Auction Hunters: Season 2, Bonus Episode: “Night of the Digging Dead.”
Haff-Ton team drove to Oxnard, California. Oxnard has beaches, mansions, agriculture, and manufacturing. Anything and everything could be inside a storage locker.
Fact: Oxnard is infamous for its violent surfer gangs.
Jewelry cabinet, flat screen TVs, fire safe, scuba tank, detergent, furniture, fake plant, and boxes. Duo won the locker for $1,000.
The fire safe was locked. Allen used his break-into-safe skills. He dropped the corner of the safe onto the floor. Inside? No gold or silver. Papers and card titles. Wah. Wah. Wah.
Allen scuba gear and steel cage-like parts. Ton blew a cap. He knew what the steel cage was. A shark cage!
Duo put the cage together. Had all its parts. They took the cage to Chris, a shark boat captain. It was a nice cage. Had a good floating system. Decent condition and higher valued cage than most.
Fact: Rodney Fox invented the first shark cage in 1965 after surviving a near fatal shark attack.
Shark cage had to be tested. First to see if it would hold up in water. Secondly to see if it would hold up against a shark attack. Say what?
Time to head out to sea into shark infested waters. Ton would take the plunge to meet Jaws!
Fact: Great white sharks can detect blood in the water from 3 miles away.
Chris lowered the cage into the water. All was quiet. Then… OH NO! One of the floatation devices broke loose from the cage. Soon after, the bottom of the cage fell off! Ton had no yet jumped into the cage. Phew! Nothing like 300 pounds of Ton bait.
The cage’s value lowered, of course. Duo sold the cage for $500.
Vintage furniture, wall clock, pharmacy tubs, old doctor diagrams, and boxes. Haff-Ton team won the unit for $550.
It was very late at night by the time the duo dug through locker.
Ton unpacked boxes of games and hot wheels. Allen found an undertaker’s certificate dating back to 1926. Don’t think that had value, but the antique postmortem equipment with embalmer might.
Fact: In 1865, Lincoln became the first U.S. President to be embalmed.
Allen also retrieved a doctor’s bag from the 1920’s with an electric bone saw inside. He could literally saw someone in Haff… I meant half. Or did I?
Ton found a vintage undertakers tool kit. Who owned this storage unit? Creep-o-mongus! Duo took the postmortem equipment to the morgue to show Sean, who was an autopsy technician and collector.
Fact: An average of 2.4 million corpses pass through U.S. mortuaries annually.
The electric bone saw interested Sean. It was from the 1940’s. Electric bone saws revolutionized how bodies were examined. Sean speculated how many thousands of heads that saw had opened. Allen really didn’t want to think about it. Can’t say I blame him.
Sean wanted to see how straight and accurate the saw could would cut. Allen held sample skull. Saw cut right through that dead skull. That’s just wrong on so many levels.
Sean paid $8,500 for all the morticians equipment.
Ton could have been shark bait. Allen cut through a skull. What a weird day at auction.
Auction Total:
Paid $1,550
Sold: $9,680
Profit: $8,130
Please post your insightful and thoughtful opinions in the comment box below.