Urns filled with ashes. A sword hidden inside a silver cobra-headed cane. The front grill of a car.

These are just some of the odd things commuters lost, and others have found, on public transit last year.

“I remember once somebody left a walker and I thought, did they have a spontaneous recovery while they were on the train?,” Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins said in an interview.

Metrolinx reported this month that its GO Transit lost-and-found office at Union Station regularly sees around 100 items in a single day. They’re quickly catalogued, moved and deposited into a secure location.

“You would be gobsmacked — people leave thousands of dollars, along with their passports,” Nancy McClure, GO Transit’s supervisor of station operations central, said in a news release.

A woman left a piece of luggage containing $12,000 on busy Front St. last year after her son picked her up from Union. She came in like nothing happened, like she was just there to pick up a lost pair of gloves, a Metrolinx official said.

Lost items are often reunited with their owners, Aikins said, but things like hats and mittens are often left behind.

Anything remaining at the end of each month is donated to charity or sold through a United Way auction. Phones are dismantled and recycled.

“You would be surprised at the end of the month, the place is full,” Aikins said.

Small things with a lot of value — like wedding rings — are kept longer, she said.

Even Aikins is surprised by the items that are left behind.

There was “a gold grill in a beautiful case,” she said. “You know, the kind for your teeth?”

Someone came back for that one.

Aikins said she often goes to visit the lost-and-found to see “the oddness that people have about them” and the range of emotions people exhibit when they come in: fear, hope — sometimes embarrassment.

“You know when the sex show is in town, because gifts are left on the train,” she said.

Roughly 50,000 lost items were turned into the TTC last year, according to Sue Motahedin, head of TTC customer service. The transit service said that on average about 28 per cent of those items find their way home.

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Of the items left behind at the Lost Articles Office in the Bay subway station, TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said 40 per cent go to charity, 40 per cent are sold through Police Auctions Canada and 20 per cent are thrown out.

“The good news about unclaimed winter gear is that we are able to donate them to various social agencies or charities throughout Toronto,” Motahedin said in an email.

What do people tend to lose the most? In the last three months of 2018, the top items left behind at the TTC were ID or credit cards, with 1,562 turned in. Wallets followed closely behind with 1,384, then Presto cards/TTC tickets (1,318), cellphones (1,089) and backpacks (658).

Phones seem like a popular lost item — Metrolinx reports that 197 smartphones were turned in last July. Of those, 143 were returned to their owners.

There’s no limit to what people will lose during their commutes. A silver cobra-headed cane, the full-front grill of a car complete with an attached licence plate and a collection of letters to Santa are par for the course (fear not, according to Metrolinx those letters found their way north and Christmas was saved).

Some of the strangest or most unexpected items found on the TTC include a pair of fancy, red polka-dotted dress shoes, a giant mounted bull horn, wrapped Christmas gifts, a four-foot-tall “really scary looking” doll and adult videos and games.

There’s also a sealed urn that no one has ever called about or tried to claim — it’s still locked in a TTC storage safe. GO staff have also found “occasional urns and ashes of souls who become lost in their afterlife travels,” the release said.

Just last August, Marbles, a six-year-old Border Collie-Shepherd mix, hopped onto a GO Transit train at Rouge Hill station and rode alone to Union Station. The dog was later reunited with his owner.

Motahedin had some tips for passengers — write your name and phone number on your Presto card. If you take your mitts or hat off, stick them in your pockets — many items tend to fall off customers’ laps when they rush to exit their bus or train, she said.

But if you do lose your wallet, ID or grill, Aikins said Metrolinx’s bountiful lost-and-found often reassures her that most people will do the right thing.

“The vast majority of people, it appears, are very honest and really want to help people,” she said.

Tell us! Be honest

Emerald Bensadoun is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @twerk_vonnegut

Claire Floody is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @claire_floody

Jack Hauen is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Star’s radio room in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @jackhauen

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