Top 10 Amazing Real Life Message in a Bottle Stories

In April 2005, a Wisconsin kid named Steve Leidel found a bottle in White Lake containing a note written by another young boy in 1995. The note read: “My name is Josh Baker. I’m 10. If you find this, put it on the news.” The finder instantly recognized the name, as he was a hometown hero of sorts. Baker had joined the Marines at 18, and his small town rallied behind him upon his deployment to Iraq. He returned, much to the joy of the town, only to be killed in a car accident months later. Baker’s mother took comfort from the message. And it did end up in the news, as the young boy wished.

Geoff Flood was walking along Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand when he stumbled across a mysterious bottle with a message inside. Dated March 17th, 1936, it read "At sea. Would the finder of this bottle kindly forward this note, where found, date, to undermentioned address." An address in Australia was included. The message was written on stationary belonging to a British Royal Mail ship that transported passengers from England to Australia. Flood did some research, and found that the sender had died in the 1940’s, but had a living grandson named Peter Hillbrick in Perth, Australia. Hillbrick was overjoyed when Flood sent him the bottle and message, thrilled to have a connection to his grandfather years after his passing.

Wim Kruiswijk of the Netherlands has been scouring the coast for messages in bottles as a hobby for decades. In 1983, a year in which he found three bottles, he reached out to the letter writers and was pleased to get answers from all of them. He responds to the senders whenever possible, and has made many a pen pal in doing so. The collector did a survey of 435 of his found bottles. He reported that 75% of the messages he found included requests for pen pals. The other 25% contained a variety of subjects, such as jokes, religious pamphlets, love letters, drawings, requests for help, advertisements, and even one message in protest of pollution (ironic).

During a cruise to Hawaii in 1979, Dorothy and John Peckham threw wine bottles containing notes requesting responses into the sea. The bottles contained dollar bills for postage. Several years later, the couple received a correspondence from Thailand. Hoa Van Nguyen, a former lieutenant in the Vietnamese army, had found it while attempting to escape from the political regime in Vietnam with his younger brother. The couple corresponded with the soldier, and eventually helped him and his family by sponsoring them so they could immigrate to the United States. They met in person in 1985, as the Vietnamese family arrived in the US.

In the 1950’s, a Swedish sailor, Ake Viking, left his romantic fate to the sea, as he tossed a plea for love in a bottle over the side of his ship. The brief message was addressed “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away”, including information for postal response. Two years later, the bottle was found by a fisherman in Sicily, Italy. He gave the bottle and message to his daughter, as a joke. She answered the message with: “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer.” The two corresponded until the sailor ended up coming to Sicily, to marry his newfound love.

In 1999, a fisherman in England found a bottle containing a letter to a WWI soldier’s wife, written as he was heading off to the front. The letter began, "Dear Wife, I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you” and ended, “Ta ta sweet, for the present. Your Hubby." The soldier was tragically killed in battle two days after the letter was thrown to sea, and his wife was never to receive it. But this story doesn’t have a totally dismal ending - because the letter was eventually delivered to his elderly daughter in New Zealand.

The story of the Titanic is full of dubious anecdotes and legends. It’s nice to find a simple, true piece of history in a bottle. A third-class Irish passenger named Jeremiah Burke was travelling to America when the ship went down. Thirteen months later, a man found a bottle on the beach, just miles from the deceased Irishman’s hometown. The bottle was recognized as a small bottle of holy water given to the young man by his mother, prior to his departure. The note inside simply read: “From Titanic. Good Bye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork.” He’d used his own bootlace to tie the message. It had miraculously travelled thousands of miles to reach the shores of his home.

Many of the bottles found in the ocean contain messages about studies of the ocean’s currents. In fact, this was one of the main origins of the practice. In 2012, UK fisherman Andrew Leaper found one of these research bottles near the Shetland Isles, dated 1914. It contained instructions on the return of the bottle, and was one of 1,890 bottles left to the sea as part of a project studying the currents. Despite the experiment taking place in the early 20th century, this bottle was only the 315th to be found. At the time, this set the world record for oldest message in a bottle, though it’s since been broken.

In 2014, fisherman Konrad Fischer found an old bottle in his nets in the Baltic Sea. It contained a postcard from a young man, written in 1913. It’s believed that he threw the bottle to sea while on a nature appreciation hike. Much of the card was illegible, but there was enough readable information to track down the man’s granddaughter, Angela Erdmann. Erdmann hadn’t known her grandfather, as he’d died six years prior to her birth. Now in her early 60’s, she was delighted to have some form of connection to him, as she knew little about him. The bottle and message are on display at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, Germany.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.

Looking for a Penpal
Zoe Averianov’s 1990 Message, Answered by a Dutch Couple 23 Years Later

Hi From Massachusetts
10 Year Old Max Vredenburgh’s 2010 Message, Answered from France Nine Years Later

Across the Atlantic
Shiloé Khokhar’s 2015 Message in Bermuda, Answered from Morocco

Indian Ocean Missive
Anne O'Sullivan’s Message from Indonesia, Answered from South Africa

In 2018, Tonya Illman and a friend were walking on a beach near Perth, Australia, when she found an old bottle containing what looked like an old cigarette. Thankfully, they didn’t toss it in the trash, because to date, this bottle is considered by the Guiness Book of World Records to be the oldest message in a bottle ever found. Dated June 12th, 1886, the message contained a German vessel’s coordinates, date and route. The bottle was what’s known as a “drift bottle”, a research method to study the ocean’s currents. The practice dates back to 310 BCE, when Greek Philosopher Theophrastus allegedly put sealed bottles in the sea to prove that the Mediterranean was formed from the inflow of the Atlantic Ocean.