Here is an article about the unusual items that are lost at Disney World daily, and what happens to them.
The lost world
By Linda Shrieves | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted December 4, 2002
It has to be the glass eye.
Or maybe the color television set.
Or the child's potty trainer.
It's hard to say exactly what might win the title of Strangest Thing a Tourist Has Ever Lost at Disney World.
But every day brings a quirky combination of the mundane and insane at Walt Disney World's lost and found department, a 15-by-50 foot room that might be more appropriately named the Land of the Forgotten Stuff.
In Central Florida, where America loves to vacation, Americans lose an incredible amount of stuff -- at Disney, at Universal, at the hotels, at the airport. And much of it they never bother to claim.
It's slow season now, a time when these places get a break from the tsunami of gadgets and geegaws that have gone missing.
But the tales of weird items that have been found continue to pile up unabated year-round.
In a room that smells vaguely of old sneakers and wet T-shirts, a team of four Disney workers carefully catalogs the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the shores of Splash Mountain, the sidewalks of Epcot or the foothills of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
It's a relentless task.
Each morning, a truck arrives at the Lost & Found storeroom outside the Magic Kingdom, bearing the detritus collected the day before.
On a winter day at Disney, the lost-and-found truck dumps only 400 to 500 items a day. In summer, when tourists pack the theme parks, the staff wades through a jumble of more than 1,000 articles daily.
To make sense of the mound of misplaced things, employees sort the most common items by description -- heaps of tortoise-shell glasses, black sunglasses, wire sunglasses and assorted sunglasses -- and mark the boxes with the date they were lost. Each day produces a box of lost red hats, along with separate boxes of blue hats, brown hats, straw hats and visors.
Baby strollers, from cheap umbrella strollers to expensive jogging strollers, are one of the most commonly lost items. Cell phones, once exotic and rare, are shooting into the top 10 list. Cameras, both expensive and disposable, also pile up, along with another popular gadget of late -- two-way radios.
Yet every day brings a laugh to Kim Lauver, a "Disney operations hostess," and her crew. Recently, an electric razor appeared in their daily stash, leading the staff to wonder who would shave at a theme park. Once, they discovered a full-size color television in the parking lot. And there's the never-ending parade of crutches, wheelchairs and canes left behind.
"We don't know how these people get home," says Lauver, shaking her head.
Together, Lauver and her crew have seen everything -- from a glass eye that popped out of a tourist's head on Space Mountain (and the man who later showed up to claim it) to toupees that routinely fly off men's heads on Splash Mountain, then swish and squish through the water system before an employee retrieves them.
"They're pretty nasty by the time they make it here," says Lauver.
And then there are the prosthetic arms and legs.
"Oh, we get body parts all the time," Lauver says. The limbs are frequently jolted loose by amusement park rides. But unlike sunglasses and hats, body parts usually are claimed by their owners.
Shocking the lost-and-found crew at Disney is a lot like shocking the makers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Not gonna happen.
"When you're around it all the time," says Lauver, with a shrug, "nothing's strange."
Detective work
At Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, the lost and found department is smaller and noticeably less odorous. One reason: Employees toss out anything that's wet.
"If it's slimy, it's not coming in here," says Jeff Polk, Universal's park operations director. "We figured it wasn't good for employees' health."
It's also noticeably less busy. While Disney World retrieves more than 100,000 lost items during the summer, Universal Studios ends up with about 20,000 items at its park each year.
Chalk that up to visitors with older children, Polk says.
Sunglasses top the list of items collected, followed by hats and cell phones. Shoes and keys show up periodically underneath the roller coasters.
An occasional Spiderman doll gets turned in -- remnants of a forgetful family -- but the lineup is pretty standard.
Except for the dentures.
"You'd be surprised how many dentures we get," says Trisha Engler, assistant director of park operations. "Sometimes they take them out while they're eating, leave them on the table at a restaurant -- and we end up with them in here."
Like detectives, the lost and found crew members at parks diligently try to find the owners of the merchandise.
If the clothing or camera or stroller has a name and address on it, the theme parks mail the item back to the owners, free of charge.
If a wheelchair is rented, they call the rental company. If a cell phone's batteries are still working, they check the phone's internal listings and leave a message with Dad or Grandma.
"We try to find the owners any way we can," Polk says. "We've tracked down kids who've lost autograph books by looking up their Girl Scout troop. We've had doctors who've lost their Palm Pilots and we've overnighted them back to them."
But it's not easy being a lost-and-found detective in an era of increasing privacy concerns. Years ago, staffers could track down someone who had lost bags of merchandise by checking for a credit card number on a receipt. No longer. Now, they just hold on to the bags of brand new dolls and T-shirts and hope the owners show up to claim them
Throwaway society
In Central Florida's theme parks, only 25 percent of the found items are claimed.
