The strangest things I've ever taken on the plane are the things I happen to get while shopping on a layover when I conveniently forget I'm not home with a car. Dur. For instance the wrought iron table and candle sticks I insisted on lugging back from tijuana on a San Diego layover. The baggage claim guys always look at you weird when you walk into the belly of the plane to drop stuff off. It's really loud in there and they have headsets with sound reduction, while I have nothing. My seattle layovers are for buying dried flowers in pike place. Those flower arrangements are gorgeous and cheap.

I've had a passenger take a full sized pinyata (I have no idea how to spell it that is phonetic) that I had to walk to the belly and retrieve when we got there, a car fender, a few chickens (smuggled and incognito until they started running around). The grossest was the person who brought their dead grandfather to the gate in a wheelchair, and tried to make believe they were alive, coming home from Tel Aviv. Naturally we protested when we couldn't get any response. The couple was trying to get out of doing international paperwork and paying death shipping..or whatever. Weird people.