Unclaimed Baggage:
The Land of Lost Luggage in Scottsboro, Alabama
Ever lost your luggage at an airport, and wonder where it ended up? Well, it very well could have ended up in Scottsboro, Alabama – at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.
A 40,000-square-foot warehouse, the Unclaimed Baggage Center is known as America’s ‘Land of Lost Luggage.’ A unique concept, this mega-store is located about 40 minutes off Exit 218 on Interstate 59 – and sells everything from ski gear, to jewelry, to electronics – even once a 4,000-year-old mummified hawk (you have to wonder who was traveling with that)!
Started in 1970, the Unclaimed Baggage Center is home to over one million items at any given time.
But don’t worry next time you travel; there’s a less than 2% chance that your luggage actually gets lost.
If your luggage actually does get lost – whether through an airline, bus station, rental company, etc – you have 90 days to search for it before it legally belongs to the airline. Most airlines offer some sort of compensation for a lost checked bag, and most often the lost bags are returned to their owners.
So how does Unclaimed Baggage Center get over 7,000 new items daily? Airlines aren’t liable for your carry-ons – so if you leave your carry-on behind, there’s a good chance you can eventually find it in Scottsboro, Alabama.
One of Alabama’s Top Tourist Attractions, the Unclaimed Baggage Center gets over 1 million visitors yearly.
Kind of makes you wonder how many of those visitors go there to find their own lost luggage. See updated hours here.
When a new shipment comes in to the Unclaimed Baggage Center, it gets sorted into one of three categories: Sale, Donation, or Trash.
According to UBC, “About a third gets recycled, a third is donated to various charities…through the UBC’s Reclaimed For Good program, and a third gets sold.”
Cloth items that are deemed ‘sellable’ get cleaned at the UBC’s in-house dry cleaner (20,000 items per day are washed and dry-cleaned), Electronics go through the Department of Defense’ protocol to get scrubbed clean of any personal information, and Jewelry is cleaned and appraised.
You’re probably curious about the craziest, most out-there items that have found their way to the Unclaimed Baggage Center right? They include: a 40.95-carat emerald, a 6-foot-tall paper mâché Tinkerbell, a platinum Rolex watch (appraised at $60k), a live rattlesnake (imagine the shock on the employee who opened that bag), a full suit of armor, 50 vacuum-packed frogs, and an engraved headstone.
They’ve even received a camera from a NASA Space Shuttle (promptly returned to NASA), and a missile guidance system for a fighter jet (promptly returned to the Air Force).
All-in-all, this is another great reason to choose a road-trip over air travel; not only is there much less than 2% of a chance you’ll lose your luggage, but you get to see these cool places along the interstates!
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