One of the reasons that TV shows like Storage Wars are so popular is the fact that you never know what’s going to be in a storage room or unit when you open it up – it could be anything from old newspapers to a vintage car that’s been there for fifty years because someone put it there and completely forgot about it.
Every once in a while, there’s a unit discovered whose contents make headlines around the world. For instance, Burt Reynolds kept a storage unit for years until he stopped paying for it and its contents were auctioned off. It turned out Reynolds was quite the hoarder – the unit contained the canoe from Deliverance, a bill of sale for Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger, personalised notes from the likes of Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant, an Emmy Award and a horse carriage built for him by Dolly Parton. Those items now form the centrepiece of a fan-run Burt Reynolds Museum in Jupiter, Florida. It takes all sorts…
Another buyer took control of a vault that turned out to have over 250 original, unreleased Michael Jackson recordings in it, while a man in San Jose, California discovered a literal treasure trove in the form of a plastic tub filled with Spanish silver coins, gold doubloons and gold and silver ingots that was valued at over $500,000. Not a bad profit considering the unit only costs just over a grand!
An unusual benefactor of the storage unit auction system was Nicolas Cage, whose extremely rare comic (it featured the first-ever appearance of Superman and was worth over a million dollars) was stolen from his home in 2000, but turned up in a storage unit auction in 2011, still in mint condition. He eventually sold it anyway to fund his bankruptcy struggles and it fetched $2.5 million.
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