The Gold Mines of Self Storage

When self-storage has been abandoned for some time, they often go to auction. The show Storage Wars gave light to some of these fantastic finds. These excellent storage lockers have their own stories to tell when they come into possession, but you are never really sure what you may get when you buy one.

Beach Boys Collection

In Florida, during the late 2000s, a radio station decided to get in on the storage locker buying action. They purchased a locker during a blind auction for only $300. The locker had initially been rented out during the 1970s, but around 2006 the person who initially rented the locker stopped paying for it, and the contents sat unclaimed. The locker was originally listed containing documents, and other paperwork and the locker was being sold to make back the payments that had been left unpaid. When the locker was sold the buyers from the radio station went to clean it out to find out what they had purchased. In the locker, they found out those documents were photographs, handwritten lyric sheets, musical arrangements, contracts, and even royalty cheques that all belonged to the musical superstars, The Beach Boys. The remaining members found out and battled it out to try and reclaim the material. However, it was eventually sold again via a sealed bid auction for a sum that was believed to be around six million pounds.

Submarine Car

A man bought an abandoned storage unit in Long Island for only $100 what he found inside was beyond imagination. When they first started to look in the locker, they did not see much that could be of use. They fiddled through old blankets, sheets, and papers, however, they did not expect to uncover a car. But this was not just any car; it was the Lotus submarine car that was used in the 1977 James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me. The man who bought the locker turned out that he had never seen a Bond movie before and had no idea just how incredible of a find he had stumbled upon. He was not informed until he was driving home with it on the back of his flatbed truck that a passerby told him of what he had. In 2013 the car was sold for an impressive $966,560 to the famous Tesla CEO Elon Musk.