Creepy dolls among unusual Texas beach discoveries headed for auction

May 16 (UPI) -- Creepy dolls, a fiberglass mermaid and a prosthetic leg are among the Texas beach discoveries set to be auctioned to benefit a local wildlife rehabilitation group.

The Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve at the University of Texas Marine Institute said the items due to be auctioned Saturday in the annual Tony's Trash to Treasure auction at Roberts Point Park in Port Aransas were all collected from the reserve's beaches during the past year.

The items include Internet-famous barnacle-encrusted dolls, a fiberglass mermaid statue, a prosthetic leg, a spell bottle, Haitian money, an old bible, a Chinese beer, steamship coal from the 1800s and a message in a bottle that floated from Jamaica.

Jace Tunnell, director of the Mission-Aransas Reserve, said the items were recovered by researchers conducting weekly surveys along the coastline while searching for stranded sea turtles on Mustang Island.

"When we find interesting items during the survey, we bring them back and pile them up for selling in the annual auction to help raise money for the sea turtles," Tunnell told the Houston Chronicle.

The auction made headlines in 2022 when Last Week Tonight host John Oliver paid $10,000 for a cache of water-damaged and barnacle-encrusted dolls featuring missing limbs, hair and eyes.

The auction is named for Tony Amos, who founded the Amos Rehabilitation Keep as part of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in 1982. Amos died in 2017, but the annual auction continues to raise money for ARK's rehabilitation efforts each year.