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."

The bottle was found 800 miles away from where it had been dropped, and Haga told BBC Scotland when she and her son read the note and saw how far it had come, "that was kind of cool." She tracked Buchan down on Facebook and sent her a message, which Buchan only just saw this week while looking through her inbox.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Now 34 and a doctor living in Australia, Buchan told BBC Scotland she was shocked to find Haga's "absolute gem" of a message. She got a kick out of her 26-year-old letter, saying that when she first read it, "I just died laughing. There's some really lovely lines in there, like what was important to me at the time."

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Catherine Garcia

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.