After nearly 70 years, a message in a bottle finds its way back to its original Hatteras owner

Mike Garrett was walking his dog in his Hatteras Village neighborhood when he noticed a small bottle bobbing in the nearby creek. Made of glass and resembling a typical medicine bottle, the container would oddly make a brief appearance and then be pulled back under the water.

“The bottle kept popping up, and then I realized that a crab was grabbing it, and it would disappear again,” said Garrett. “I was trying to retrieve it, but the crab kept getting hold of the bottle and taking it back underwater.”

After a short tug-of-war for the bottle, Garrett finally won the contest by scooping it up with a dip net.

“I caught the crab, too, but I let him go,” said Garrett.

The bottle was in good shape and looked fairly new, but upon further examination, Garrett realized there was a piece of paper inside.

“I carried it home and took out the note, and it said ‘Betty Willis, 1956,’” said Garrett. “I was shocked – I have no idea how it resurfaced like that.”

Luckily for Garrett, he happened to know a Willis in the area – his neighbors Eugene and Jan Willis – so he took the bottle over to their house to see if they recognized the name.

“It was a little tiny pill bottle, and the only thing the note said was ‘Betty Jean Willis.’ Well, as it turns out, she’s my sister,” said Eugene Willis. “She is three years older than I am, so she was 11 years old at the time she wrote it.”

There were 10 children in the Willis family, who all lived in Hatteras Village in the mid-20^th century near the same creek where the bottle was discovered.

“We were living in the old house on the front row [of Hatteras] and at the time everyone’s garbage piles were next to the ditches and the creek, so there’s no telling what kind of old stuff is in there,” said Willis. “I played in that same creek when I was a little kid, and these tides come in and out of the creek during storms, and the edges of the banks cave in a little, and that’s when you find this sort of thing.”

Eugene passed the bottle over to his brother and sister-in-law, Virgil and Belinda Willis of Lee Robinson General Store, and they were soon in contact with Betty Willis herself – now Betty Willis Fisher.

“They called me and sent me pictures, and I just couldn’t believe it – I don’t even remember writing it,” said Fisher. “It just kind of blows your mind.”

Fisher said that she and her siblings spent every day on the Pamlico Sound shoreline when they were young. Just a short walk away, along a trail near the current Lee Robinson General Store, the sound is where the younger members of the family swam, played, and learned to fish.

“It was a daily thing in the summertime,” said Fisher. “We grew up playing in the sound, which was about a block away.”

And while she doesn’t remember throwing the bottle into the water nearly 70 years ago, she has some theories about how it landed in the creek, and how it returned home decades later.

“We didn’t bother to put in any address – we just put my name – so I guess we figured someone would find it next week, or maybe next year,” said Fisher. “Since we spent so much time on the sound, maybe it was thrown in there at the time. You think of all the hurricanes we’ve had, and especially [2003’s] Isabel which flooded the whole village, so maybe it came to the creek that way.”

Fisher moved from Hatteras Village with her U.S. Coast Guard husband in 1964, living in various locations based on where he was stationed until the couple retired in the late 1970s.

Now living in Jacksonville, N.C., her brother Virgil Willis mailed the bottle back to her, and it arrived on May 5.

“The lid is on it pretty tight, and I couldn’t pull it off,” she said. “It’s definitely in great shape – it still has the ridges on the lid and everything.”

Now that the bottle has been returned, Fisher is going to hang on to it this time around and save it as a unique memento for her children.

While its origin story remains a slight mystery, lost to memory, the fact that the bottle was uncovered nearly 70 years later is a “message in a bottle” story that has surprised everyone in the Willis family.

“My son said this sounds like one of those ‘Reader’s Digest’ stories,” said Fisher. “Maybe it went all the way across the Pamlico Sound and back. Who knows. It’s just interesting to think it has been floating around, in and out of Hatteras, for 70 years.”