Mary Padian's Most Bizarre Storage Wars Find Ever

Among the stranger things you can find on Mary Padian's online store are a wooden landline phone that still works, a vintage cloth Pinocchio puppet made in Japan, and a Kennedy for President letterhead, hand-signed by Ted Kennedy. If you're adventurous, you can also spend $55 on a "Surprise Mystery Box of Treasures," filled with Padian's finds from her 2001 to 2019 stints on the reality TV Shows, Storage Wars and Storage Wars: Texas.  

What could possibly be inside a box? Padian promises a mix of 10 to 20 housewares, sports memorabilia, figurines, home decor, gadgets, toys, and paper goods. We can't guarantee that you'd come away satisfied. We can, however, say for certain that Padian has a knack for finding the unexpected. The 40-year-old Dallas, Texas, native may have a bachelor's degree in photojournalism, but she has treasure hunting written into her DNA (via Legit). 

Among Padian's most interesting Storage Wars finds are a shelf filled with the urns of one woman's pets and ex-husbands, $3,000 worth of 18th-century Asian camel saddles, and a trunk from World War II, filled with unopened Kool cigarettes, a harmonica, and hundreds of love letters (via Sparefoot). Impressed yet? None of those relics come close to comparing with the ancient Byzantine weapon she discovered on Storage Wars: Texas, and put up for sale on eBay in 2014 (via Twitter).

Mary Padian didn't find just any Byzantine weapon. As per her interview in Sparefoot, she found a ceramic grenade that Byzantine's used to fill with a mythical "Greek fire." Why mythical?  It clung to skin and couldn't be put out with water. New Scientist calls Greek fire the "napalm of Byzantium." Legend has it that this ancient, chemical weapon was dreamt up by a family of chemists and engineers in Constantinople. Greek fire caused Byznatine's enemies to — as one Byzantine historian put it — "shiver in terror" (via Ancient History Encyclopedia). Possibly it owes its lethal composition to a mixture of light crude oil and pine resin. Possibly. No one's been able to replicate it since.

How did an ancient ceramic grenade make its way into the hands of Mary Padian in Texas? No one knows. And while we can almost certainly guarantee you won't find one of those in a Surprise Mystery Box of Treasures, we wouldn't rule out needle-point tapestries, jump ropes, Batman Pez containers, and vintage packs of bubblegum from 1992. That's what fan James Helferstay found in his (via YouTube).