Mystery messages leave Barrow pals looking for answers
Last updated at 18:48, Sunday, 07 October 2012
A TRIO of Barrow children are trying to crack a code unsolved by beachcombers all over the UK, after mystery messages washed up on the shores near their homes.
Friends Ellie Crabtree, 10, Maddison Almond, 11, and Mili Kumar, 10, found 23 bottles containing almost identical notes while out walking with Ellie’s parents.
The group were strolling along South End on Walney, between the caravan site and the lighthouse, last Saturday morning, when the children began spotting them.
Rolled up tightly, tied with cotton and stuffed into Panda Pop, Tropicana and Fruitshoot bottles, the messages found inside were all written in the same handwriting, and say the same things, give or take a few words.
Mandy Crabtree, 47, of North Scale, said: “It’s just two sheets of paper in every bottle – A5 note paper from a spiral notepad - all in the same black pen with some parts underlined in red.”
The cryptic listings on the messages include ‘31/12/68 Koncordesky crash Paris TU 144’, ‘31/12/1999 Putin’, ‘Beltriot France – England’, and ‘Hovercraft England - France’.
Others are ‘25/7/00 Concorde crash Paris’, ‘01/02/05 WM Gray Heysham LA3’ and the date ‘16/09/12’.
Mysterious enough on their own, the plot thickened when the family began researching the messages online.
Mrs Crabtree said: “There’s been quite a lot of the same ones washed up all over the place – in Liverpool, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
“But for us, it seems even more bizarre that we’ve found 23 all in the same place – you wouldn’t think you’d find that many on one stretch of beach.”
Mrs Crabtree and her husband, Geoff, are appealing to the public to try and help them solve the mystery.
Their daughter and her friends are desperate to find out where the messages are coming from and what they mean.
They have already taken the notes to their teacher at Vickerstown Primary School, and Ellie’s parents have promised to do what they can to investigate further.
Mrs Crabtree said: “We haven’t had time to sit down and go further into it yet, but we’re stuck with all these bottles now so we need to do something.”
First published at 16:29, Friday, 05 October 2012
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk
Have your say
Hi there,
Well done in picking up all that litter! It is a terrible shame that it is there in the first place...You are not the first to find these - we have been finding these bottles for the two years or more on Morecambe Bay Partnership beach cleans all around Morecambe Bay.It seems that there is someone who lives in Heysham who is something of a "conspiracy theorist" and keeps littering the bay with these.Because of the flow of water around Morecambe Bay, anything thrown into the sea around Heysham often finds its way onto the Cartmel and/or Furness peninsulas, or out into the Irish Sea.Furness BeachCare group has found around 50 of these bottles in the last two years, and more have been found by the Arnside and Silverdale BeachCare group and the Morecambe BeachCare group.Hopefully whoever is doing this will stop soon, as all they are doing is polluting the seas, putting wildlife at risk, and littering our beaches.Matt,Furness BeachCare,
a part of the Morecambe Bay Partnership
Posted by Matt on 8 October 2012 at 08:44