Despite being more than a decade old, Storage Wars is still one of the reality TV greats. The series has maintained viewer intrigue despite rumors of faked finds, dozens of failed spin-offs, and a premise that is essentially Tidying Up with Marie Kondo but with money. Over the course of its more than ten-year-run the series has seen hundreds of interesting finds grace the screen, making it almost impossible to choose just 10 things as the biggest and wildest finds. Not everything on this list brought in a ton of cash, but sometimes the real treasure is the junk you find along the way. We’ve combed through Storage Wars to try to find the most interesting buys the series has to offer.
The tiny piano find
This little piano may not seem like much, but it ended up being the highest priced item of season 1. Barry bought this container for just under $300. The mostly empty shed contained a miniature piano, not one styled for children, but rather — as his expert explained — to show potential buyers a scale model of the product. First developed in New York in the 1830s, Marshall and Wendell salesmen would take these tiny pianos around the country to convince retailers of their quality.
The adorable baby grand was valued at $12K, several thousand dollars more expensive than a full-sized Marshall and Wendell piano of today.
The My Little Pony haul
Bought for just $50, this storage unit had very few pieces in it. Brandi Passante was the first to realize the treasure trove her team had uncovered after a massive rideable My Little Pony first reared its pretty little head. The single tote filled with opened and unopened ponies alike was appraised at just under $900 when put before a collector. With such a massive fan following it was inevitable that Brandi’s “Pegisister” status would solidify her position as a fan favorite among Bronies everywhere.
The forgotten voodoo stash
Brandi was the lucky buyer of one of the more unconventional cool finds on Storage Wars. Immediately creeped out when she stumbled across the antlers and skull cap of a deer, she handed the rest of the dirty business off to her crew. As baggies filled with animal bones, totems made with beaks and talons, and some sort of ceremonial staff were removed Brandi was clearly losing her cool.
With Passante unwilling to sell the items in her shop, we never got the full breakdown behind the potential religious meaning within the collection, but it certainly left an impression. Viewers will never know if that was actually human hair or not.
The vintage video game treasure trove
As someone who worked in one of those used video game stores, I can’t tell you how many dude-bros would come in with a copy of Super Mario 3 thinking they had won the video game resale jackpot. While Rene Nezhoda starts this interaction in that exact energy, it doesn’t take long for him to start pulling out some real beauties. He finds dozens of totes filled to the brim with Sega Genesis titles, NES cartridges, original Game & Watch LED handhelds, and a plethora of hardware attachments to boot. Unlike Darrell’s comic book container this shed smacks of a seasoned collector rather than the remains of a store.
It’s a little disconcerting to see Rene hurl the cartridges to the side as his Nintendo collector friend Fluffy — who is YouTube personality Phillip “Fluffy Gamer” Braden — gives him massive ballpark estimates, but it’s obvious that regardless of any recently shattered components, Rene has struck gold with this one. The final total falls around $45,000 but it seems a bit conservative if you ask me. For all of his friend’s trouble, Rene gave Fluffy MUSHA for the friendly low price of $120.
The lost paintings of Frank Gutierrez
Despite having the highest payout in all of Storage Wars history, Darrell Sheets’ incredible find comes in fairly early in this list. The season 3 finale saw Sheetz drop $3K on a unit filled with paintings. The ample paintings were the work of Frank Gutierrez, a notable Mexican Impressionist painter and a “very important artist of a piece of Chicano history,” according to the expert.
Darrell’s gamble paid off, with the total of the unit coming to more than $300K. Allegedly, Darrell tracked Gutierrez down after getting his treasure valued and confirmed that the locker’s former owner was indeed the painter. While he didn’t return any of his money-making paintings, Sheets did return a number of personal items that belonged to Gutierrez.
The three chicken glasses
One of the most ludicrously expensive and niche collectors’ items to appear on Storage Wars was found by Barry Weiss. Three tiny pieces of aluminum and plastic turned out to be Chicken Glasses. Produced in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, they were sold by the millions to curb violent behaviors in domesticated chickens — they are descendants of dinosaurs after all. Sliding over the chicken’s beak, the colorful visors helped to calm the bird’s killer instincts by obscuring the color of blood and preventing them from pecking each other’s eyes out.
The tiny spectacles could be purchased from Sears catalogs for three dollars, but they fell out of style as farmers and poultry industrialists opted for beak cutting instead. Nowadays the tiny ocular devices are considered collectors’ items. Though Barry only found three pairs, the excitable chicken farmer told him that to the right collector, they were well worth 500 bucks apiece.
The comic book store find
This unit was the bet that kept on giving. Darrell Sheets bid on the absolutely loaded unit after the briefest glimpse of the arcade cabinet and some sort of Kiss storage container. His instincts were right on the money — somewhere around $74,000 after everything was inventoried. The container was filled with unopened action figures, plastic-wrapped comic issues, and hot wheels tightly sealed in their packaging. He estimated that there were 3000 comic book issues in total, all perfectly alphabetized and waiting to find their way onto a comic book store shelf.
It was hard not to feel a little jealous seeing the absolutely amazing items the Sheets pulled from container after container in this one.
The vintage peep show
Oh Barry, no one seemed to lose as often as the former music executive, but he always did it with a smile. One of his most amazing buys during his short tenure on the show was a Mutoscope, a motion picture device from the the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Though they were initially manufactured for use in arcades or on “pleasure piers,” the devices would eventually be re-centered on softcore pornographic materials and gained a reputation for “the corruption of youth.”
The vintage peepshow was easily one of the coolest finds on Storage Wars. Weighing in at somewhere around 100 lbs, the authentic penny arcade machine was described by the silent movie expert Barry leaned on to appraise the piece as a “really, really fancy, over-produced flip-book.” Essentially a rolladex of images, users would pay to power up the piece and then crank a handle to “play” the movie. The neat find was appraised somewhere between 6 and 7 thousand dollars.
The breast augmentation machine
Dave Hester was the lucky new owner of an alternative breast augmentation machine in Storage wars season 3. First developed in the 1970s, these “enhancement devices” relied on stretching tissue to encourage, as doctor Ed Hassan writes for Zwivel, “cells to up-regulate their division rate, deposit more connective tissue between the cells, and realign themselves to expand in the direction in which they were stretched.” Hassan goes on to say that such a device only has minimal efficacy and results only showed after more than a month of 10-12 hours daily of use.
The diminished popularity of these contraptions should be enough to tell you enlargement pumps of any kind are mostly medical quackery, but that didn’t stop Dave from creepily relishing his newfound prize. With the device missing the vest to complete the setup — knocking his profit from just below $1K to around $400 — the bargain hunter decided to keep the pair of silicone covers to “have some fun with them.” The look his expert gave him at the end of the segment summarizes this creepy encounter.
The human skeleton
This Storage Wars find was like the premise of a horror movie. Dave discovered a nondescript wicker basket with an instrument case filled with none other than human bones casually tossed into his season 1 episode 18 locker. He described the discovery as the strangest thing he’d ever found and immediately boxed it back up in order to get an expert opinion. The expert pointed to the cleanliness of the bones and the careful threading of nylon through them as proof that the skeleton was for medical use. She valued the skull alone at $700, and a single hand at $300. All-in-all the skeleton retailed for around $1600.
The segment is controversial for some fans, who point to it as one of the first moments of network staged discoveries. Most states require human remains to be reported to the police, and fans point to this breach in protocol as proof that A&E had planted the case for drama.