The Bizarrely Successful History of People Mailing Themselves in Boxes
Updated: Aug 12
Long before the age of biometric passports and full-body scanners, some travellers took a more... unconventional route to their destination. Like stowaways on ships, trains, and even aeroplanes, a very particular group of people, fewer than you'd think, but more than you'd expect, have attempted, and occasionally succeeded, in mailing themselves as freight. While undoubtedly illegal, highly dangerous, and never encouraged by any reputable postal service, the practice of self-shipping spans continents, centuries, and a wide range of motivations, from escaping bondage to simply avoiding the cost of a plane ticket.
From Ship Holds to Cargo Holds
The idea of concealing oneself in transit isn't new. The 19th century saw the rise of the stowaway, hiding aboard ships or, later, freight trains, as a crude method of escape or travel. These attempts came with extraordinary risk: suffocation, starvation, dehydration and hypothermia were all common outcomes, and those who were caught faced legal repercussions or worse. As aviation advanced in the 20th century, so did the desperation and creativity of stowaways. With airport security tight, some resorted to hiding in the wheel wells of planes, where temperatures can plummet to minus 63 degrees Celsius and low oxygen makes survival highly unlikely. A handful have lived to tell the tale regardless, including Mario Steven Ambarita, a 21-year-old Indonesian man who survived a short domestic flight hidden in a plane's wheel well in 2015, but such cases remain rare and depend heavily on altitude, flight duration and sheer luck.
The Box as a Vehicle of Hope
Mailing oneself offers a different, if still perilous, opportunity. Parcel cargo holds on modern planes are typically pressurised and temperature-controlled, conditions that vastly improve someone's odds compared to an uninsulated wheel well, and the concealment of a crate can delay detection until the package actually arrives. The most famous example by far is Henry "Box" Brown, an enslaved man who mailed himself from Virginia to Pennsylvania in 1849 to escape bondage. Aged 42 at the time, Brown faked an injury to excuse himself from labour, coordinated secretly with abolitionists, and climbed into a wooden crate carrying a jug of water, a few biscuits and a blanket. The trip took 27 hours and cost $86, something like $2,500 today. Brown emerged free and went on to become a well-known speaker and performer, touring both the box itself and a moving panorama depicting his escape. Not everyone approved of the publicity; Frederick Douglass reportedly criticised Brown for revealing exactly how he'd done it, fearing it would close the method off for anyone who might try to follow him. It's a small irony that Brown's escape happened at more or less the same moment enslaved families across the American South were placing newspaper ads searching for relatives lost to the slave trade, a reminder of exactly what Brown was risking his life to get away from.
An Olympic Javelin Thrower's Box
More than a century later, in 1964, Australian athlete Reginald "Reg" Spiers faced a dilemma that would push the boundaries of ingenuity, endurance and legal oversight. A talented javelin thrower with Olympic ambitions, Spiers had travelled to the United Kingdom hoping to qualify for the Australian athletics team. When he failed to make the cut and found himself penniless in London, his wallet stolen, no return ticket, no immediate way to earn his way home, he began contemplating radical options. Rather than ask Australian authorities or his family for help, Spiers devised a plan that was both ridiculous and inspired: he would ship himself home, literally.
Spiers confided in his friend John McSorley, a fellow athlete and former British javelin champion working in freight services at the time, who thought at first he was joking. The two built a crate roughly five feet long, three feet wide and two and a half feet deep, just large enough for Spiers to crouch or lie curled up inside, reinforced with carrying handles, air holes and internal straps. They packed a sleeping bag, a pillow, tinned food, a torch, a bottle of water and an empty bottle for a toilet, labelled the box "computing equipment" and marked it fragile, and consigned it as air freight, cash on delivery.
The journey, routed through Paris and Bombay to Perth, was harrowing from the start. In Paris the crate was left upside down for 22 hours. In Bombay it sat on scorching tarmac for hours, and Spiers suffered dehydration and heat exhaustion that could easily have killed him. He survived regardless, cut his way out of the crate with a pocketknife once it reached a holding area at Perth airport, walked out unstopped, and hitchhiked home to Adelaide, unaware the world was about to find out what he'd done. Back in London, McSorley, having heard nothing for days, feared the worst and contacted the press. The resulting coverage turned Spiers into an instant folk hero on both sides of the world. The airline, initially furious, declined to press charges and waived the shipping fee. Decades later McSorley co-authored a memoir of the adventure, and in interviews Spiers downplayed the danger, joking about it the way one might recount a youthful indiscretion, though he acknowledged real panic and regret at the time.
