We Asked: What's The Odd Object You're Emotionally Attached To? Hilarity Ensued

Lindsey Wright is a producer on LAist 89.3’s daily news program, AirTalk. More importantly, she was a child unicyclist.

On a recent trip to her childhood home in Indianapolis to help her mother move, she dug out that old unicycle from the garage, rusted with a flat tire, and was absolutely unwilling to get rid of it.

So it came home with her to Los Angeles.

“It felt so ridiculous carrying that thing into the Indianapolis airport to the baggage check.”

Lindsey couldn't bear to let this unicycle go. So she moved it cross-country.

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Lindsey Wright

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Lindsey Wright

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So we figured others are probably hanging onto an item they feel ridiculous about as well. AirTalk asked listeners to share the most embarrassing or strange object they’re emotionally attached to and probably never parting with, however silly.

Here’s what listeners revealed.

Bodies, bodies, bodies

Sandra in Torrance’s gallstone is special, which she knows because the doctor who removed it wanted to keep it for himself. Sandra declined, and brought the “perfectly round, like a huge mothball” specimen home with her, where it’s been for 20 years.

“Someday, I want to put it in a necklace,” she said.

Not everyone has such clear designs for their anatomical keepsakes. Allison in Pasadena has the placenta from her daughter's birth in the freezer.

“We have no idea what to do with it … I don't really want to bury it in the backyard,” she said.

This indecision has lasted through several moves (and, presumably, several freezers).

LAist’s own Larry Mantle is not immune to hoarding body parts. At his house, you can find his father’s stapes.

“The stapes is a tiny little bone that looks like a little stirrup that's in the ear,” Mantle said.

At one point, his father had his stapes removed and asked Mantle’s wife Kristen, a speech pathologist, if she wanted it. And that’s how “we have this little container with my father's tiny little stapes from his ear sitting somewhere in our house. I'm not sure where.”

Deep freeze

The freezer is a common solution for AirTalk listeners with, let’s say, perishable items.

Laure in Encino is holding onto a 1971 See’s Candy Easter Egg, an uneaten gift for her grandmother.

As she explained, “My mom never threw the egg away and kept it in her freezer. And when she passed away in 2006, I found the Easter Egg–it’s still in the packaging. And so I kept it…It’s [been] in my freezer for 18 years.”

The 52-year-old candy egg looking fresh as a daisy

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Laure in Encino

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“I'm trying to figure out what to do with it when I go. I don't know. Someone in the family is going to get it,” Laure added.

Carla in Mount Washington has a dead leopard gecko in her freezer. He was her first pet as an adult, and since she and her husband have moved around a lot, they haven’t landed on a final resting place for him.

“I just haven't had the heart to put him somewhere, so he's wrapped up with a little note,” Carla said. “I tend to, every once in a while, clean out our freezer and pull him out and say, like, OK, this year is going to be the year.”

What happens after dark

RIP "William Carlson"

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Tony Haig

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Not many people can say they’ve been holding on to their gravestone for 50 years, but Tony in Santa Monica can. It’s a prop from a film he acted in during the 1970s.

“My character in the plot died and the camera took a shot of the prop gravestone…At the end of the shooting, I took it home and I still have it,” he said.

Beware the Home Shopping Network in the wee hours of the morning

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Manny in West Hollywood

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Manny in West Hollywood doesn’t understand what appealed to him about the vase he bought on the Home Shopping Network at 2 a.m. in 1984.

Now he sees it as “a reminder not to shop after midnight.”

Honor thy mother and father

Yolanda in Los Feliz detests the color green, but can’t bear to get rid of the dark green bathrobe her father gave her.

“Every time I take a box full of clothes to Goodwill, I want to throw it in there, but I can't because my father gave it to me. He's gone, and he gave me so few things in life except my intellect, if I might say. And so I just keep it in the back of the closet, and there it is, this hideous, dark, green, worn out bathrobe,” Yolanda said.

Mom's favorite shade

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Nancy in Marina Del Rey

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Nancy in Marina Del Rey has no problem with the shade of her mother’s lipstick. When her mother died in 2007 at the age of 88, Nancy brought the lipstick for the funeral home to use on her because, as she explained, “I knew that she'd be wearing it forever, so let's put the lipstick on her that she always wore.”

Nancy still has that same tube of lipstick, and wears it for special occasions. “I mean, it's really got to be special,” she said.

Captured on film

A stranger's history

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Nadia in San Pedro

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Nadia in San Pedro said: “I've been holding on to these random old photos I found on the side of the road. They have this couple in them doing everyday things. I couldn't throw them away because I felt like I was throwing away someone's life.”

In a similar vein, Carl in Irvine can’t bring himself to develop the film still left in his grandfather’s camera. “I just like the idea that those images are still captured on that camera,” he said.

A slice of history

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Allison in Chinatown

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Allison in Chinatown’s late father was a film editor for 50 years, and she hangs onto a 35-pound splicing machine from his negative cutting business.

“I've moved it with me five times, but it was part of him. He died this year,” she said. “You just can't part with some of these things because it’s a piece of your family, a piece of your past."

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