That's a testament to the affluence of American society, says Betsy Taylor, president of the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md.
"There's this throwaway mentality, that it's easier to go get another camera than to try and track down one you've lost," says Taylor. "There's also a shortage of time. People who go to Disney World are only there for a few days, and there's so much to do."
The state prescribes a timetable for how long the parks must hold on to missing items. Valuable items, such as jewelry and watches, must be held for 90 days, while the generic junk stays for 30 days.
After one month, the theme parks divide the bounty into two categories: Charities generally pick up the wheelchairs, canes, crutches, strollers and eyeglasses, as well as brand-new stuffed animals. The rest of the stuff heads for an employee sale, the equivalent of a gigantic yard sale for theme-park employees. At Disney, because so much is lost there, the property department conducts a never-ending yard sale, with new items showing up daily, spread out on tables in employee break areas. Proceeds from those sales go to Disney charities.
At Universal, the remaining stuff goes on the block at a gigantic employee yard sale held twice a year -- a big event for the workers.
"We had one employee who bought 50 pairs of sunglasses for five dollars," says Trisha Engler at Universal. "She wore a different pair of sunglasses every day for several months."
At hotels, wads of cash
While theme parks collect hats and clothing and strollers, airports and hotels rake in other kinds of valuables.
At hotels that cater to families with children, teddy bears and children's favorite blankies lead the list of missing items.
"We have a huge room full of lost stuff, " says Rebecca Hernandez with Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Lake Buena Vista.
As the hotel's marketing and public relations staffer, Hernandez frequently handles telephone calls from distraught parents desperately searching for their child's teddy bear.
But customers, not the hotel, pick up the mailing fee.
"People in the United States usually say, 'Oh, just send it regular mail,' " says Hernandez. "But if they're from overseas, they want it overnighted."
Nobody balks about paying international prices?
"Oh, no," she says, laughing. "They'll pay it."
Business and convention travelers, on the other hand, don't leave behind their favorite blankies, but cell-phone chargers, prescription glasses, car keys and, yes, nightgowns and robes left on the hook behind the hotel door.
"The No. 1 item left behind is the cell-phone charger," says Lori Babb of the Renaissance Orlando Resort. "We probably ship out five or six cell-phone chargers every day."
But a surprising number of people leave the hotel -- and forget large amounts of cash or paperwork in the hotel safe.
"We get a lot of calls from the airport, when people realize they can't pay for their ticket or they don't have their passport," Babb says.
The hotel quickly dispatches a bellman to the airport with their valuables.
Yet at the airport, travelers lose still other items -- most frequently, cell phones and laptop computers, says Chris Camerino, who oversees the airport's passenger terminal operations.
If the phone or computer's batteries are still working, the airport's lost-and-found crew can usually find the owner -- which is why the airport succeeds in returning half of the lost items to their owners.
Still, there's no way to find the owners of some things -- like the two trees wrapped in plastic that a worker recently discovered in a terminal. Or the airport staff favorite: a pair of handcuffs that was never claimed.
Widespread honesty
In the gargantuan complex of hotels and shops and parks that make up Disney World, the company operates 23 lost and found offices.
But the bulk of the action -- and the most unusual discoveries -- occur in Lauver's jurisdiction, the four theme parks and their parking lots.
And what tourists leave behind in a parking lot is often as astounding as what they lose inside the parks.
There's that full-size television. ("We think it came out of a camper that was in the parking lot," says Lauver.) Barbecue grills. A tire. And more wheelchairs.
Yet amid the mountains of debris that pile up each day in the lost and found departments, there's one thing that raises the eyebrow of even the blasé lost-and-found staffers.
Wads of cash.
Three years ago, a man lost a wallet with $10,000 cash inside and no identification. To his amazement, someone turned it in -- with all the money intact.
One particular tale of lost lucre still amazes them. Several years ago, a wallet turned up with $8,000 cash inside -- and no one ever showed up to retrieve it. With no identification and no way to find the owner, Disney followed the law: After one year, it turned the money over to the state of Florida. The state, in turn, put the money in an unclaimed property fund, which is given to the state school system.
But what's most surprising at the lost and found departments isn't the odd stuff that shows up each day. What's truly surprising is how honest people are. In a city where many people still believe in Disney's famous "pixie dust," chances are good that if a visitor lost a wallet or a camcorder or a prosthetic leg, someone would turn it in -- rather than steal it.
"People may find it hard to believe," says Lauver, "but here, you just might get it back."
Linda Shrieves can be reached at lshrieves@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5433.
