Cats, cash, slithering snakes, underwear, an artificial arm and a rooster. The last place those critters and objects belong is in a public mailbox, but that's where some of them have ended up.
People inadvertently and purposely deposit more than letters into some of the U.S. Postal Service's 326,000 blue collection boxes every day.
"I saw a lady who dropped her checkbook in the Rockville mail slot in the lobby right at midnight on April 15," said Mark Saunders, spokesman for the Postal Service's headquarters in Southwest Washington. When the frenzied tax filer informed a postal clerk, he immediately recovered it for her.
"All items are not 'accidentally' put into the collection boxes," said Pat McGovern, a New York City postal spokesman. "Often the box is used as a dump site for pickpockets who steal wallets or purses, take out the money and 'dump' the wallet or purse."
New York carriers routinely find ID badges, glasses, keys and credit cards in the metal boxes. They've also fished out coconuts, crickets and "sexual apparatus," McGovern said.
After last year's terrorist attacks and letters laden with anthrax spores, the Postal Service removed some boxes due to local security concerns and instituted other safety measures, though Saunders declined to discuss details, citing employees' security needs. But before and after Sept. 11, dangerous and unseemly items have made their way into postal boxes. In the District, guns, knives, firecrackers and hypodermic needles have been found. Feces, trash and dead animals have been fetched from the bins as well.
Living animals have been stuffed into the receptacles, too. About a month ago a mail carrier encountered a rooster when he unlocked an urban Pittsburgh collection box. "It actually came flapping out and the spurs on his feet sliced his uniform," said postal employee Diana Svoboda. The furious fowl is still on the lam. "It's doing a lot of cockle-a-doodle-doo-ing at the crack of dawn and it's driving the neighbors nuts."
This summer a carrier rescued a gray hamster from an out-of-town collection box in Clifton Heights, on the outskirts of Philadelphia -- home of the first dead letter office, established in 1753 by Benjamin Franklin. "No one called to claim him," said the Postal Service's Belinda Kelley. "One of our carriers showed compassion and provided the hamster with a loving home."
Although pythons and other creepy creatures are sometimes found mingling among the manila envelopes in mailboxes, more typically kittens and cats wind up there. Clothes also appear from time to time. A pair of new perfumed black lacy thong panties with a little pink ball fringe was once discovered in a collection box in Fort Worth. Flustered customers commonly drop cell phones, bank deposits, airline tickets, legal documents and even wedding rings into collection boxes.
Although many postal patrons don't realize it, if they slip something in by mistake and then quickly alert their local post office, a supervisor may be able to retrieve it. Mail with an illegible address and no return address is soon forwarded to one of the Postal Service's three Mail Recovery Centers.
When consultant Melissa Zimmerman accidentally dropped an unsealed, unmarked white envelope containing $150 in cash and $550 in endorsed checks into a collection box around the Fourth of July, she frantically called her post office in Canton, Ohio. Employees returned her envelope the following day. "There wasn't even a dollar missing," said Zimmerman, 25, who had earmarked the cash for a vacation in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "I had tears in my eyes because of the honesty."
Earlier this year, postal workers reunited an elderly Cranston, R.I., woman with $1,200 she dropped in a mailbox before rushing to Florida.
In Charleston, W.Va., postal employees have found a $52,000 check, death certificates and wills. One Friday night in Knoxville, Tenn., someone popped a marriage license into a box. It was slated for a wedding the next day. An artificial arm turned up at the Claims and Inquiries office in Columbus, Ohio, about five years ago. "It was never claimed locally," said postal spokesman Ray Jacobs. "It was sent to the Mail Recovery Center. As far as we know, it was disposed of there."
The recovery centers, in Atlanta, San Francisco, and St. Paul, Minn., returned more than 6 million errant checks, totaling about $1.5 billion, in the last fiscal year, Saunders said. Employees located the money among the 118 million letters and 1.7 million packages processed last year at the Mail Recovery Centers, the name for "dead letter offices" since 1994. When the letters arrive, machines scan them to detect checks, cash and credit cards inside. Then clerks open them to see if they can find an address or other clues to reveal the owners.
Periodically the centers auction off unclaimed and damaged articles or donate them to charities. Postal auctions reaped $3 million in revenue in 2000. Funds are used to offset recovery center operational expenses. The next auction is scheduled for Aug. 28 in Atlanta. Some valuables are too sacred to be auctioned off.
For about a quarter of a century, a bronze cremation box with the inscription "W.C.G. McLeod, 1891-1977" languished unclaimed on a shelf at the St. Paul Mail Recovery Center. After Smithsonian magazine mentioned it in a story two years ago, a genealogy buff from Canada tracked down the family and contacted the Postal Service.
"We were able to return it, I believe, within two months," said Susan Tedrick, acting manager of the Mail Recovery Center's headquarters in Washington. "It was wonderful. We got a very nice thank-you note."
