Little girl's message found 30 years later

HUDSON, N.H. (WHDH) -- A New Hampshire woman managed to track-down the author of a message in a bottle discovered nearly three decades after it was written.

Jean Sperling found the old bottle while cutting back brush near the creek behind her house.

"Well I could understand if I was by an ocean I would find a bottle with a message in it, but here in Hudson? In my little creek?"

And when Jean's husband pulled the cork, that’s just what he found: a message scrawled on a scrap of brown paper in what looked like a child's handwriting:

"Dear anyone, if you find this bottle, please write to me at Miss Leslie Sorenson, RFD #6, 12 Sanders Road, Hudson, New Hampshire,” the note read.

The note brought Jean to the home around the corner from her, but the Sorensons had moved away more than 10 years before -- to Arizona the new owner thought. For Jean it was a dead end, until someone heard her story, got on the internet, and tracked down little Leslie Sorenson, now 38 and living outside of Phoenix.

The phone call was a surprise but Sorenson eventually recalled putting the bottle with the message in a creek near her house after seeing something like that in an old episode of Little House on the Prairie.

"I was amazed,” she said. “I just thought it was absolutely out of this world that something that I dropped in a stream when I was a little girl was found 30 years later."

The Sperlings are making arrangements to get the bottle and note back to Sorenson -- something to show her own daughter who's just about the age she was when she sent that bottle on its journey.

"Even though didn’t travel very far in distance, it traveled a long way in time,” Peter Sperling said.