Copyright © 2002, Orlando Sentinel
The lost world
By Linda Shrieves | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted December 4, 2002
It has to be the glass eye.
Or maybe the color television set.
Or the child's potty trainer.
It's hard to say exactly what might win the title of Strangest Thing a Tourist Has Ever Lost at Disney World.
But every day brings a quirky combination of the mundane and insane at Walt Disney World's lost and found department, a 15-by-50 foot room that might be more appropriately named the Land of the Forgotten Stuff.
In Central Florida, where America loves to vacation, Americans lose an incredible amount of stuff -- at Disney, at Universal, at the hotels, at the airport. And much of it they never bother to claim.
It's slow season now, a time when these places get a break from the tsunami of gadgets and geegaws that have gone missing.
But the tales of weird items that have been found continue to pile up unabated year-round.
In a room that smells vaguely of old sneakers and wet T-shirts, a team of four Disney workers carefully catalogs the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the shores of Splash Mountain, the sidewalks of Epcot or the foothills of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
It's a relentless task.
Each morning, a truck arrives at the Lost & Found storeroom outside the Magic Kingdom, bearing the detritus collected the day before.
On a winter day at Disney, the lost-and-found truck dumps only 400 to 500 items a day. In summer, when tourists pack the theme parks, the staff wades through a jumble of more than 1,000 articles daily.
To make sense of the mound of misplaced things, employees sort the most common items by description -- heaps of tortoise-shell glasses, black sunglasses, wire sunglasses and assorted sunglasses -- and mark the boxes with the date they were lost. Each day produces a box of lost red hats, along with separate boxes of blue hats, brown hats, straw hats and visors.
Baby strollers, from cheap umbrella strollers to expensive jogging strollers, are one of the most commonly lost items. Cell phones, once exotic and rare, are shooting into the top 10 list. Cameras, both expensive and disposable, also pile up, along with another popular gadget of late -- two-way radios.
Yet every day brings a laugh to Kim Lauver, a "Disney operations hostess," and her crew. Recently, an electric razor appeared in their daily stash, leading the staff to wonder who would shave at a theme park. Once, they discovered a full-size color television in the parking lot. And there's the never-ending parade of crutches, wheelchairs and canes left behind.
"We don't know how these people get home," says Lauver, shaking her head.
Together, Lauver and her crew have seen everything -- from a glass eye that popped out of a tourist's head on Space Mountain (and the man who later showed up to claim it) to toupees that routinely fly off men's heads on Splash Mountain, then swish and squish through the water system before an employee retrieves them.
"They're pretty nasty by the time they make it here," says Lauver.
And then there are the prosthetic arms and legs.
"Oh, we get body parts all the time," Lauver says. The limbs are frequently jolted loose by amusement park rides. But unlike sunglasses and hats, body parts usually are claimed by their owners.
Shocking the lost-and-found crew at Disney is a lot like shocking the makers of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Not gonna happen.
"When you're around it all the time," says Lauver, with a shrug, "nothing's strange."
Detective work
At Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, the lost and found department is smaller and noticeably less odorous. One reason: Employees toss out anything that's wet.
"If it's slimy, it's not coming in here," says Jeff Polk, Universal's park operations director. "We figured it wasn't good for employees' health."
It's also noticeably less busy. While Disney World retrieves more than 100,000 lost items during the summer, Universal Studios ends up with about 20,000 items at its park each year.
Chalk that up to visitors with older children, Polk says.
Sunglasses top the list of items collected, followed by hats and cell phones. Shoes and keys show up periodically underneath the roller coasters.
An occasional Spiderman doll gets turned in -- remnants of a forgetful family -- but the lineup is pretty standard.
Except for the dentures.
"You'd be surprised how many dentures we get," says Trisha Engler, assistant director of park operations. "Sometimes they take them out while they're eating, leave them on the table at a restaurant -- and we end up with them in here."
Like detectives, the lost and found crew members at parks diligently try to find the owners of the merchandise.
If the clothing or camera or stroller has a name and address on it, the theme parks mail the item back to the owners, free of charge.
If a wheelchair is rented, they call the rental company. If a cell phone's batteries are still working, they check the phone's internal listings and leave a message with Dad or Grandma.
"We try to find the owners any way we can," Polk says. "We've tracked down kids who've lost autograph books by looking up their Girl Scout troop. We've had doctors who've lost their Palm Pilots and we've overnighted them back to them."
But it's not easy being a lost-and-found detective in an era of increasing privacy concerns. Years ago, staffers could track down someone who had lost bags of merchandise by checking for a credit card number on a receipt. No longer. Now, they just hold on to the bags of brand new dolls and T-shirts and hope the owners show up to claim them
Throwaway society
In Central Florida's theme parks, only 25 percent of the found items are claimed.
