SPEAKER_10: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars and I am standing in the Galapagos in front of a congress of marine iguanas. They're piled on top of each other. Occasionally, if you can make it through the sound of the waves in the wind, you can hear them spitting out salt water from their nose. They just sneeze on each other and lay on each other. And they seem like they enjoy life pretty well. Last week, I was in the Galapagos Islands, which for me is the ultimate travel destination. I'm on Fernandina Island where the marine iguanas are very plentiful. Also the flightless cormorant who keeps his wings open while he's just standing on a lava rock. It's really silly looking. My family hiked and swam with these astounding creatures in this completely foreign landscape. The ground is black lava. The iguanas just match the lava. You can almost step on them. They don't move since there are no predators. They have no fear of humans at all. And you can just walk right up to them. You don't touch them, but you can just walk real close to them and take a picture. And sometimes they sneeze on you. It was life-changing. I'll probably end up doing a story about it someday despite myself, but fundamentally, I was there just to be there. And it was amazing. For 40 years of my life, I could barely conceive of doing this kind of trip. But I have that privilege now. And after leaving the islands, my first thought was, I have to do this more often. Experiencing as much of the world as possible is something that I need to place a little closer to the foundation of my hierarchy of needs. This is something the team at Atlas Obscura figured out a long time ago. Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's hidden wonders. They write books. They host experiences. They lead excursions. And they have a podcast that I really enjoy. So in order for me to have enough time to take my life-changing trip, we are presenting a couple of life-changing trips from Atlas Obscura that capture their adventurous and curious spirit. This is the Beachy Island Graves.
SPEAKER_12: Way, way up north, far in the Canadian Arctic, there's a lonely windswept island.
SPEAKER_14: No trees, nothing. Just pebble beach back by mountains.
SPEAKER_12: Even in summer, it can be well below freezing on this island. Cheats of ice float by in the bay. A crisp wind whips across its pebble beaches. And there are no signs of life. Out here, standing alone on this rock, are four simple wooden headstones. These graves are the remnants of one of the most infamous Arctic expeditions of all time. I'm Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, an exploration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. In this two-part series, we are going to venture out towards those frozen graves, following two groups of adventurers, separated by more than 170 years, and we'll play witness to the disasters that befell them all. Yeah, yeah. So I had a great time.
SPEAKER_07: Iron man in wooden ships. A description of heroism never more apt as when applied to those who braved the Arctic. I have to admit that I am a sucker for true life adventure stories.
SPEAKER_12: The extraordinary tales, the human spirit against unforgiving odds, I kind of eat it up. My bookshelf is embarrassingly full of these kinds of stories, and included among them, of course, is one of the classics. One of the epics. The story of the Franklin expedition. Sir John Franklin was at 59, a veteran of two overland expeditions in the North American Arctic.
SPEAKER_12: On the morning of May 19, 1845, Captain John Franklin said goodbye to his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, and stepped aboard his new ship. This was the beginning of his fourth Arctic mission. He already had a reputation for being tough. His nickname in the press was the man who ate his boots, because during one of his previous Arctic expeditions, he and his crew had survived by eating lichen and their own boot leather. At nearly 60 years old, Franklin was embarking on one more mission, one that he knew would define him. Franklin was attempting the Victorian era's version of the moonshot. Franklin was going to try and chart the Northwest Passage. Finding the passage was all about money, about trade. European countries had wanted a faster route to Asia so that they could do more exporting. And the expeditions to find this trade route date back to 1497. The voyage meant sailing up and over North America through the incredible expanse of Arctic ice in order to ultimately reach the other side, the Pacific Ocean. And even as the route lost its luster as an economic possibility, the British stayed obsessed with charting it. By the time Franklin set sail in 1845, many had tried, failed, and died. The two ships on the expedition, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, had been reinforced to withstand the ice, and they were being sailed by an experienced crew of 134 sailors and officers. They even had a monkey on board named Jacko. But most of all, they had lots and lots of food. 36,000 pounds of biscuits, 32,000 pounds of salted beef, 8,000 tins of preserved meat. They had 1,000 pounds of just mustard and 3,600 gallons of booze. It was enough food to last every sailor for three years. When did you decide to go to the Arctic? What kind of incited you to want to take that trip?
