
Mobile Mini Museum
The 18th May is officially known as International Museum Day and to celebrate all things (or at least some things) old and fusty, we’re taking a look at some of the truly weird and wonderful objects found in storage containers over the years. Some containers are – quite literally – Mobile Mini museums, with old and sometimes decrepit items concealed within. Some items are valuable, some are just plain odd. Here’s a list of our favourite artefacts discovered in – yep – storage containers:
1. NASA Rocket
A NASA rocket? Found in a storage container? A particularly small rocket – but a rocket nevertheless – was found alongside a countdown clock in a storage unit in Florida. The bemused owner of the container, a winning bidder on the hit U.S TV show Auction Hunters, learned they’d been stored in the unit following the discontinuation of a NASA space programme.
2. $2 million dollar comic book
In a strange turn of events, the comic book – which had been stolen a decade earlier from none other than actor Nicholas Cage – was discovered in a storage container in the San Fernando Valley, California. The highly valuable and incredibly rare first edition of “Action Comics” was humbly returned to Cage, a self-confessed comic book collector.
3. Bond car
It’s not unheard of to find a car in a storage container. But when news came out that a Lotus Esprit S1 had been lurking in the back of a storage container on Long Island, people started talking. When it was found to be the Lotus from the 1977 Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me” there was – not surprisingly – a frenzy. The car sold at auction for more than $1 million US dollars.
4. Aretha Franklin’s clothes
The story goes that following a fire at Aretha’s Michigan home in 2002, she put her vast collection of clothes and hats into a storage container, but she stopped paying the fee. So perhaps inevitably, the container plus an incredible new wardrobe went to the highest bidder at auction.
5. And finally… Burt Reynold’s kooky collection of stuff
A real treasure trove of hidden gems, from Hollywood paraphernalia to the plain extraordinary, the storage container belonging to Burt Reynolds was prised open to reveal a canoe from 1972 film Deliverance, and bizarrely, a horse carriage presented as a gift to Burt from Dolly Parton. There was so much stuff, the new owner opened a museum.