Who hasn't gone on a trip and realized all too late, you left something in your hotel room? You are certainly not alone. At the Eldorado Hotel Casino, the word that comes to mind when you look around their lost and found department is "random." Truly, genuinely random. There are 3 rooms of unclaimed items…3 rooms of unanswered questions and multiple mysteries. As we picked through some pricey items, the Eldorado's Jen Eastwood turned to us and said, "I'm just amazed at the sheer amount of things people leave behind."
There's a lot of head shaking in these rooms, and a lot of bizarre "you don't see that every day" objects. All are among the thousands of items the Eldorado collects in their lost and found department every year. None of what we saw has been reclaimed by owners. Eastwood told us, "A lot of it is brand new. Yeah, its amazing people would get something and just leave it. They forgot, or they didn't bother, or something."
Eldorado security officer Bodie Cromer runs through the bounty collected over just the past 30 days. As he pulled down one large box off a shelf, he told us, "I don't know why, but everybody seems to leave their glasses here. And we have beer kegs left in the room. You know those bachelor parties get out of hand sometimes."
Skis and poles are common items found in winter, hats and ice chests in summer. There are guitars. Crutches, many of them. Pillows and jackets. Purses...wallets...checkbooks. Bodie says the most common items are "Cell phone chargers…sunglasses, eyeglasses...oh, and I get a lot of hats."
There are boxes of keys. Shirts, belts, socks and jewelry. And in one section is Reno's true island of misfit toys…bags and barrels of them. Some things are hard to figure out, like the one prosthetic leg. It still puzzles Jen: "Who leaves without their leg? How do you forget? I mean it's easy to forget a charger. I don't know how easy it is to forget a leg."
But for Bodie Cromer, this is serious business. So serious, he turned down our request to model the just-found leopard fedora. "No, I'm not going to put that on, but I would say this is the classiest one here."
The Eldorado truly makes every effort to get these items back to their owners, but succeeding in that mission is easier said than done. When the Eldorado runs out of room in their lost and found, they sell items to employees. Then that money goes to the relief fund for employees in need. If you left behind anything that's yours at the Eldorado, you can call their lost and found at 1-800-648-4597, ext. 7059. Be prepared to have the date you lost it.
-written by John Potter
