Things in the courier world often get weird. Really weird! There’s no limit to the human imagination, and so there are no boundaries on the kinds of things that the general public has asked couriers to deliver.

The following are the ten strangest items delivered by courier. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Ashes

Not all people can be bothered to transport the bodily remains of their relatives from one location to another. In those circumstances, they rely on couriers to be their undertakers.

Mascot Costumes

Sports teams up and down the country have mascots, but moving mascot costumes from one location to another isn’t always easy. And sometimes, they have to do it fast.

Enter the humble courier – the person who doesn’t mind carefully placing costumes in the back of a van and diligently transporting them to the desired location.

A Single Banana

Sending a banana through the post might sound impossible, but it has happened. The intended recipient was a Taiwanese woman who found the banana one day in amongst the rest of her letters. The sender wrote her address neatly on the skin and applied a stamp, paying for the delivery in full. There was a second note for the courier: “handle with care.”

A Live Human

While you can’t send people in the post any more, you could do it centuries ago. Henry Brown was born into slavery in 1816. He was, as you might imagine, not particularly keen on the lifestyle, so he packaged himself up to be delivered to a location where there were no slaves. Let’s hope his experiment worked out.

A Cat

The nineteenth-century New York postal system was a little unusual. Postmen didn’t march around, delivering to people living in skyscrapers. Instead, the city used pressurised tubes. Futuristic, eh?

People loved experimenting with these tubes, seeing what they could stuff inside them and whisk off to distant locations. One day, somebody put a cat inside one of the tubes for delivery as a joke. Don’t worry – it survived.

A Boat

Do you need to send a boat to someone fast? If so, then couriers can help. One man suddenly realised that his friend needed a canoe and so he called up his local courier service and got them to deliver with haste!

A Time Machine

A Birmingham inventor eventually gave up trying to create a time machine in his shed. He decided, therefore, to send it to his friend to see if he might have more luck getting the darn thing to work. His delivery method of choice? Courier, of course!

Unwanted Mail

People receive millions of unwanted letters in the post every year. The solution for many? Give them to a courier to return to sender.

A Protest Brick

One woman was so annoyed with subscription letters she was receiving from companies that she decided to mail them back in protest – with a brick. The brick features all kinds of angry scribblings, designed to prevent them from contacting her in the future.

Illegal Contraband

Some criminals are just plain lazy. Who wants to go to the hassle of transporting contraband around the world when you can get FedEx to do it for you?