A suitcase full of soup and a six foot tree: oddest lost property of 2014

Most travellers have accidentally left something in a hotel room at some point, but while for the vast majority it's something dull like an old paperback or a jumper lurking at the back of a drawer, for a few people, it's something far more bizarre. The Travelodge hotel chain has released its list of the oddest things left in hotel rooms in 2014, and some of the discoveries are particularly weird.

It's hard to imagine, for example, how one traveller came to leave a prosthetic hand behind - unless it was a spare they carried with them for emergencies.

Poodle

Then there are items which you might have assumed had the kind of sentimental attachment to persuade the owner to keep them safe - such as the love letter written 40 years previously, a wedding certificate, a pug dog, a poodle called Strudle (which was admittedly only left for 15 minutes), or indeed the woman who left without her husband and didn't notice he was missing for half an hour.
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BMW

If you're not the sentimental kind, then how about the items with another kind of value altogether - such as the first class ticket to Los Angeles, the suitcase full of 3,000 pound coins, the keys to a BMW X6 (which were claimed an impressive five days later), or the first edition of Watership Down.

Cat pram

Then there are the items that had no earthly reason for ever making their way to a hotel room in the first place, such as the suitcase full of tinned soup, the six foot Christmas tree designed to look like a snowman, a 3 foot sculpture of a lamb crossed with a banana, a cat pram and a suitcase full of outfits for cats, a four foot antique dolls house with furniture, the stormtrooper outfit (left after Comic Con came to London), and the 6 foot bouncy castle - which was still inflated in the room.

Top ten

In among the weird items there were also shocking stacks of technology - including 12,000 smartphones and tablets. The ten most popular items aren't quite so mind-bending: and consist of chargers, phones, books, laptops and tablets, clothes, toiletries, teddies, electric toothbrushes, bags, and sat navs.

Given the quantity of property left behind, it's probably safe to assume that once you've worked cleaning hotel rooms for a while, you're less shocked to find someone has left their valuables. The prosthetic hand must still have given them a bit of a scare though.

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