Bottles with messages are meant to be found. Workers transfering a war memorial in Christchurch, New Zealand have just found one.
When the dismantlers of the 85-year-old Citizen’s War Memorial noticed a glint in the concrete, they reported it to Jenny May, an architectural historian and heritage consultant. A careful scrutiny revealed a chrism with a note inside the small bottle.
A conservator who unrolled the paper then read “the names of the men who originally worked on the memorial’s construction in 1937,” May said, according to Radio New Zealand.
Among the names were William Trethewey, the sculptor of the monument’s bronze statues, and Graham Haines, a stone mason.
More interesting than the time capsule was the message in a bottle recently found in Texas, United States.
Volunteer cleaner Terry Pettijohn was picking up trash in Highland Bayou Park one Saturday of July when he stumbled on the bottle containing a piece of cardboard, FOX 26 Houston reported.
Written on the cardboard were the names of the senders, two phone numbers and a request to call them and leave the finder’s number.
The numbers were out of service, so Pettijohn asked for help from the Keep La Marque Beautiful Commission, which traced Brian Standefer through Facebook.
Standefer was surprised when he received the bottle. The 37-year-old guy told FOX 26 that he was about 10 years old when he and three friends wrote the note and dropped the bottle about two miles away from where it was found. That bottle thrown in 1995 was finally reunited with one of its senders after 27 years.