The 10 strangest things ever sold at auction

Lists of strange auction lots are mostly folklore. Repeat a good story often enough and it acquires a price, a year and a saleroom it never had. So the rule here is narrow: every lot below has a named seller or auction house, a date, and a figure that was reported at the time. A number of famous ones were left out because they did not survive that test.

What remains is odder than the folklore anyway, and it says something practical about why people bid.

1. Apex, a stegosaurus — $44.6 million

Sotheby's, New York, 17 July 2024. Apex is the largest and most complete Stegosaurus skeleton known, 254 of roughly 319 bones, dug out of private land in Colorado between 2022 and 2023. The estimate was four to six million dollars. Bidding started at three million, seven bidders took part, and fifteen minutes later it closed at eleven times the low estimate. The buyer, Ken Griffin, has since lent it to the American Museum of Natural History.

2. A painting that destroyed itself — £18,582,000

In October 2018 Sotheby's in London sold Banksy's Girl with Balloon for £1,042,000. Seconds after the hammer fell the canvas began sliding through a shredder hidden in the frame and stopped halfway. The buyer went ahead with the purchase, the work was renamed Love Is in the Bin, and in October 2021 the same auction house sold it again for £18,582,000 against a guide of four to six million. Damaging it multiplied its value roughly eighteenfold.

3. A banana taped to a wall — $6.2 million

Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian sold at Sotheby's in New York on 20 November 2024 for 5.2 million dollars hammer, 6.2 million with fees, against an estimate of one to one and a half million. What the buyer received was a certificate of authenticity with instructions for display; the banana and the tape are replaced as needed. The particular banana on the wall that week had been bought from a New York street vendor for twenty-five cents.

4. The largest piece of Mars on Earth — $5.3 million

Sotheby's, New York, 16 July 2025. NWA 16788 is a 24.67 kilogram Martian meteorite found in Niger in 2023, about seventy per cent larger than any other known fragment of the planet. The estimate was two to four million dollars. Niger has since opened an investigation into how it left the country.

5. A single fish — about 510 million yen

At the New Year auction at Tokyo's Toyosu market on 5 January 2026, the restaurateur Kiyoshi Kimura paid roughly 510 million yen, about $3.2 million, for one bluefin tuna. Bluefin normally sells for something in the region of eighty-eight dollars a kilogram. Kimura has been the top bidder at that auction in most recent years, and the reason is not the fish: the first tuna of the year is a national news item, and the price buys the headline.

6. An entire town — $1.77 million bid

Bridgeville, California, 83 acres with about twenty-five residents, eight houses, three cows and a post office, became the first town put up for auction on eBay in 2002. The winning bid was 1.77 million dollars. The winner then withdrew, and the town eventually sold for 700,000. It has been on the market twice more since.

7. The right to name a species — $650,000

On 3 March 2005 an online charity auction sold the naming rights to a newly discovered titi monkey from Madidi National Park in Bolivia. The money went towards managing the park. The winner was an online casino, and the animal is now formally Callicebus aureipalatii — roughly, the titi monkey of the golden palace.

8. A walking stick, to settle a child's fears — $65,000

In December 2004 a mother auctioned her late father's metal cane because her six-year-old son believed the grandfather's ghost was in the house, and she hoped that selling the object would end it. The same casino bought it for 65,000 dollars.

9. A cheese toastie — $28,000

A grilled cheese sandwich, ten years old and reportedly free of mould, said to bear the face of the Virgin Mary, sold on eBay in November 2004 for 28,000 dollars. The buyer, again, was the casino.

10. William Shatner's kidney stone — $25,000

Sold in January 2006, and by then the casino's fourth appearance on this list. Four of the ten lots here went to one company that had worked out something worth noticing: an object nobody else wanted, bought in public for a sum small enough to be trivial, bought more coverage than an advertising campaign.

What this has to do with your evening

Three things run through the list. The first is that a lot needs a story you can tell in one sentence. Not a description — a story. "The largest stegosaurus ever found." "The painting that shredded itself." "The first tuna of the year." A guest who can repeat the sentence to the person beside them is a guest who is paying attention when the lot opens. If a lot on your list takes three sentences to explain, it will underperform, and the fix is usually to cut rather than add. There is more on writing lot descriptions in the guide.

The second is that almost none of these prices came from the object's usefulness. The banana was a certificate. The cane was a cane. What was bought in each case was a position: being the person who owns the thing everyone is talking about. That is the same engine that runs a school auction, only smaller. The head teacher's parking space is worth nothing and sells for a great deal, for exactly the reason the tuna does. The page for charities and galas goes into how to build a list around that.

The third is Bridgeville, and it is the least glamorous lesson but the one that costs real money. A winning bid is not a payment. The town was sold for 1.77 million dollars and then it was not. Any auction where bidders are not registered before they can bid is an auction that will produce some results it cannot collect. Registration, a record of who bid what and when, and an invoice that goes out while people are still in the room are what turn a hammer price into a bank transfer. How that works from the organiser's side is set out on the how it works page.

None of this requires a stegosaurus. It requires a handful of lots that only exist at your event, described in a sentence each, sold to people whose names you already have. You can build the list and rehearse the evening before deciding anything at getting started, and the help centre answers the practical questions.

Prices as reported at the time of sale; figures include buyer's premium where stated.