SPEAKER_14: You know, I have no idea. Other than I like adventures, I was interested in the Franklin expedition.
SPEAKER_12: That's John Stewart. And in 2018, 173 years after the Franklin expedition sailed, John Stewart of Thunder Bay, Canada, climbed onto a little zodiac, kind of inflatable boat, and motored out to a large cruise ship floating in the Arctic Bay. At 91 years old, John Stewart was almost certainly the oldest passenger on the expedition.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah, well, I'm not one to go and sit on the beach down in Florida. I like to follow history if I can.
SPEAKER_12: The ship John was boarding was called the Academic Ioffe, and it was part of an Arctic tourist cruise run by a company called One Oceans and sailed by an experienced Russian crew. Would you say your name was again?
SPEAKER_12: The purpose of the cruise was to follow in Franklin's footsteps, to bring Franklin-obsessed travelers one step closer to the object of their historical fascination. And the ship, the Ioffe, was carrying a total of 126 people, just about the size of Franklin's original crew. Although, to be fair, the cruise expedition that John Stewart was on was a little bit cushier than Franklin's. Meals were served via a buffet line, and there were optional yoga classes. John had opted for the cheaper shared bunk option.
SPEAKER_14: So I shared a cabin with somebody I had never met before, and I was shown to my cabin, and I was the only person there, but eventually this young, good-looking, inspired fellow stepped in, and said, I'm your bunk mate.
SPEAKER_12: And that fellow was me.
SPEAKER_14: I think we both hit it off pretty well. In a very short period of time, I think we became good friends.
SPEAKER_12: That's right. That's right. I was there as part of an Atlas Obscura trip, helping to make sure our travelers got what they needed. But John wasn't actually one of our Atlas Obscura travelers. He was just my delightful, unexpected 91-year-old bunk mate. But that first night, John and I stayed up talking, and he told me all about his wife and their three sons.
SPEAKER_14: As a matter of fact, when they were young, we did a lot of canoeing around here, great canoe country out here, but they were quite adventurous trips, and I really enjoyed them.
SPEAKER_12: He told me all about his adventures and talked about how he'd been traveling alone more since his wife passed away, and even how just a short time before our trip, he'd actually lost one of his three sons in a biking accident.
SPEAKER_14: It's a sad thing, but it's life you can't really think about it. We had some wonderful times together,
SPEAKER_14: and almost every year we went on some major holiday somewhere.
SPEAKER_12: That evening, I made a note to myself. John and I were going to stick together on this trip. He was the heartiest 91-year-old I had ever met, but I figured we could both use a good crewmate. On July 6, 1845, Captain John Franklin wrote home from the Whalefish Islands, just off the coast of Greenland. It was a letter to his wife and daughter telling them not to worry, even if he was gone for many years. Part of the plan was for the Franklin expedition to spend multiple winters in the Arctic, and the ship was provisioned to last that long. As the Franklin expedition left the coast of Greenland, one of Franklin's crew drew a pencil sketch of the Greenland Bay, a lovely image of a single ship floating alone, surrounded by ice and rock. And with that, the crew began to sail up and over the very top of the globe. Of course, Franklin and his crew were not actually the first explorers to make it this far into the Northwest Passage, and the idea that they could even discover it was wrong. The Arctic waterways running from Greenland to Alaska had already been home to Arctic and Inuit peoples for over 4,000 years. By the time Franklin came to find it, the Northwest Passage had been thoroughly explored by Inuit tribes as they hunted, fished, and settled across thousands of miles of Arctic coastline. And as Franklin's expedition headed deeper and deeper into the Arctic, the Inuit watched from afar, observing its progress through the passage and into the dangers that they already knew.
SPEAKER_07: Here on Beachy Island, at the upper reaches of the passage, are the graves of three ordinary sailors, doomed by extraordinary circumstances.
