Tennessee family finds 30-year-old message in a bottle sent from Kentucky river

RIPLEY, Tenn. — A message in a bottle launched into a Kentucky river 30 years ago was discovered recently about 250 nautical miles away in Tennessee.

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Pam Stanfield went “treasure hunting” with her daughter Skylar Mae Friday after a recent flooding to see what washed up on shore, the Jackson Sun reported.

“Most of the time it’s a bunch of trash, but every now and then you get something neat,” Pam Stanfield said. “And we got something neat.”

They found a bottle with a note stuffed inside. The note read:

“We wanted to see how fat this will go. It’s almost Christmas. Ho! Ho! Ho! This bottle was launched from Calhoun Ky 12-21-90.”

Stanfield posted photos of it on social media in an attempt to connect with the senders. Less than an hour later they found the couple.

“Hi! It is us! We can’t believe it! We remember writing the note and launching the bottle so many years ago,” Trina Hollander commented.

John and Trina Hollander penned the letter Dec. 21, 1990. They put it in a glass bottle, corked it and sent it from the Green River in Calhoun, Kentucky.

“We don’t live at that house anymore. We moved around the corner from it and away from the river a few years back, but we liked to go treasure hunting too,” Trina Hollander said. “But we were out there one day looking at the river and thought it would be really neat to find a bottle with a message on it that washed ashore. We never found one, but John said we should send one out, so we did.”

It somehow traveled about 250 nautical miles before the Stanfields found it.

“We’ll never know, but I’d love to know where all that bottle went from Calhoun, Kentucky, to Ripley, Tennessee,” Stanfield said. “For all we know, flood waters carried it in the woods somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee or even Illinois or Missouri somewhere and it sat there for years before another flood picked it up and carried it out to the river again. But it was a cool thing for our daughter to experience, and me too because I spent a lot of time as a little girl looking for stuff but this is definitely one of the best things we found.”

The Hollanders now have new friends in Tennessee.

Cox Media Group