9 Amazing Stories of How Messages in Bottles Changed Some People’s Lives

Picture this: you are walking along the sea coast and suddenly you notice that the waves wash ashore an old bottle, full of seaweed, with a note inside it. Is it a joke? Or perhaps an old message? What if that piece of paper changes your whole life? If you find it hard to believe this is possible, read the stories we’ve selected below.

O awesome.club compiled for you the most extraordinary cases of messages in bottles: a very old way of exchanging notes between people. Yes, this type of mail is slow, sometimes nothing more than waves for dozens of years to reach the recipient. But, unlike modern instant messaging, they will probably never be forgotten.

An Italian newspaper clipping about “newlyweds by a bottle”. Syracuse, 1958

In 1957, 22-year-old Swedish sailor Ake Viking tossed a bottle with a letter to “a beautiful and distant stranger” to Gibraltar. Half a year later, the message ended up off the coast of Sicily, Italy, found by a local fisherman. Soon, the letter reached his 17-year-old niece, Paolina Puzzo. The girl hesitated a lot, but in the end she wrote to the man: “I’m not pretty, but it seems like a miracle that such a small bottle was swimming to end up in my hands, so I couldn’t help but answer…”. And it was really a miracle, because the two young men soon met and got married.🇧🇷 So don’t be shy about meeting people in unexpected ways!

Emily Crowhurst holds the bottle with her father’s message

On September 9, 1915, British soldier Thomas Hughes, who had traveled to France for the war, wrote a letter to his wife, Elizabeth. He put the message in a beer bottle and threw it into the English Channel. In addition to the letter to his wife, the bottle contained an additional note, in which the soldier asked whoever found it to please deliver it to his wife. Two days later, Hughes died in a battle. His little daughter, Emily, never got to see her father. After the war, Elizabeth and Emily Hughes moved to New Zealand, where their mother died in 1979. Only in 1999, a fisherman named Steve Gowan found the bottle in Essex (Great Britain). He managed to locate the woman and discovered that she lived in New Zealand. That country’s postal service paid Gowan and his wife for the flight, and Emily finally received the message her father had written 85 years earlier.

In 1968, 8-year-old Sandra Morris was returning from Europe to the United States on a transatlantic cruise. She wrote her address, a little message on a card, put it in a bottle and threw it in the water. The girl wanted someone to find her letter and write a reply. Within 3 months, a girl of the same age, Rosalind Hearse, walking in South Wales, found the message.

Rosalind wrote to Sandra, and that’s how a 40 years friendship🇧🇷 The two grew up, they already have their families, but they kept in touch. When the women were 48, they celebrated the anniversary of their wonderful relationship on the beach, where the waves carried the bottle with this message.

The American priest George Phillips was nicknamed “the bottle pastor”, because he gave his sermons that invited people to stop drinking from empty alcohol bottles, and threw them into the waves of Puget Sound (Washington State). In this way, Father George sent more than 20 thousand messages🇧🇷 Nature itself helped him: the strong current of the bay quickly carried the man’s words away. He has often received thank-you messages from Alaska, Hawaii, New Guinea, and Mexico, from people who believed that the bottle found on the coast was “a sign from heaven” and stopped drinking.

In 1979, couple Dorothy and John Peckham were celebrating Christmas on a cruise ship in Hawaii. According to tradition, passengers threw messages into bottles in the water to attract happiness. The Peckhams did that too, wrote their address on the letter and even put in a dollar for postage. Four years later, 9,000 miles from where they had dropped their message, the letter was found by Hoa Van Nguyen, a refugee from Vietnam.🇧🇷 Upon arriving in Thailand and settling in a refugee camp, Hoa wrote to the Peckhams. They received the message on March 4, 1983, the day John turned 70.

Hoa and the Peckhams exchanged letters for 2 years, during which the refugee got married and asked his new friends to help him move to the United States. The Peckhams agreed to help him, and the Van Nguyen family has lived in Los Angeles ever since, all thanks to a message in a bottle and human kindness.

Hoa Van Nguyen is not the only refugee whose life was changed by a message in a bottle. In another case, 88 people were rescued from death thanks to a desperate letter thrown into the water.

In 2005, a ship carrying passengers from Peru and Ecuador was hijacked by pirates. Near Costa Rica, the ship was caught in a storm. The criminals fled, leaving the hostages with no means of communication. The boat ran aground, food supplies quickly ran out, and people tried the last remedy to try to survive: they threw a letter into a bottle with the SOS signal. Fortunately, some fishermen found the note just three days later. They notified local authorities and the ship was quickly detected. The passengers, mostly women and children, were severely dehydrated, but all survived.

Mimi Fery with a message from her daughter.

When Josh Baker was 10 years old, he wrote the following letter: “My name is Josh Baker, I am 10 years old. If you find this message, show it in the news, Date: 16.04.95”. The boy put the paper in a bottle and threw it in White Lake, Wisconsin, where he roamed for the next 10 years. In 2005, Josh tragically died in an accident. A year later, his friends Robert Duncan and Steve Leidel were on vacation there. Steve noticed a bottle with a message inside, floating in the trash. They went into shock when they realized it was a letter from their deceased friend. They gave it to Josh’s mother, who took it as a good sign from her son.

A similar story occurred on Long Island in late 2012, when a janitor found a bottle with a message inside. He took the letter to his boss and called the number mentioned on the note. It was the phone Mimi Fery, whose 18-year-old daughter, Sidonie, had died in 2010. The note was written by the girl 10 years earlier, and helped the mother come to terms with the loss and try to move on. On a piece of paper, little Sidonie wrote the line from her favorite movie “The Amazing Adventures of Bill and Ted”, as if she were calling out to someone who might find her letter: “Be great to each other!”

A postcard that spent 108 years at sea.

In 2015, retired Marianne Winkler discovered on the shores of the island Amrum (North Sea, Germany) a bottle with the inscription “BREAK”. Inside, there was a small questionnaire in which the person had to indicate the name of the person who had found them, the date and place and, if found by a ship, the name of the ship. Anyone who had found it had to send the questions to the Marine Biology Association in Plymouth, Great Britain, for a shilling in compensation. It turns out that the bottle was part of an experiment, conducted by marine biologist George Parker Bidder III in 1904-1906, to study currents in the North Sea.

Marianne filled out the questionnaire and sent the letter to the mentioned address. And the Plymouth Marine Biological Association honestly sent him an old shilling.

Representatives of the Guinness Book of World Records proved that this is the oldest message of all time. This bottle spent 108 years and 138 days in the sea🇧🇷 The previous record was 99 years and 43 days, with a ticket that also belonged to that experiment.