SPEAKER_12: During the first winter in the Arctic, the Franklin expedition hit an impasse, a frozen expanse of ice that they couldn't sail through. So they tried to turn around, but they were stuck. The way back had frozen solid. That, in and of itself, wasn't the end of the world. They were in the Arctic. It was full of ice, and they had expected something like this to happen. So they settled in for the first winter. And during that winter, the first touch of death visited the expedition. Three men, 20-year-old John Torrington, 32-year-old William Brain, and 25-year-old John Hartnell all died from some combination of pneumonia, malnourishment, zinc deficiency, and lead poisoning. In fact, they may well have been ill when they first boarded the ship. When he died, 20-year-old John Torrington only weighed 85 pounds. All three were buried on Beachy Island, the very graves John and I were sailing off to sea. On the second day aboard the academic Aoffee, John and I woke up, and along with all the other new passengers, we went into what was called the mud room, where we practiced putting on our foul weather gear, basically just huge waterproof waders and boots. The ocean water temperature was around 28 degrees or just below freezing, so these weren't going to do you much good if you actually fell into the water, but they were meant to keep you from getting soaked when you went out on one of the little zodiac boats. After that, we clomped our way up onto the deck, where we all got trained in the use of the lifeboats. As we listened to the instructions, we stood along the bow of the ship and looked out at this new landscape in front of us. The wind was overpowering. The Arctic Ocean lapped against bare rocks. There were no trees, just water and stone. To my unfamiliar eyes, the landscape felt inhospitable and barren. Just about done with our introductory training, we all filed down below to watch a PowerPoint about how to avoid getting eaten by polar bears.
SPEAKER_14: And I remember the room was dark, so we must have been showing PowerPoints, but as we were sitting there listening to this, all of a sudden there was a huge crash. I can still hear it. Just like somebody was beating an oil drum with steel bars, it was just... and then we were thrown forward off our chairs, and obviously we hit something. And I think you could safely say we were between a rock and a hard place because we had hit a rock. We were all sent to our cabins and told to stay there.
SPEAKER_12: The ship was listing at an angle that made it hard to walk. And as John and I slowly made our way back up the stairs, we saw the Russian crew, which up until this point we hadn't seen that much of, now running all over the place, shouting in Russian, all wearing their life jackets. And the ship continued to sway at this nauseating angle. John and I made it back to our room, and we put on the foul weather gear we had just been trained to use, ready potentially to go back out on deck and lower those lifeboats down into the water.
SPEAKER_03: Our little tour here...
SPEAKER_12: And then we just sat, awaiting further instructions, waiting to hear whether we needed to abandon ship.
SPEAKER_02: So, anyway, it's been fun being with you, Doug. You too, John. Take care. Don't forget.
SPEAKER_12: We were keeping our spirits high, but truth be told, I was pretty nervous. Now I can't remember his name. I can only think of Franklin. Franklin's the wrong one to think of. We don't want to think of Franklin. We want to think of... Adminson.
SPEAKER_03: Adminson. Perry would be okay.
SPEAKER_12: Shackleton. Shackleton. Yeah. Pray for Shackleton. Pray for Shackleton and Franklin.
SPEAKER_12: As my 91-year-old bunkmate and I sat in our cabin, we were very much aware that we and John Franklin were exploring the same Arctic. The water and rocks outside my windows were just like what Franklin had sailed past himself. And everyone on my boat, including us, knew how the Franklin expedition had ended. So... Yeah, we're in the Arctic and we run the ship aground. We're like literally stuck on a rock. It's a very exciting journey. Probably too exciting for everybody here. Sometime in the early 1900s, in the northern islands of the Canadian Arctic, an Inuit girl named Humahuk was out with her father walking across the ice and rocks. She was about seven or eight at the time, and Humahuk and her father were out looking for driftwood, when something bright caught her eye. A glint of light, the sun reflecting off of an odd metal object. And there, laying in the snow of the vast Arctic plain, she found a single engraved dinner knife. It was a relic of a long-lost crew, and one key in unlocking the fate of the Franklin expedition.
SPEAKER_03: There was a huge bump. This was about 15, 20 minutes after the big bump. It feels like the ship is trying to pull itself off a rock. That's what they said. They said, yeah, we've grounded. We've actually grounded the ship.
SPEAKER_12: That's John Stewart of Thunder Bay, Canada.
SPEAKER_12: He was my 91-year-old bunkmate on the Academic Ioffe, an Arctic cruise ship that was following in the path of the Franklin expedition. The Franklin expedition was a famous Arctic voyage that left in 1845 to chart the Northwest Passage, but instead found themselves stuck in the ice. And on my trip, to follow in the footsteps of an Arctic voyage where things had gone incredibly wrong, things had gone incredibly wrong. As John said, about 15 minutes earlier, our cruise ship had hit a rock with an enormous crash, throwing people to the ground. Outside on the deck, you could hear the Arctic wind absolutely howling. The Russian crew was running around with their life jackets already on, shouting in Russian. John and I sat in our cabin, waiting. We've been told of this time to get into our heavy gear,
SPEAKER_03: and that's about where we are right now, just waiting for our next set of instructions to go. Inside, people were beginning to mill about.
