I work part-time at a small thrift store to help cover some of my college expenses, and one of my duties is to go through and sort the donated items.
The donations get sorted by type/department and then set aside so they can be priced later, anything deemed too damaged to be sold is thrown away, and anything that seems like it was donated by mistake (you’d be surprised how many people accidentally donate their relative’s ashes) gets set on a specific shelf where it stays for a while to give whoever donated it a chance to come back for it.
Now I’ve come across a lot of weird stuff in my time working there, but recently we’ve been getting some more… genuinely disturbing items.
The first was a small vintage photo album, we get a lot of these but I always make sure to look through them so we don’t end up selling someone’s family photos.
Taped down to the first page of the album was a lock of human hair, with a name and a date written underneath it in neat script.
This didn’t immediately strike me as strange; it’s not terribly uncommon for folks to hold onto a lock of their kid’s hair from their first haircut, and I’d come across similar things in other donated photo albums before. Turning to the second page of the album did not reveal family photos like I was expecting, but another lock of hair. I turned the page again. More hair. I ended up going through the entire album, and on every page there was a lock of hair, each with a different name and date written underneath.
I’d never come across anything exceptionally suspicious while going through the donations before, and I was feeling a bit shaken up about it. I took the album over to Kathryn, an older woman who’d been working there much longer than I had, and asked her what I should do with it. She told me to put it on the shelf that we’d designated for unintentionally donated items, and said that she’d sort through the rest of this batch of donations,
The rest of my shift passed without incident, with the exception of an ancient-looking gentleman who kept trying to get me to purchase a watch off of him despite being told multiple times that we aren’t a pawn shop, but that’s fairly standard frustrating customer service stuff.
I wasn’t at work when they found the next one.
It was an ornately carved wooden box with a metal latch, maybe a little bit bigger than the average jewelry box. The person tasked with sorting through the donations that day (a teenaged employee who’s name escapes me at the moment) noticed that it made a sort of… rattling sound when picked up, so they opened it.
It was filled with human teeth.
Not baby teeth, no, these were adult teeth with roots. Apparently a few even had visible crowns and metal fillings.
This, as you would probably imagine, resulted in one of the managers contacting the police, and both the box of teeth and the hair album were turned over to them. They asked us to report any similar donations going forward, and, about a week later, I got to make that report.
The black trash bags filled with bloody clothing and the velvet coin pouch filled with torn fingernails were, again, turned over to the police. They’ve got a squad car parked by our donation drop-off now, but if I’m being honest, I don’t think that’s going to stop whoever’s been doing this.
They’ve been able to match some of the DNA found on the donated items with people on the missing persons database, so this isn’t some sort of elaborate, fucked up prank. I wish it was though, wish I could get through my work day without being terrified that I’ll stumble across human remains.
I’ve considered quitting, but I really, *really* need the money, and I keep thinking that if I just get through this, everything will go back to normal.
The smell coming off of this batch of donations makes me think otherwise.