Couple make morbid discovery after picking up what they thought was 'message in a bottle'
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@auslapourway
Messages in a bottle date all the way back to 310 BC, and they're seemingly still floating around to this day.
Just last year, a man in France discovered a 26-year-old message in a bottle that had been penned by someone when they were just five.
Benjamin Lyons, from Sandwich, Massachusetts, released the bottle in 1997 and French fisherman Hubert Eriau was the lucky individual to find it over two decades later.
The bottle that was released was part of a class project. The students had been learning about ocean currents at the time.
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Another bottle was discovered last year, but this time by a couple named Rick and Crystal who have been documenting their travels around Australia on TikTok.
Spotting the bottle in floating in the ocean, Rick filmed himself fishing it out of the water and passing it to Crystal.
The duo then take the lid off the bottle and pour out the contents onto the beach in a bid to get to the note inside.
But in the process, Rick and Crystal came to the realization that the bottle contained the ashes of a deceased man named Geoffrey.
The man seemingly had the desire for his ashes to travel the seas in the years after he passed, with the note adding, "If found, please throw bottle into outgoing tide so I can continue my journey."
Unfortunately, he instead wound up mixed in amongst the sand of an Australian beach. Whoops.
The clip has since been viewed nearly two million times. One person commented on it: "Okay but why would you put a message in a bottle and not think someone would open it?"
A second person echoed similar sentiments, writing: "To be fair that’s poor foresight on Geoff’s part."
"You’d think they’d super glue the lid on," said someone else.
"OMFG MY JAW. IS ON THE FLOOR," added another shocked individual.
Another commenter gained some clarity on what the couple did next, saying, "Just put some sand back in there. And chuck it back in. No one will ever know."
The original posters replied in agreement, stating, "That’s exactly what I did. Tried to get all of him back in there. Felt bad bro."
A different person went as far as describing the ordeal as 'the best video I’ve ever seen on the internet'.
I think the moral of the story here is to try read the note in the bottle before opening it...