Message In A Bottle Shows Up After 26 Years

While at the beach in Gasvaer, Norway, in the summer of 2020, Elena Andreassen Haga found that a moment in time from 1996 had washed ashore.

Haga and her son, Eliah, discovered a green bottle that contained a letter written 24 years earlier by Joanna Buchan. Buchan was 8 years old and living in Peterhead, Scotland, when she dropped her message in a bottle into the sea for a school project. She addressed the letter to the “discoverer,” and talked about her love of sweets, the book Charlotte’s Web, her dog, and her family’s “rather big house.” She ended the note by saying, “By the way, I hate boys.”

Haga found Joanna on Facebook and sent her a message with a picture of the note.  She just opened that message this week saying, “I just died laughing. There’s some really lovely lines in there, like what was important to me at the time.”