Post Office

Between 1830 and the 1970s, clerks in Washington sorted thousands of undeliverable letters a day, reuniting lost messages, uncovering bizarre packages, and sometimes finding stories more haunting than the mail itself.

The holiday season is pretty busy for the United States Post Office -- lots of letters and packages going all over the country, from coast to coast. And we're all familiar with the warnings that tell us to mail our items early if we want to guarantee delivery by Christmas. Well, apparently D.C. residents weren't heeding the warnings back in 1921. So the U.S.P.S. called in the big fella to get the point across.