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 has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.