SPEAKER_12: The crews had shut the bar down, but the buffet line was still operating. It had to be the most awkward, nervous buffet I have ever been a part of. And wherever you were on the ship, inside or out, you could hear and feel the engines grinding as they struggled to pull us off this rock, at least until they shut them down, and the ship went quiet. I can remember sitting in the cabin waiting to be told what we were going to do.
SPEAKER_14: I don't think anybody panicked, and I saw. Everybody was calm and accepted what had happened, and I think everybody accepted their fate.
SPEAKER_12: In September of 1847, John Franklin and his Arctic expedition had been gone for over two years. Franklin had been on the ship for over three years, and Franklin had known before he left that it would take years to get through the Arctic, and no one expected to hear from him within a year, and two years didn't seem that far out of the ordinary. But Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin, she was beginning to worry. She wrote to another famous Arctic explorer, Sir John Ross, and urged him onward in a rescue mission. She wrote, Should it be you to rescue them from peril or death, you will have your reward. Sir John Ross, the explorer Lady Franklin was hoping would rescue her husband, had himself spent four years surviving in the Arctic, and he was a longtime friend of the Franklins. In 1848, more than three years after the Franklin expedition had departed, Ross set out alongside two other expeditions, each approaching from a different angle, all in the hopes of finding the Franklin expedition. Instead, they found nothing.
SPEAKER_13: There's Captain Ross and many more In vain, their crews ground the Arctic shore
SPEAKER_12: Those would be the first rescue expeditions of many, many to follow, often with Lady Franklin as the motivating force behind them. The English public followed along with bated breath, finding Sir John Franklin and his lost expedition became a nationwide obsession. The expedition began with Lady Franklin searching through the Arctic for her lost husband. In taverns across the country, ballads were sung of Lady Franklin's lament.
SPEAKER_13: 10,000 pounds I would freely give to learn that my husband still did live and to bring him back to the land of my own
SPEAKER_12: In 1854, nearly a decade after the Franklin expedition there were more than a dozen rescue expeditions. One rescue mission leader, Captain Ray, returned from the Arctic with particularly grim news. He had spoken at length with the local Inuit tribes and their stories of the expedition's fate were pretty clear. Captain Ray wrote that the unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin had met with a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine. The bodies of some 30 persons were discovered on the continent from the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of their kettles. It is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource, cannibalism, as a means of prolonging existence. In England, this news was met with absolute refusal. No one wanted to even entertain the idea that their noble hero and his crew might have resorted to cannibalism, least of all his wife, Lady Franklin. Captain Ray, who brought back the stories from the Inuit, was defamed and a wave of racism was unleashed against the Inuit. Charles Dickens referred to the stories as the vague babel of savages. But the evidence that John Franklin and his men were dead was hard to dismiss. The gravestones had already been found on Beachy Island and later a note was discovered under a carn saying that Admiral John Franklin had actually died in 1847, long before the first rescue mission had ever even departed. But even so, much remained mysterious. None of the dozens of missions to find the Franklin expedition was ever able to find out exactly where the men had gone, much less find the wreckage of the ships. Discovering that would have to wait another 170 years and for the world to actually listen to Inuit stories.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Louis Kamukak. I live in Jawhaven. I was born and raised here and I'm known as a local historian.
SPEAKER_12: That's Louis Kamukak. Louis had been collecting Inuit stories for his whole life and humuhuk, that Inuit girl who found the dinner knife, the one left behind by the Franklin expedition, that was actually Louis' great-grandmother. This is from a video that Maclean's, a Canadian news magazine, made about Louis.
SPEAKER_00: There was one story that my great-grandmother told me. They started finding all kinds of artifacts. She said they noticed that there was a big chain going into the ocean. Her story was always in my mind, but I didn't have a clue until I started going to school. The teacher started teaching history and he started talking about the Franklin expedition.
