OCCASIONALLY, professional movers experience alarming (or just plain odd) packing requests when preparing to haul their clients’ belongings from point A to point B. “We encounter weird stuff at the most unexpected times,” said Lior Rachmany, CEO of New York City’s Dumbo Moving + Storage. “One time we entered a seemingly normal household [to find] a pet python snake. You never know exactly what you’re walking into.” We polled movers from Omaha to New Orleans about the most peculiar items they’d ever been asked to schlep. Warning: You can’t unread this.
“An older lady who had passed away collected porcelain dolls and baby fetuses of animals in jars. She was a biologist or something. It was very creepy.” —Lior Rachmany, Dumbo Moving, New York
“I’ve packed full closets of sex toys. You’d think that’s something they’d pack on their own!” —Tim Ford, Einstein Moving, Austin, Texas
“For a horror-movie fan, we transported a collection of Chucky dolls and Pennywise dolls—from the movie “It.” We weren’t expecting that one of the Chucky dolls was automated. All of a sudden it started moving on us. The guy I was working with gave such a scream that another [voice-activated] doll holding a knife started coming toward us.” —Mr. Rachmany
“We moved a family that thought they were vampires. The guy drove a hearse. We had to move a coffin—it was empty, but supposedly he slept in it sometimes.” —Nicholas Brasset, Abba Movers, New Orleans, La.