Another message in a bottle mystery is upon us!

Today’s message in a bottle mystery comes from Connecticut. A young woman named Amanda “mailed” this message in a bottle on the Quinnipiac River in Connecticut back in April of 2007:

Hey person who finds this, my name is Amanda! I’m helping my best friend ever Shantel babysit her kid sister and brother. We bought a six pack of root beer + decided to write notes and put them in the bottles. This bottle started out in Southington, CT. Tell me where it ends up!

4/26/2007

My Cell Area Code 860-538-7544

or myspace: www.myspace.com/mandatatertot

PS I’m 15

In May of 2017, according to myrecordjournal.com, “Michael Wieloch, a volunteer with the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association (QRWA), found the glass root beer bottle during a cleanup event on April 15 and could see the note inside”.

Apparently, QRWA volunteers have hauled “old tires, crumpled beer cans, shopping carts and construction debris from the river,” but not messages in bottles. Of course, I find this kind of trash washed up in the Caribbean, too. It is amazing how much garbage people dump in waterways.

Quinnipiac River from bridge in Meridan. Photo: Arthur Dutra IV / Wikipedia

And yet, this message in a bottle feels special–not at all like garbage, as pointed out by president of the QWRA, David James: “To a lot of people, (the river) is an avenue or medium that takes things away. It’s a trash disposal,” James said. “For this person, it was a means of reaching out.”

Where is Amanda?

Well, Amanda reached out all those years ago. One spring night in 2007, she sent a message in a bottle in hopes of connecting with someone somewhere. But no one in the QWRA was able to find her because the phone number didn’t work. And, as you can see by trying her MySpace address, her profile is no longer in existence.

So, where is Amanda? This is the question we have to solve in this message in a bottle mystery… Let’s find her, y’all, and let her know that her message in a bottle has been found!

Map of Quinnipiac River. Credit: Wikipedia.

As a sidenote, I have certain fondness for messages in bottles that began their journeys in rivers, since I found one that turned out to be very meaningful to me. In fact, it started out in the Delaware river, but made it all the way down to the Caribbean! Click here for that story. Oh–and there’s another super cool story about a message in a bottle found in a river, and it was 97 years old! Click here for that one.

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