Allison Spencer was just a kid in August 1973 when she and her nine-year-old sister Laurie Blair wrote out a wild, made-up tale of being kidnapped by sponge fishermen, stuffed it into a Coca-Cola bottle, and sent it bobbing into the Atlantic off Ocean City, New Jersey. More than five decades later, that same bottle turned up along New Jersey's coastal wetlands — perfectly preserved, and carrying a message that would eventually make its way back to Spencer, now living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Spencer recalled that her mother had sent her and her younger sister to a beach in southern New Jersey that day with instructions to write a message and seal it inside a bottle, according to WKRC. The note itself, dated to Second Street Beach in Ocean City, declared that it had been “set adrift on August 20th, 1973,” according to CBC Radio. Laurie, playing along with the prank, signed her name to a fictional distress call claiming that “a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested waters,” as reported by 6ABC.
The sisters figured someone would find the bottle fairly quickly. Instead, Spencer said she simply stopped thinking about the message for 53 years, assuming it had long since been lost to the sea.
A Wetlands Cleanup Turns Up a Time Capsule
The note resurfaced this year when John Kauterman came across it while clearing debris from New Jersey's wetlands, finding it in remarkably good condition despite its decades adrift, per the same CBC Radio account. Kauterman is the co-founder of the nonprofit Tidelands Initiative, an organization devoted to picking up trash along the state's coastal wetlands. He told CBC Radio that stumbling onto old bottles isn't unusual for him — “I can come across possibly one a week, or one a month” — and separately told 6ABC that it's common to find glass bottles from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s washed ashore during his cleanups.
Kauterman posted a photo of the note online, and it quickly found its way back to Spencer in Michigan, the station's report notes. He later mailed her the original letter, which she said she plans to frame in a shadow box for display in her home, according to UPI.
A Bittersweet Homecoming
For Spencer, the return of the note carried weight well beyond nostalgia. She said receiving it was meaningful because she misses her sister, and she believes Laurie — whom she described as having a strong sense of humor and a habit of cracking jokes — would have found it funny that their childhood prank resurfaced more than 50 years later.
Laurie Blair died of breast cancer in her 50s, per the account the WKRC article was built from. Reports differ on exactly when: CBC Radio reported that she died in 2017, while UPI reported her death occurred in 2019. The discrepancy between the two accounts has not been resolved.
Not the Only Bottle to Find Its Way Home
Kauterman's wetlands work regularly turns up relics of the past — he told Cape May Magazine that his cleanups often uncover bottles from the 1960s and 1970s mixed in with roughly 60 years' worth of accumulated debris. The scale of that effort is substantial: Kauterman and a colleague estimated that in 2023 alone, he cleared 25,000 pounds of debris from Cape May County's wetlands, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Spencer and Blair's bottle isn't the only decades-old message to resurface this year, either. In Massachusetts, Kate Rivers found a bottle on South Cape Beach in Mashpee containing a letter written by a 14-year-old girl that had been floating for nearly 60 years, according to CBS News Boston. That note was eventually traced to Wendy Warner after people recognized her handwriting and a Worcester address written on the page, and Warner's daughter, Aja Talarico, said she knew instantly it belonged to her mother. Rivers was in the process of mailing that letter back to the family.
For Spencer, the return of her sister's handwriting offers something similar — a small, unexpected piece of a shared childhood, arriving decades later than either sister ever imagined.