SPEAKER_12: Louis' knowledge of the traditional Inuit stories and of the Franklin expedition made him a unique expert on the subject and led him to believe that he might also know the location of the missing ships. When I got old enough to travel, I started reading more
SPEAKER_00: and I started asking more questions to the elders about the oral history. I started trying to put the puzzle together and go out to the known sites that were mentioned by the elders.
SPEAKER_12: For nearly 160 years, the whereabouts of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror remained a mystery, but in 2014, using Inuit testimony to guide them, Louis Comicook led a team from Parks Canada to the site of the HMS Erebus and recorded on a map from the 1860s is the Inuit name of the area where the ship was found. And translated, it reads, The boat sank here. When I heard the news about one of the ships being found,
SPEAKER_00: I think it was kind of emotional for me to think about the elders that had been interviewed that had been right all along. And Inuit oral history was powerful and it was the only way that everything was passed down through generations.
SPEAKER_12: Louis Comicook died just a couple of years after the second ship, the HMS Terror, was discovered. Finding it was the result of a lifetime of his work collecting Inuit stories. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society called him the last great Franklin searcher. We also know more about what happened to the Franklin expedition all of those years stuck in the ice, thanks largely to stories from the Inuit. Franklin died early, but the rest of the sailors died a longer, slower death. One by one succumbing to scurvy, starvation, zinc deficiency, hypothermia. Some of the sailors may have lived as long as six or seven years out on the ice. But in the end, none of them ever made it back home. Over the course of a decade, almost 32 expeditions went out searching for Franklin. Though those rescue expeditions never found Franklin. They did end up doing what Franklin was unable to. They effectively charted the Northwest Passage. And it was successfully navigated by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906. Luckily for John and I, we didn't suffer quite the same fate as Franklin. We were eventually rescued. It was really only 24 hours later. But it was a long 24 hours. And the real possibility of disaster had hung over all of us. Just the sense that we had come to a place without really knowing how to survive there. As we took our zodiacs across the ocean and loaded onto our new ship, relief washed over everyone. It was only 8 a.m. in the morning, but the bar was open and John and I made ample use of it. It was glorious.
SPEAKER_12: That was almost three years ago.
SPEAKER_08: Calling John.
SPEAKER_11: So lucky he wrote down his information on an index card and then I took a picture of it. Hello? Hi, is this John Stewart?
SPEAKER_12: It is John Stewart. Oh my word, John. Okay, let me tell you, my name is Dylan and we were shipwrecked together. Yeah, for heaven's sake, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_11: I'm doing fine. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_14: Well, I'm doing okay. I clicked over to the 93 the other day. When I was writing this story, I knew I needed to give John a call.
SPEAKER_12: And when I talked to him, what I found out was that wasn't John's last trip. Franklin never made it to Beachy Island and back, and I never even made it to Beachy Island. But you know who did?
SPEAKER_14: I took the next cruise. You went back out. You went back out on another ship.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah, yeah. So I had a great time.
SPEAKER_14: Hoping that you would be there and we'd be cabin mates again.
SPEAKER_14: I would have loved that. I wish, oh, that would have been great.
SPEAKER_12: Well, I'm so glad to hear that you made it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were up above the Arctic Circle, actually.
SPEAKER_14: Then we went ashore, landed at the grave site. There were just four wooden slab headstones there with a brass plaque on each one.
SPEAKER_12: At 93, you've lived quite a full life. Do you have any advice for, you know, I'm 38 now, which to me feels like well on in my years. I've got two young kids. Do you have any advice for me or anyone else? Always be kind to people.
SPEAKER_14: Learn to forgive. Have purpose in life. And friends are one of your most important assets. Cherish them.
SPEAKER_12: I have a memory of John that I will never forget. That last time at the bar when the two of us were together in person, having just been rescued from a stranded ship, drinking a beer at eight in the morning. And in the background, someone put on a famous song about Franklin. People in the bar began singing along.
SPEAKER_13: For just one time, I was taken on first passage To find the hand of Franklin, reaching for the book of the sea.
SPEAKER_12: Whether we meant to or not, we had truly gotten to experience a tiny bit of what it felt like to be out on the Franklin expedition. To follow our curiosity, to embark in the spirit of adventure, and to sail out in Franklin's path. To take one last trip.
