A 9-year-old’s prank message in a bottle has been discovered, albeit over 50 years later.
NJ.com reports that New Jersey resident John Kauterman discovered the bottle while cleaning up a stretch of wetlands. Inside he found a letter dated Aug. 20, 1973, by a young girl named Laurie Blair Brown.
“Please notify my family that a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested waters!” the letter read.
“My first initial thought was like, ‘Okay, this sounds like a kid’s prank,'” Kauterman tells NJ.com.
Kauterman posted an image of the letter on social media, and learned that Blair Brown had died in 2017. However, her sister, Allison Spencer, recognized it.
“My sister, who was a very creative and quirky person, had a really great sense of humor,” Spencer says. “She immediately latched onto this idea and she came up with the crazy story.”
The letter actually contains Spencer’s handwriting, though she credits the idea and contents of the letter to her sister.
“She was really confident at the time we wrote it that it was going to be found,” Spencer says. “So I think she would say, ‘I told you so.'”