Auctions are great. If you’re a buyer, you have a chance to nab a car cheap, because the last owner was arrested for smuggling lizards. If you’re a seller, you now have a way to cash in your family antiques, or to hawk all those laptops you stole.
Maybe not everything should go up for auction, though. For example, we’d be perfectly fine if we never learned anything about people auctioning such items as…
Eva Braun’s Panties
Buying celebrity underwear is weird, but it’s a level of perversion the public is somewhat okay with. When someone buys Marilyn Monroe’s bra at an auction, we might mock them for this specific step, but we understand the more general desire to masturbate to Marilyn Monroe. We can’t extend that same courtesy to the buyer who bought Eva Braun’s underwear for $4,620 in 2019.
Humbert & Ellis Auctioneers
The auction house selling the silk underpants was unable to provide a proper record explaining how it obtained them. This fact, which raises the possibility that these were never really worn by Hitler’s girlfriend at all, doesn’t make this a more forgivable purchase. Just the opposite, in fact: When a buyer is willing to place a bid on an item despite its dubious provenance, that indicates that they’re extremely keen on owning it.
The buyer also bought a monogrammed cotton nightgown of Braun’s for $3,250. We don’t know the man’s identity. We just know he placed the bid over the phone from within the U.K., so we have to assume this is someone employed at the highest levels of government.
Julian Lennon’s Letters
John Lennon was apparently not all that close with his son Julian. Julian said he felt closer to Paul McCartney. But the son must have felt affection for his father at some point, if the text of the following postcard means anything:
Julian Lennon
The body of the letter doesn’t have a lot of restaurant recommendations or any other travel details, but the kid made sure to get the most important past of the message in there.
John died in 1980, and Julian thought it would be nice to get back the letters he’d written his father long ago. Widow Yoko Ono instead put the letters up for auction, along with various other items from the estate. So, the letters were soon available for anyone to buy. The highest bidder turned out to be the person who valued them the most: Julian Lennon.
He bought the letters using money he’d received from the Lennon estate — after suing, since John otherwise didn’t leave him a large sum.
NASA’s Lunar Bag
In the 1990s, NASA lent a bunch of mementos to a museum in Kansas named the Cosmosphere. The director of the museum, Max Ary, figured that rather than return the stuff when the exhibition was done, he’d just keep it for himself and sell it at his leisure. Police eventually figured out what he was doing and locked him up. Then, to help pay off his fine, they auctioned off what stuff remained in his collection, most of which seemed like trash unworthy of returning to NASA.
Among the items was a bag. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if this was a pouch that NASA had used during space expedition, that’s pretty cool. An Illinois woman named Nancy Carlson won the auction by offering a bid of $995. To find out if the bag really was as cool as she hoped, she mailed it to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, asking NASA to authenticate it for her.
NASA determined that it was authentic all right. Only, it was more than just a bag. It was a bag that contained traces of moon dust collected during Apollo 11. No one is allowed to buy and sell moon dust, that’s a treasure that NASA keeps for itself, or possibly saves as gifts for honored kings. So, NASA said this bag should never have gone up for auction, and they refused to return it to Carlson.
Bonhams
Here’s another case where it fell to the courts to set right what was wrong. Carson sued and won. NASA had to give her the bag back, and now that it had been officially declared as precious, she was able to sell it for a bit more than $995. She sent it for auction again, and this time, it sold for $1.8 million.
That wasn’t the end of the story, however. When the auction analyzed the bag, they realized NASA had removed a fraction of that dust when analyzing it. So, Carlson sued again — and won again. NASA sent her back those specs of dust (which had stuck to some tape they’d applied to the bag), and she managed to auction those off as well, for a further $500,000.
Mark’s Truck
Houston plumber Mark Oberholtzer had a Ford F-250, and in 2013, he traded it in for a newer model. He asked whether he should remove the truck’s decal first, as it displayed the name of his business, “Mark-1 Plumbing.” No need, said the dealer. The dealership would take care of that.
The dealership did not take of that. They auctioned off the vehicle, without removing the company logo. The new buyer exported it to Turkey. We don’t have an exact record of what happened to it after that, but in 2014, it wound up in Syria, in the hands of ISIS. News footage captured clear footage of the truck, and customers of Mark-1 Plumbing back in Texas had to conclude that their local tradesman was sponsoring international terrorism.
via NBC
Oberholtzer sued, initially seeking $1 million for lost business, and the dealership agreed to settle in 2017. ISIS basically collapsed over the two years that followed, turning into an insurgent group again rather than anything like a state. We can only imagine how much sooner that collapse would have happened without Mark’s truck.
The Roman Empire
Speaking of collapse, things in Rome weren’t going so great at the end of the second century. Someone assassinated Emperor Commodus, and despite what Gladiator told us, this didn’t usher in a new age of peace. Instead, it ushered in Gladiator II, and first, Rome got a new emperor named Pertinax.
Pertinax was the son of a slave. That sounds like he’d be a breath of fresh air, and maybe the air was a little too fresh, because within two years, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him. For his replacement, they didn’t appoint a leader like last time. Instead, they figured they’d auction off the title to the highest bidder. The winner was an army dude named Didius Julianus. A rival offered 20,000 silver coins to every solider, while Didius offered 25,000.
Romainbehar/Wiki Commons
So, Didius Julianus became the emperor of Rome — for about two months. Then someone else declared himself emperor and marched on the city, and Julianus ordered his guards to prepare to fight, but none of them felt especially loyal to him. An assassin entered his home and dispatched him with ease. His last words were, “But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?”
The assassin’s reply wasn’t recorded, but we imagine it was: “You didn’t do anything. Yours was just the winning bid.”
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