Are you Mike and Charlene? Maybe you were big Beatles fans back in the ’80s. Perhaps you still are.
Two Irishtown, N.B., neighbours are looking for whoever penned a message in a bottle that’s sat for four decades waiting to be discovered.
“It’s neat because there’s not too many ways and pathways, waterways that could have floated down this way. So it makes me curious where exactly it came from,” Chad Martin said.
Martin and his friend Chris Holl were out in the woods behind Holl’s property last week picking fiddleheads when they came across some green glass gleaming in the light.
“I seen a piece of glass and thought (I) better pick it up so (Martin’s) dog doesn’t get cut. And it turned out to be a big bottle,” Holl recalled.
He pulled out a note — a bit weathered and watermarked — with the words, “To the finder, let me out.”
“(And there are also) people’s names: Mike and Charlene, and then there was Paul, Linda, Ringo. So Beatles people!” Holl said.
The note inside the bottle asks the finder to ‘let me out.’.
Provided/Chris Holl
He believes the bottle may have travelled down the Shediac River at some point, maybe during a flood.
The back of the note has a logo from Tower Gift World, which is a gift shop that would have had locations in New Brunswick at the time.
With few details to go by, the two posted photos of their find on a community Facebook page in hopes of finding out who the authors are.
“It would be neat if we could get any information on the people that wrote it just to get a little history of the area,” Martin said. “It being a small area and close-knit, it would be cool to get a bit of finality to the story and talk to the people that put it in there and get their story.”
Chris Holl believes the bottle may have floated down the river during a flood.
Provided/Chris Holl
On the Facebook post, theories abound. Some have tagged Mikes and Charlenes they know. Others have shared their own stories of finding time capsules with unknown histories.
The letter is dated May 7, 1982. Martin and Holl discovered it on May 8 — almost exactly 42 years later.
Holl was a youthful 14-year-old in 1982, and has fond memories of the era.
“It was a good time, so hopefully we got a good story out of it,” he said.
As for where Martin was back in 1982, “I wasn’t even a thought yet,” he said.
The two are inviting people to keep sending in tips on Facebook and hopefully they can one day meet the note’s authors.