'You never know what you’re going to find': Halifax junk remover shares some of his company’s strangest discoveries

Do you have a basement or a shed you've been meaning to clean out? Or maybe you're getting your house ready to sell and need to get rid of decades of clutter?

Junk removers can help, and one Halifax man is doing just that with the local branch of the “Just Junk” company.

Glenn Graham says while he and his team have found many interesting things over the years, they don’t get to keep them.

“We donate, we recycle, we reuse, currently over 70 per cent of everything we pick up we’re able to give to be reused or recycled so it’s great that way, great business model and great for the environment,” he said during an interview on CTV Morning Live Atlantic.

If Graham and his team find something of value they go back to the homeowner to see if they meant to throw it out.

“And many times there’s been things of lots of value, throughout our franchise and across the country, including large sums of cash that we’ve made the people aware of and they didn’t know it was there,” he said.

One of the weirder items “Just Junk” found was a literal skeleton in a closet.

A man stands next to “Boney” the skeleton. (Just Junk)

“This human skeleton goes back 200 years, first started in India and they use it for medical schools, teaching students,” Graham said.

“We were doing a clean out of a doctor’s office, they opened the closet and let me tell ya, the heart skipped a few times for these employees not knowing what is it. Is this real? Did somebody forget somebody in the closet? They weren’t sure until they asked one of the homeowners that said ‘that’s for medical reasons.’”

Another strange, and common, find in people’s homes is dolls.

A doll from the from the 1800s is pictured. (Just Junk)

“It’s funny, the dolls you see nowadays are very lovely but the ones from a hundred years ago, I’m not quite sure what they were thinking when they put these together,” Graham joked.

He added one of their biggest finds was a room filled with 400 dolls from the 1800s.

“And they were made with human hair,” he said. “They unfortunately went to the landfill; we kept a couple just to show people that we’ll do everything.”

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While many people keep mementos of their pets, Graham said it’s not everyday you find a blowfish.

“We get a lot of people, they love their adventures, they love their pets and they want to keep them forever, well we found this blowfish that somebody had on some Amazon tour, they kept it,” he said.

“Every time we see one of these pets, is it a real pet? Is it something that’s gone through the taxidermy process? So you take a step back just to ask, ‘please explain what that is?’”

A taxidermy blowfish is pictured. (Just Junk)

A scarier discovery for the “Just Junk” team is unexploded ammunition.

“The first thing the team does is back away. We don’t know if that’s just a replica or whatever, we don’t take chances. On many occasions we’ve had to call the police, bomb squad to come in and tell us. In some cases, some of our franchisees across the country have actually found live ammunition that the bomb squad had to take away and deal with,” Graham said.

While Graham and his team often walk into unknown conditions, he said people don’t have to do a lot of work before they arrive.

“Some people think that they have to get it all together in one room or one area – not at all. If they have stuff on different parts of their home in their backyard, their basement. All they have to do when they call us is book an appointment, my team comes out, we’ll go through, they show exactly what they have, my team will give them a quote, if they like the quote we’ll do the removal right away.”