SPEAKER_13: For just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage To find the hand of Franklin, reaching for the Beaufort Sea. Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
SPEAKER_08:
SPEAKER_10: More Atlas Obscura, after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks, and if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Chances are you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile.com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile.com.
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SPEAKER_12: In the late 1980s, a suitcase arrived at a warehouse in Scottsboro, Alabama. It wasn't so unusual. A lot of suitcases showed up at this particular warehouse. But inside this bag was something special.
SPEAKER_04: They opened the suitcase and this troll face is staring back at them.
SPEAKER_12: A four-foot tall goblin puppet with a giant head, a huge nose, and piercing blue eyes. I'm Hoggle. Who are you? Inside the bag was the real original Hoggle doll. This beloved character from the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth. I get tickled every time I think about how funny and astonishing that must have been.
SPEAKER_04: We were just amazed at it. We have Hoggle.
SPEAKER_12: If you lose your luggage while traveling, you're probably going to get it back. Ninety-nine point five percent of lost bags ultimately make their way back to their owners. But once in a while, that other point five percent, bags slip through the cracks. And when that happens, airlines will hang on to the luggage for 90 days. They do their best to reunite bag and owner. But after that 90 days, the bag legally becomes the airline's property. And that is when the Unclaimed Baggage Center steps in. The Unclaimed Baggage Center buys orphan bags from the airlines and then either donates, recycles or resells their contents. And they've got contracts with all the domestic airlines and they go and load up these lost bags on semis at the airport and then drive them all the way back to Scottsboro.
SPEAKER_04: A truck just backs up to our building and we unload their suitcases and we have a team of what we call openers that will open the suitcases.
SPEAKER_12: This is Jennifer Kritner and she's been working at Unclaimed Baggage for more than 20 years since she was just five days out of high school.
SPEAKER_04: And they go through each suitcase to figure out, you know, does this item need to be sold? Does this item need to be cleaned? Does this item need to be recycled? Or does this item need to be donated?
SPEAKER_12: Personally, I would love to spend a day being a bag opener. Each bag, it would be like a little Christmas morning. What is in there? What's inside the next one? Although that said, more than once, bag openers have opened up a suitcase and found a live rattlesnake inside. Another time they found an entire bear pelt packed in salt and still in the middle of the curing process. Smell kind of gave it away. So there are some hazards to the job, but there are also some thrills. We've had aluminum fire suits. We've had two full suits of armor.
SPEAKER_04: The most expensive thing that we've ever sold is actually a men's platinum presidential Rolex. It retailed for $64,000. We sold it in our store to a gentleman that shops with us about once a month, and he purchased it for $32,000.
SPEAKER_12: The finer jewelry that winds up at Unclaimed Baggage gets appraised. And I'll just say, this is why I'm a carry-on only kind of guy.
SPEAKER_04: One of the coolest things that we have gotten in in my time here was a 40-karat natural raw emerald. And we found that in the toe of a sock rolled up in the corner of a suitcase. I mean, totally unassuming. You would never think something that's for $30,000 would just be in the toe of a sock tossed in with a dirty laundry, but that's exactly how we found it.
SPEAKER_12: Finding an emerald in someone's dirty laundry is exciting, but for the vast majority of the time, it's just dirty laundry. Lots and lots and lots of dirty laundry.
SPEAKER_04: Every bag tells a story. So some of these bags were on their way to the trip, and some of the bags were coming home from the trip. So you can imagine, it's not as glamorous as one might think, but it is very interesting.
SPEAKER_12: In fact, there is so much dirty laundry that Unclaimed Baggage has its own laundry facility. They process over 50,000 items every month.
SPEAKER_04: That's the biggest straw cleaning service in the state of Alabama. As a matter of fact, that's more than most laundry mats process in an entire year. And so that happens right here in Scottsboro.
SPEAKER_12: The laundry gets washed and the electronics are sent away to be wiped of their previous owner's data. And yes, there are a lot, a lot of electronics, headphones, laptops, iPads. So easy to leave in those seatback pockets. Finally, everything is ready for its second life. If something doesn't get recycled or donated, it goes out to the store shelves. And attention to all bargain hunters out there. Most items in the store are resold for about 20 to 80% off their retail price. There are roughly 45,000 flights every day in the United States. So of the bags that get lost each day, even if only half of 1% of those bags are truly lost, it adds up quick. Unclaimed Baggage Center stocks anywhere from 5,000 to 7,000 new items every single day. Today, Unclaimed Baggage Center is this huge sprawling place. It's bigger than a city block. But it started much, much smaller. In 1970, Doyle Owens was working part-time as an insurance salesman in Scottsboro when he got a call from a friend who worked for a bus company in Washington, D.C. The friend told Doyle about a unique problem he had. He had too many pieces of lost luggage that were just piling up.
