semis at the airport, and then drive them all the way back to Scottsboro.

Jennifer Kritner:
A truck just backs up to our building and we unload those suitcases and we have a team of what we call openers that will open the suitcases.

Dylan Thuras:
This is Jennifer Kritner, and she’s been working at Unclaimed Baggage for more than 20 years, since she was just five days out of high school.

Jennifer Kritner:
And they go through each suitcase to figure out, “Does this item need to be sold? Does this item need to be cleaned, does this item need to be recycled, or does this item need to be donated?”

Dylan Thuras:
Personally, I would love to spend a day being a bag opener. Each bag, it would be like a little Christmas morning. What is in there? What’s inside the next one? Although, that said, more than once, bag openers have opened up a suitcase and found a live rattlesnake inside. Another time they found an entire bear pelt, packed in salt and still in the middle of the curing process. Smell kind of gave it away. So there are some hazards to the job, but there are also some thrills.

Jennifer Kritner:
We’ve had aluminum fire suits. We’ve had two full suits of armor. The most expensive thing that we’ve ever sold is actually a men’s platinum presidential Rolex, at retail for $64,000. We sold it in our store to a gentleman that shops with us about once a month and he purchased it for $32,000.

Dylan Thuras:
The finer jewelry that winds up at Unclaimed Baggage gets appraised. And I’ll just say this is why I’m a carry-on only kind of guy.

Jennifer Kritner:
One of the coolest things that we have gotten in my time here was a 40 carat natural raw emerald and we found that in the toe of a sock rolled up in the corner of a suitcase. I mean, totally unassuming. You would never think something that’s for $30,000 would just be in the toe of sock tossed with the dirty laundry, but that’s exactly how I found it.

Dylan Thuras:
Finding an emerald in someone’s dirty laundry is exciting, but for the vast majority of the time, it’s just dirty laundry, lots and lots and lots of dirty laundry.

Jennifer Kritner:
Every bag tells a story, so some of these bags were on their way to the trip and some of the bags were coming home from the trips. You can imagine it’s not as glamorous as one might think, but it is very interesting.

Dylan Thuras:
In fact, there is so much dirty laundry, that Unclaimed Baggage has its own laundry facility. They process over 50,000 items every month.

Jennifer Kritner:
That’s the biggest dry cleaning service in the state of Alabama. As a matter of fact, that’s more than most laundromats process in an entire year and so that happens right here in Scottsboro.

Dylan Thuras:
The laundry gets washed and the electronics are sent away to be wiped of their previous owner’s data. And yes, there are a lot, a lot of electronics, headphones, laptops, iPads — so easy to leave in those seat back pockets. Finally, everything is ready for its second life. If something doesn’t get recycled or donated, it goes out to the store shelves. And attention to all bargain hunters out there, most items in the store are resold for about 20 to 80% off their retail price. There are roughly 45,000 flights every day in the United States, so of the bags that get lost each day, even if only half of 1% of those bags are truly lost, it adds up quick. Unclaimed Baggage stocks anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 new items every single day. Today, Unclaimed Baggage Center is this huge sprawling place. It’s bigger than a city block, but it started much, much smaller. In 1970, Doyle Owens was working part-time as an insurance salesman in Scottsboro when he got a call from a friend who worked for a bus company in Washington, DC. The friend told Doyle about a unique problem he had. He had too many pieces of lost luggage that were just piling up.

Doyle Owens:
I borrowed my Dad’s pickup truck and $300. Asked for the first load, went to Washington DC, and picked up the bag.

Dylan Thuras:
Doyle died in 2016, and this is footage from an Oral History made by Unclaimed Baggage.

Doyle Owens:
And we looked like Jed Clampett planning to come back down from Washington DC to Alabama.

Dylan Thuras:
When Doyle got back to Scottsboro with his very first luggage haul, he set up a handful of card tables in an old rented house and he ran an ad in the local paper. He planned to be open for just two days, but by the end of the first day, he was already completely sold out. And that’s when Doyle knew he was onto something.

Doyle Owens:
And I called the guy up. I said, “Hey, you got some more bags? We’re out of merchandise.”

Dylan Thuras:
A few years later, Doyle landed his first contract with an airline company and eventually locked in contracts with other domestic carriers. He quit his insurance job and the business bobbed along steadily. But then in 1995, a little talk show picked up the story.

Oprah:
Did you see a gold necklace that’s about … I lost at Newark airport five years ago.

Woman (unidentified):
Right. Well, there’s lots of jewelry inside, Oprah, and the way they priced jewelry is that…

Jennifer Kritner:
Well, we joke it felt like the queen of England arrived. And truly from that day forward, it changed everything. It was a game changer.

Dylan Thuras:
Today, all kinds of people show up to shop at the Unclaimed Baggage Center, tourists, locals, people who make one annual giant shopping pilgrimage. Millionaires shop for discount Rolexes next to everyday people looking for a new cheap, winter jacket, or just maybe, if they’re lucky, Oprah’s gold necklace.

Dylan Thuras:
But a few of the items that come through unclaimed baggage are just too special to sell, like Hoggle from Labyrinth. He’s still there. As soon as you walk through the front door, Hoggle is there on your left. Then once workers open up and found a camera from the space shuttle. This was one of the earliest iterations of the digital camera, only three were ever made. So Unclaimed Baggage, give that one back. Other things that turn up at Unclaimed Baggage are genuinely rare and contain these huge stories of humanity and culture.

Jennifer Kritner:
Thinking back over my time, I can remember a trunk of Versace runway gowns that came through, just fresh off the runway. Around the same time, there was a trunk full of amazing hand-painted kimonos.

Dylan Thuras:
A Tibetan ceremonial horn, a handmade Polynesian grass skirt, a medicine stick likely from a tribe in the Amazon with a ceremonial shrunken head still attached… One day, this well-worn Gucci suitcase showed up at the store and inside, it was filled with Egyptian artifacts, including a burial mask that dated to about 1500 BC, just around the time when the Phoneticians were putting the final touches on this thing called the alphabet, so you know… old.

Dylan Thuras:
Each non-descript rollie bag that arrives at the Unclaimed Baggage Center brings a story with it. Not always as exciting as a live rattlesnake or ancient Egyptian artifacts, but still, there’s a story there. Who was this person? Where were they going? Why do they still have a hair crimper? Where were they going to wear those glittery golden sneakers? Were they actually using this iPod nano or did it just slip into a crevice in their bag and get lost twice over? Does the toddler who lost their panda blankie miss it? All of this, all of the world contained in one half of 1% of lost luggage, our bags and ourselves, all there at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

Dylan Thuras:
The Unclaimed Baggage Center is open every day of the week, except Sundays. And if you can’t make a trip to Scottsboro Alabama, these days you can still do your bargain hunting in their online store, but it really just gives you a taste of what you’ll find in the real brick and mortar store. So if you’re looking for a suit of armor or a Hoggle doll, you better make your way down to Scottsboro.

Roman Mars:
The Atlas Obscura podcast is hosted by Dylan Thuras and is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. The production team includes Chris Naka, Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Sarah Weiman, Manolo Morales, John DeLore, Willis Ryder Arnold, Gianna Palmer, Tracie Samuelson, Baudelaire Ceus, Peter Clowney, and Casey Holford. Theme by Sam Tyndall. Mixed by Luz Fleming. The Unclaimed Baggage episode was produced by Johanna Mayer

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CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible is Martín Gonzalez who mixed this episode for us. Swan Real, Delaney Hall, Kurt Kohlstedt, Emmett FitzGerald, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Jayson De Leon, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.