Spiers' story didn't end there, and the rest of it undercuts the folk-hero framing considerably. He briefly returned to competitive javelin in the mid-1960s, but by the early 1980s he'd moved into a very different line of work: drug smuggling. In 1981 he disappeared from Adelaide with his girlfriend after being charged over a plot to smuggle roughly $1.2 million worth of narcotics into Australia, and spent six years on the run before being arrested in India in 1982 on separate heroin and hashish charges, for which he initially received a death sentence, later overturned on appeal, and eventually served around five years in prison. He's since largely stayed out of the public eye, though he endorsed McSorley's memoir of the box journey decades later and reportedly remains close friends with the McSorley family to this day.
Other Notable Human Parcels
The motivation to mail oneself has varied wildly over the years, from political statement to prank gone wrong. Some of the more notable cases:
● Herman Zeitung and Ignatz Lefkovitz (1893): two Austrian men who separately mailed themselves from New York to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Zeitung arrived on July 28, apparently beating Lefkovitz by four days.
● W. Reginald Bray (1900 to 1903): a British eccentric who mailed himself within England, once via ordinary post and once via registered mail, purely as a stunt rather than out of necessity.
Elspeth Douglas McClelland and Daisy Solomon (1909): two suffragettes who really did want an audience with the prime minister, and found a loophole to get one. Post Office rules at the time allowed a person to be dispatched by express messenger as a "human letter," so on February 23, fellow campaigner Jessie Kenney paid threepence at the Strand Post Office to have McClelland and Solomon posted to H.H. Asquith at 10 Downing Street, carried there in person by a telegraph messenger boy. Police refused them entry, and the two women were technically returned to the sorting office as dead letters. The stunt made the front page of the Daily Mirror anyway, and Solomon's mother Georgiana, also a suffragette, was later badly injured on a separate deputation to the House of Commons. A later suffragette, Florence Feek, tried the same trick on Winston Churchill's office and was turned away too, told he was "not at home to callers" even ones with the postal service's own stamp of approval.
Reg Spiers (1964): mailed himself from London to Perth, arriving after 63 hours inside a wooden crate, as detailed above.
Brian Robson (1965): a 19-year-old Welshman working in Melbourne under the UK's "Ten Pound Pom" migration scheme, homesick and unable to afford the roughly £700 airfare home to Cardiff, directly inspired by Spiers' own stunt the year before. With two friends, Paul and John, he built a crate just 30 by 26 by 38 inches and packed it with a hammer, a suitcase, a pillow, a litre of water, a torch, a book of Beatles songs and an empty bottle. His connecting flight fell through, the crate was left upside down on the tarmac for 22 hours, and after roughly 96 hours in transit, weak and slipping in and out of consciousness, he was discovered not in London but in a freight shed in Los Angeles, when a ground worker peered through a knot hole in the wood and the two of them made eye contact. The FBI declined to press charges, treating it as a bizarre prank, and Pan Am flew him home to the UK for free. Robson has said the experience still haunts him. He published a memoir about it, The Crate Escape, in 2021, and spent years afterward trying to track down the two friends who'd helped nail him into the box, whom he'd lost touch with entirely.
Charles McKinley (2003): a 25-year-old shipping clerk from New York who, homesick and unable to afford a plane ticket, had himself sealed into a crate and shipped, cash on delivery, to his parents' home in DeSoto, Texas, billed to his employer. The crate went by truck, then cargo plane, routed through Niagara Falls and a freight hub in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a roughly 1,500-mile, 15-hour journey with no food or water and a cell phone that didn't work. When the delivery driver went to unload the 350-pound crate and saw a pair of eyes staring back through the slats, he assumed there was a body inside and called police on the spot. One freight executive later pointed out that the $550 shipping cost, charged to McKinley's employer, would have covered a first-class plane ticket. McKinley pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour and was sentenced to probation, though his troubles didn't end there; a year later he was sent to prison for eight months after skipping town and violating the terms of his release.
Unnamed inmate (2008): escaped a German prison by hiding inside a package collected as part of the prison's own mail room operation.
Hu Seng (2012): a Chinese man who attempted to prank his girlfriend by mailing himself to her as a surprise. The delivery took over three hours in a poorly ventilated box, and paramedics had to revive him on arrival.
The End of the Line
Modern airport security and scanning technology make this kind of subterfuge far less likely to succeed today, with freight subject to far greater scrutiny than in Spiers' or even McKinley's day. Yet the stories keep resonating, because they represent a rare, sometimes darkly funny clash between human determination and bureaucratic infrastructure, an anti-travel tale where the suitcase is the passenger. It's a different kind of ingenuity from the sort found in more conventional escape artistry, the kind practised by performers like John "the Little Welsh Terror" Jones, but it comes from the same basic instinct: that for every mile of progress, someone, somewhere, is still willing to challenge the rules in the most literal way imaginable, by thinking inside the box.
