Gravestone, Human Ashes, Live Turtle And More Bizarre Items Left At Airport

Sunglasses, headphones, neck pillows: these are all possible items that could be left behind at an airport. But when it comes to Dublin Airport, the objects in the lost and found bin are much more bizarre. Included in the strange mix were a headstone with the ironic epitaph, “You will never be forgotten,” a turtle and a toilet seat.

So how did someone just leave behind a headstone? A few years ago, the owner “misplaced” the item at a drop-off point to the departures area, DAA spokeswoman Audrey O'Hagan told The Herald Monday.

Also left in the departure entrance of the airport were human ashes, false teeth, a life-size mannequin and a glass eye. These items could be retrieved within a year of being abandoned, The Herald wrote.

Among the more popular items to be discarded were crutches and wheelchairs. O’Hagan joked to The Herald that the airport staff wondered if there were “some miraculous recoveries have taken place within the terminals.”

As for the live turtle, it wasn’t forgotten. A passenger attempted to smuggle the turtle in their pocket. When security guards discovered it, the turtle was handed over to a family member who was not going on the flight. The animal was not harmed.

It seems like people attempted to bring everything, including the kitchen sink. While this is normally a metaphor, airport staff once caught a traveler attempted to sneak a kitchen sink in their hand luggage.

Most recently, a passenger left behind a set of “cast iron dungeon keys” June 11 and a month later a “brown envelope” was found. The Herald didn’t reveal what items the “brown envelope” contained.

While people leave behind strange items at the airport, some might argue flight attendants must follow some bizarre rules. In Russia, a flight attendant is suing Russia’s top airline Aeroflot for discrimination. She claimed she was demoted because she was “old, fat and ugly.”

“Right now there’s a policy that a flight attendant has to be sexually attractive,” Yevgeniya Magurina told the Associated Press Monday. “But our role onboard is different: it’s to ensure safety, not to be an object of sexual desire. This is wrong and hurtful.” She added: “No one cares about professionalism — you have to be young, slim and pretty.”

Magurina, 42, said the airline stopped making her size last year. A few months later, she was demoted without being notified. She had showed up to go on an international flight, but wasn’t able to take the job. Previously, she had been a senior flight attendant, but was downgraded to a junior attendant, which meant she wasn’t given the coveted jobs.

“You scan your pass, the names of the crew light up and you see your position. No one [had] even told me,” she told the AP.

A spokesperson for Aeroflot didn’t take the lawsuit seriously, saying it was “a routine employee vs. employer dispute that has been deliberately inflated to the scale of a public campaign aimed at tarnishing the airline’s reputation.”

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