Message in a bottle sent from Scotland washes up in Norway after 24 years

A message in a bottle.
(Image credit: iStock)

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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.