SPEAKER_01: I borrowed my dad's pickup truck and $300. That's when the first load went to Washington, D.C. and picked up the bags. Doyle died in 2016, and this is footage from an oral history made by Unclaimed Baggage.
SPEAKER_12: We looked like Jed Clampett's plan of coming back down from Washington, D.C. to Alabama.
SPEAKER_12: When Doyle got back to Scottsboro with his very first luggage haul, he set up a handful of card tables in an old rented house and he ran an ad in the local paper. He planned to be open for just two days, but by the end of the first day, he was already completely sold out. And that's when Doyle knew he was onto something.
SPEAKER_01: I called the guy up. I said, hey, you got some more bags. We're out of merchandise. A few years later, Doyle landed his first contract with an airline company
SPEAKER_12: and eventually locked in contracts with other domestic carriers. He quit his insurance job and the business bopped along steadily. But then in 1995, a little talk show picked up the story.
SPEAKER_05: Did you see a gold necklace that's about right? Actually, I thought I lost it in Newark Airport five years ago. I'm right. Well, there's lots of jewelry inside, Oprah. And the way they price jewelry is that we kind of joke.
SPEAKER_04: It felt like the Queen of England arrived. And truly, from that day forward, it changed everything. It was a game changer. Today, all kinds of people show up to shop at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.
SPEAKER_12: Tourists, locals, people who make one annual giant shopping pilgrimage, millionaires shop for discount Rolexes next to everyday people looking for a new cheap winter jacket. Or just maybe, if they're lucky, Oprah's gold necklace. But a few of the items that come through Unclaimed Baggage are just too special to sell. Like Hoggle from Labyrinth. He's still there. As soon as you walk through the front door, Hoggle is there on your left. And once workers opened up a bag and found a camera from the Space Shuttle. This was one of the earliest iterations of the digital camera. Only three were ever made. So Unclaimed Baggage gave that one back. Other things that turn up at Unclaimed Baggage are genuinely rare and contain these huge stories of humanity and culture. Thinking back over my time, I can remember a trunk of Versace runway gowns that came through just fresh off the runway.
SPEAKER_04: Around the same time, there was a trunk full of amazing hand-painted kimonos. A Tibetan ceremonial horn. A handmade Polynesian grass skirt.
SPEAKER_12: A medicine stick likely from a tribe in the Amazon with a ceremonial shrunken head still attached. One day, this well-worn Gucci suitcase showed up at the store. And inside, it was filled with Egyptian artifacts. Including a burial mask that dated to about 1500 BC. Just around the time when the Phoenicians were putting the final touches on this thing called the alphabet. So, you know, old. Each nondescript rolly bag that arrives at the Unclaimed Baggage Center brings a story with it. Not always as exciting as a live rattlesnake or ancient Egyptian artifacts. But still, there's a story there. Who was this person? Where were they going? Why do they still have a hair crimper? Where were they going to wear those glittery golden sneakers? Were they actually using this iPod Nano or did it just slip into a crevice in their bag and get lost twice over? Does the toddler who lost their panda blankie miss it? All of this, all of the world, contained in one half of one percent of lost luggage. Our bags and ourselves. All there at the Unclaimed Baggage Center.
SPEAKER_12: The Unclaimed Baggage Center is open every day of the week except Sundays. And if you can't make a trip to Scottsboro, Alabama, these days you can still do your bargain hunting in their online store. But it really just gives you a taste of what you'll find in the real brick and mortar store. So if you're looking for a suit of armor or a haggle doll, you better make your way down to Scottsboro.
SPEAKER_10: The Unclaimed Baggage episode was produced by Johanna Mayer. 99% invisible is Martine Gonzalez, who makes this episode for us, Swan Rial, Delaney Hall, Kurt Kolkstad, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lay, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madon, Jason De Leon, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
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