Lynn Hall wasn’t having it.
“You cannot go into the vault,” she somewhat sternly told me, shutting down my journalistic impulse to enter any type of room referred to as, well, a vault.
This vault, though, wasn’t full of money, nor was it located in the basement of an ornate bank named after a wealthy owner from yesteryear. Instead, the vault is in an easy-to-miss D.C. government building in Southwest — and it’s packed with people’s stuff.
In official government lingo, it’s unclaimed property. And Lynn Hall is its keeper.
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Hall runs the unit within the city’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer that’s responsible for reuniting people with their stuff. Call it D.C.’s municipal version of the lost and found — and it’s not just pennies we’re talking about.
Hall estimates that her office has more than $760 million worth of people’s money in the form of unclaimed refunds, misdelivered paychecks and bank accounts that someone may have just forgotten they had. (You can check if any of it is yours here.)
But the unit also deals in physical belongings. Once a year banks release the contents of safe deposit boxes that are delinquent on rent payments, at which point the city government assumes the responsibility of reuniting the items with their owners or any surviving relatives. Hall’s staff will catalog what comes in, have it formally appraised, and if the original owners or their families can’t be found within a certain time frame, eventually auction it off.
In most cases it’s jewelry or coins. One recent auction for a $20 gold coin from 1924 started around $2,500 and approached $3,000 toward the end of the 10-day bidding period. A lot of 27 Morgan silver dollar coins, minted in 1883, was set to fetch more than $1,100. A single Confederate $5 bill went for just over $30. An appraiser recently estimated that a gold $20 coin from 1907 could get between $15,000 and $20,000.
The goal isn’t to pad the city’s coffers, though; it’s to set aside the proceeds for any claims that a rightful owner may eventually make. “Every dollar we get, they get,” she says.
And it’s plenty of dollars: Between the checks, refunds and money made from auctions, Hall’s unit returns some $35 million to their owners every year.
Some of the items Hall deals with lean toward the more quixotic. There’s a Vest-Pocket Webster’s Dictionary — “for Constant Use” — from 1899. A bottle of Champagne that can’t be sold (“We don’t have a liquor license,” she says). There’s the occasional gun, knife or illegal drugs. (D.C. police gets those.) Hall once found a diaper, and there have even been locks of hair and umbilical cords.
“We get teeth all the time,” gold and otherwise, says Blair Spear, an unclaimed property specialist, sounding none too pleased.
The unit will often deal with family keepsakes like military medals, manuscripts, plays, patents for interesting devices and old photos. Those they try to reunite with their owners or any surviving family. And in some cases, what they uncover could well have historic value.
Spear says she once found memos and cables from a former foreign service officer reporting on what he felt was a suspicious dinner in Mexico between a group of Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald, who later assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Spear says she’s working with the officer’s daughter to return the papers. (Where that’s not possible, they reach out to museums to gauge interest; they often don’t get responses.)
In another case, Spear found savings bonds in one of the abandoned safe deposit boxes that belonged to a woman who had died and was survived by a son. “He had no idea they existed,” she says. “So he got a letter in the mail that resulted in $18,000 in bonds.”
Hall has been in unclaimed property since 1989, first for Maryland before coming to D.C. in 2013. In that time she’s seen a significant drop in the number of safe deposit boxes her unit gets on an annual basis, from what used to be 1,000 a year to maybe 100 now. “The safe deposit boxes are becoming more obsolete,” she concedes.
Still, her team isn’t about to run out of property to auction and items to reunite with their owners. The vault — the one she banned me from entering — remains full. And that, adds Hall, keeps the job interesting.
“That’s the great thing about unclaimed property,” she says. “Every day is different.”
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