A slide show of some of the most touching and bizarre items sold.

An estate sale has a peculiar way of converting an entire life's worth of experiences into a set of monetary values. Used wedding dress: $50. Smiling passport photos of the deceased: 50 cents each. Everything gets price tags. In turn, strangers often purchase the items and give them a second life.

The term estate sale doesn't necessarily imply the owner has died; they occur for a variety of reasons. As Amy Marguello of Great Estate Solutions puts it, "There are four Ds of estate sales; deceased, destitute, divorced, and increasingly nowadays, downsizing."

In all these cases, the estate sale is a revealing window to a previous life. Regardless of what one buys, visiting is like making a trip to a highly personal museum. The gallery above contains some of the most intriguing items spotted at estate sales in the Washington, D.C., area over the past month, along with their prices.