Five of the strangest unclaimed baggage finds

A live rattlesnake was left on a plane. Photo / Thinkstock

Stored in a massive warehouse in the US are the weirdest and scariest things airline passengers have left behind. Unclaimed Baggage is a 3700sq m building stocked with lost luggage. You need a map to get around the clothes, gadgets, books, toys and collectibles.

Here are five categories of the most noteworthy that gloved-up employees of Unclaimed Baggage have found.

1. Animals: A bear skin that arrived packed in salt, which did little to mask the smell. Fifty vacuum-packed frogs, a huge loggerhead turtle shell, a 3m boa constrictor skin and a live rattlesnake.

2. Clothes: They run the largest laundry facility in Alabama washing 20,000 items a day. Among the more precious were a new Versace gown, a Las Vegas showgirl costume, a Scottish kilt, a full suit of armour and a bridal gown (perhaps deliberately abandoned?).

3. Jewellery: Occasionally they find a true gem like the 5.8 carat diamond ring found in a sock, or the 40.95 carat emerald, along with other diamonds.

4. Gadgets: An IT team wipes personal data from unclaimed phones, tablets and laptops, but when they found a camera from a space shuttle they quickly returned that to Nasa (unwiped) and the missile guidance system for a fighter jet that had a plaque saying "Handle with extreme caution, I am worth my weight in gold" was (carefully) sent to the US Air Force.

5. Spooky: Pop into the next-door museum to see an urn of ashes and a South American shrunken head. Someone bought the engraved headstone to use as a coffee table, and an Egyptian death mask and a coffin were also snapped up.