The title says everything. There is a domain I want that I would rather try to contact the original owner in person than have to go to auction for obvious reasons. The WhoIs info just says "Pending Delete" owns this domain.
look for historical whois, www.aboutus.org often has some, domaintools has a paid tool. try searching the domain name, often SEs cache old whois information from these type of sites.
If it had a website on it, you could check the history through archive.org and try to find the contact address.