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Peter Allan was moving a radiator when he made a cut in the floor and found a whiskey bottle with a folded note inside. The 135-year-old bottle had to be broken with a hammer to reveal the message signed by James Ritchie and John Grieve on October 6, 1887.
Peter Allan, 50 years old and owner of WF Wightman Plumbing, was doing routine work in a house in Edinburgh, Scotland: moving a radiator and finding the piping under the floor. He cut a random hole. The room was about 3 by 4.5 meters. He cut exactly over the 135-year-old bottle that was hidden there, having no idea what was under the board.
“The room is 3 by 4.5 meters and I cut exactly around the bottle without knowing it was there. I can’t believe it,” Allan told BBC Scotland. The probability of hitting that specific spot was extremely low. The bottle could have stayed there forever if the cut had been made a few centimeters to the side. Allan picked up the bottle, went downstairs, and showed the homeowner what he had found under her floor.
The doctor who waited for her children to come home from school to open it
When Allan came down with the bottle in hand, she made a decision: she would wait for the children to come home from school before trying to open it. She picked them up and said she had exciting news to share on the way. The children asked if they were going to have hot dogs for a snack. She said no, it was something better.
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When she told them that a message in a bottle had been found under the floor of their house, the children were excited and thought it was a treasure. At home, they tried to remove the note with tweezers and pliers, but the paper started to tear. Eilidh took a hammer and broke the 135-year-old bottle. She kept all the shards in a Tupperware afterward, feeling, in her own words, absolutely terrible for destroying a 19th-century object. But it was the only way to read what was inside.
The message that the two workers left about their own death
The note, signed and dated, said: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor, but did not drink the whisky. October 6, 1887. Whoever finds this bottle may think that our dust is blowing along the road.” Wikipedia
The phrase about the dust is what made the message disturbing to those who read it. The two men who wrote that note knew that, when it was found, they would already be dead. They were leaving a record of their own existence under a floor, in a whisky bottle they did not drink, for someone they did not know, at a time they could not imagine. The family who read the message in November 2022 was looking at words written 135 years earlier by two men who died more than a century ago and who accurately predicted they would be dust when found.
The two men traced by the 1881 Census
After the discovery, a family friend researched the names in the 1881 Census and found records of James Ritchie and John Grieve living a few kilometers from the house, in the Newington area of Edinburgh. The two were not strangers in that neighborhood. They lived near the place where they laid the floor six years after the census was taken. Exame
The tracing through the census gave a concrete historical dimension to the note. The names left almost playfully inside the whisky bottle became identifiable, locatable in time and space. James Ritchie and John Grieve were real people, with a registered address, who once worked in that house and decided to leave a sign that they had been there. One hundred and thirty-five years later, the sign worked.
The National Library of Scotland and the plan to preserve everything
A curator from the National Library of Scotland recommended to the family that they preserve the note in an acid-free envelope to ensure the paper’s conservation over time. Eilidh ordered the envelopes and plans to frame the note along with a piece of the original bottle, such as the neck, so that the complete story is visible in a single object. Noticias Caracol
The family’s plan for the hole in the floor is also in keeping with the story. Before closing the opening, they will place a new bottle in the same place, with a note written by the current family and a transcript of the original message. Whoever opens that floor one day will find two messages: the one from 1887 and the one from 2022. Eilidh summed up the feeling with a straightforward phrase: “Thinking that it stayed there all this time and could have stayed there forever is incredible.”
The report was published by the BBC on November 19, 2022. Read the original text at: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-63691806
Have you ever found something unexpected during a renovation or construction work at home? What would you do if you found a message like this hidden in a wall or floor? Leave it in the comments.
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