For 53 years, a store in Scottsboro, Alabama, has been buying lost or unclaimed luggage from the nation’s airlines and selling the contents at bargain basement prices.

“If a bag has gone lost or unclaimed for a minimum of 90 days after the airlines have searched for the owner, then we buy those orphaned suitcases from the airlines,” Unclaimed Baggage Public Relations and Community Affairs Coordinator Sonni Hood told WSB’s Jonathan O’Brien. “We purchase the suitcases sight unseen, so we truly never know what we are going to receive.”

Employees sort the contents, clean the clothes and price the items well below the original purchase price. Over the years, the store’s “bag openers” have found everything from iPads to diamond rings and once even a live rattlesnake.

“The snake was actually tucked away in a pocket of a duffle bag,” Hood explained. “Our assumption is surely someone was not traveling with the snake surely during the 90-day waiting period or transport process he snuck inside.”

Also on the list of weird items: are real human shrunken heads, taxidermized animals, and even moose antlers.

“The most expensive thing that we’ve ever sold in our store was a men’s platinum presidential Rolex watch that retails for $64,000, and we sold it for $32,000,” Hood said. “So half-off appraisal value.”

The store is currently renovating its “found treasures museum,” which houses many of the unusual items that employees have found over the years. One of the items includes the puppet Hoggle from the Jim Henson film “Labyrinth.”

“He came to us in kind of a disarray in the suitcase, and we sent him off to be refurbished and brought back to life,” Hood explained.

According to Hood, airlines are able to reunite passengers with their luggage 99.5% of the time, so they get what is left. They sell, donate or recycle everything that comes to their store.

“We like to think that we’re the sustainable solution for the airlines, so they aren’t tossing away these bags and adding to landfills,” Hood said.

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