In Storage Wars the bidders never know quite what they're going to get when they're competing for a locker. Sometimes there's hidden treasure, sometimes just a pile of rubbish, and just occasionally there's an item, or collection of items, that makes the winning bidder stand back in sheer disbelief (and not necessarily in a good way).
Snakes Alive!
Storage Wars' Brandon Sheets got more than he bargained for when he entered his freshly won locker only to find a whole nest of albino Burmese pythons. The snakes, which can survive for a fair while without food, were being bred in the locker to be sold on as exotic pets.
Locker number 007, presumably
A Long Islander won himself a storage locker for a $100 bid and was surprised to find a weird looking car inside, hidden under a pile of blankets. The car was a Lotus Esprit S1 but instead of wheels it had weird fins. Baffled by their find the winning bidder and his son loaded the car onto a trailer and towed it away. It was on the journey home that a fellow motorist shouted to them wanting to know what they were doing with the “James Bond car”. It turned out that the vehicle was indeed the Lotus submarine car driven by Roger Moore in the 1977 Bond Film “The Spy Who Loved Me”. The car went on to sell at auction for more than one million US dollars.
So that's where I left it!
Mr. Shannon Whisnaut purchased the contents of a storage locker which contained a barbecue smoker. Upon getting his new barbecue home and set up in his garden Shannon lifted the lid and found a large object wrapped in tin-foil. Unwrapping the aluminium package Mr. Whisnaut was, understandably, shocked to discover a human leg inside (uncooked, I should add). After reporting his find to the police the former owner of the locker, Mr. John Wood, was tracked down. It turned out that Mr. Wood had had his leg severed in a plane crash in 2004 and had opted to keep the limb so that it could be buried with him when he eventually died. He had, however, forgotten where he had stashed the limb for safekeeping.
Face Value
In 2011 a Storage Wars bidder paid four-hundred US dollars for a locker only to discover that an old trunk inside contained $24,000 in cash. What was weird – eerie even – about the money was that all of the faces had been cut or torn out of the notes. The serial numbers still being intact however, the cash was still deemed legal tender. Lucky bidder!
Locker or mausoleum?
In January 2012 members of the Bunch family were informed that they had missed too many payments on the storage unit they had been renting in U-Stor Self Storage in Clearwater, Florida and that the contents were to be sold at auction to cover costs. The Bunch family protested vehemently because, as it turned out, that was where grandma Bunch had been entombed. Mrs. Ann Bunch, born in 1900, died of natural causes at the age of ninety-five, her body was embalmed a prepared for burial by a funeral home in Alabama soon after. Instead of being inhumed in a family plot however, Mrs. Bunch's coffin was instead stored in the family locker.