That's a testament to the affluence of American society, says Betsy Taylor, president of the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md.
"There's this throwaway mentality, that it's easier to go get another camera than to try and track down one you've lost," says Taylor. "There's also a shortage of time. People who go to Disney World are only there for a few days, and there's so much to do."
The state prescribes a timetable for how long the parks must hold on to missing items. Valuable items, such as jewelry and watches, must be held for 90 days, while the generic junk stays for 30 days.
After one month, the theme parks divide the bounty into two categories: Charities generally pick up the wheelchairs, canes, crutches, strollers and eyeglasses, as well as brand-new stuffed animals. The rest of the stuff heads for an employee sale, the equivalent of a gigantic yard sale for theme-park employees. At Disney, because so much is lost there, the property department conducts a never-ending yard sale, with new items showing up daily, spread out on tables in employee break areas. Proceeds from those sales go to Disney charities.
At Universal, the remaining stuff goes on the block at a gigantic employee yard sale held twice a year -- a big event for the workers.
"We had one employee who bought 50 pairs of sunglasses for five dollars," says Trisha Engler at Universal. "She wore a different pair of sunglasses every day for several months."
At hotels, wads of cash
While theme parks collect hats and clothing and strollers, airports and hotels rake in other kinds of valuables.
At hotels that cater to families with children, teddy bears and children's favorite blankies lead the list of missing items.
"We have a huge room full of lost stuff, " says Rebecca Hernandez with Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Lake Buena Vista.
As the hotel's marketing and public relations staffer, Hernandez frequently handles telephone calls from distraught parents desperately searching for their child's teddy bear.
But customers, not the hotel, pick up the mailing fee.
"People in the United States usually say, 'Oh, just send it regular mail,' " says Hernandez. "But if they're from overseas, they want it overnighted."
Nobody balks about paying international prices?
"Oh, no," she says, laughing. "They'll pay it."
Business and convention travelers, on the other hand, don't leave behind their favorite blankies, but cell-phone chargers, prescription glasses, car keys and, yes, nightgowns and robes left on the hook behind the hotel door.
"The No. 1 item left behind is the cell-phone charger," says Lori Babb of the Renaissance Orlando Resort. "We probably ship out five or six cell-phone chargers every day."
But a surprising number of people leave the hotel -- and forget large amounts of cash or paperwork in the hotel safe.
"We get a lot of calls from the airport, when people realize they can't pay for their ticket or they don't have their passport," Babb says.
The hotel quickly dispatches a bellman to the airport with their valuables.
Yet at the airport, travelers lose still other items -- most frequently, cell phones and laptop computers, says Chris Camerino, who oversees the airport's passenger terminal operations.
If the phone or computer's batteries are still working, the airport's lost-and-found crew can usually find the owner -- which is why the airport succeeds in returning half of the lost items to their owners.
Still, there's no way to find the owners of some things -- like the two trees wrapped in plastic that a worker recently discovered in a terminal. Or the airport staff favorite: a pair of handcuffs that was never claimed.
Widespread honesty
In the gargantuan complex of hotels and shops and parks that make up Disney World, the company operates 23 lost and found offices.
But the bulk of the action -- and the most unusual discoveries -- occur in Lauver's jurisdiction, the four theme parks and their parking lots.
And what tourists leave behind in a parking lot is often as astounding as what they lose inside the parks.
There's that full-size television. ("We think it came out of a camper that was in the parking lot," says Lauver.) Barbecue grills. A tire. And more wheelchairs.
Yet amid the mountains of debris that pile up each day in the lost and found departments, there's one thing that raises the eyebrow of even the blasé lost-and-found staffers.
Wads of cash.
Three years ago, a man lost a wallet with $10,000 cash inside and no identification. To his amazement, someone turned it in -- with all the money intact.
One particular tale of lost lucre still amazes them. Several years ago, a wallet turned up with $8,000 cash inside -- and no one ever showed up to retrieve it. With no identification and no way to find the owner, Disney followed the law: After one year, it turned the money over to the state of Florida. The state, in turn, put the money in an unclaimed property fund, which is given to the state school system.
But what's most surprising at the lost and found departments isn't the odd stuff that shows up each day. What's truly surprising is how honest people are. In a city where many people still believe in Disney's famous "pixie dust," chances are good that if a visitor lost a wallet or a camcorder or a prosthetic leg, someone would turn it in -- rather than steal it.
"People may find it hard to believe," says Lauver, "but here, you just might get it back."
Linda Shrieves can be reached at lshrieves@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5433.
Copyright © 2002, Orlando Sentinel
