- The oceans hold many mysteries, but sometimes they decide to share them with beachgoers.
Earlier this week, we brought you the story of the Florida man who drifted ashore in his strange oceanic hamster wheel. That got us thinking — what other weird things have washed up from the sea?
So, we decided to do a bit of digging. Here is a collection of some of the weirdest things that the oceans have spat out onto beaches around the world.
1) Garfield Phones
Since the 1980s, a strange phenomenon has plagued the beaches of Brittany, France. Hundreds of telephones in the shape of the famous cartoon cat Garfield have regularly drifted ashore for more than 35 years.
For the longest time, nobody knew what on Earth was going on. Then, in 2019, the mystery was finally solved.
Journalists discovered a long-forgotten cargo container filled with Garfield phones that had fallen into the sea during the storm in the ‘80s. It had managed to lodged itself in a seaside cave and was slowly disgorging its contents back into the waves.
2) A Bag of Severed Hands
In 2018, a fisherman in Khabarovsk, Siberia, made a gruesome discovery. On as mall island in the Amur River, he saw a human hand sticking out of the snow.
It only got worse from there. After a bit of digging, the man found a total of 54 hands scattered along the riverside, along with the bag that had contained them.
Needless to say, the fisherman summoned the authorities to the island with all due haste. But an investigation by the Russian Investigative Committee soon found there was no cause for alarm.
According to them, the hands came from a forensic laboratory where they had been kept for identifying bodies. They had simply been improperly disposed of — by dumping them in the river.
3) Giant Lego Man
In 2014, Japanese beachgoers got watch a gigantic replica of a Lego minifigure slowly drift in from the sea. The people were, to put it slightly, confused.
Turns out, the giant Lego man was the work of a Dutch artist going by the name of Ego Leonard. He apparently has a thing for making big plastic Lego sculptures and throwing them into the sea.
A similar thing happened in 2012, only that time in California. Florida also got its taste of Leonard’s Lego in 2011.
4) A Dragon Skull
You probably wouldn’t expect to find dragon bones on a beach. But in 2013, people going to Dorset’s Jurassic Coast for a morning walk found a 40-foot-long dragon skull sitting on the sand.
The Jurassic Coast is known for being a good place to spot dinosaur fossils. But where the heck did the dragon skull come from?
Well, it didn’t actually drift in from the sea. The skull was placed at the spot overnight as an ad stunt for the then-ongoing Game of Thrones TV show.
5) A Dinosaur Femur
Speaking of dinosaur bones, in 2012, a dinosaur bone suddenly showed on a beach in Washington state. The 80-million-year-old femur had been sitting on the bottom of the sea for quite a while until waves dislodged it.
According to scientists, the bone once belonged to a theropod — large bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs like the T-Rex. The researchers say that the bone is the first evidence that dinosaurs once inhabited today’s Washington.
6) WWII Love Letters
After Hurricane Sandy wrecked the U.S. East Coast in 2012, a woman found a pile of letters that had washed up on a beach near Jersey shore. She picked the letters and took them home, probably out of curiosity.
Reading the letter, the woman realized they were love letters from World War II, written by Dorothy Fallon and Lynn Farnham. The letter dated between 1942 and 1947 when Farnham served in the military.
After a bit of digging, the woman discovered that Fallon, now 91, was still alive and living in a nursing home in New Jersey. How the letters got into the sea, nobody knows, but at least they went back to their rightful owner in the end.
7) Rubber Ducks
Like the Garfield phones in France, there are rubber ducks that sank into the sea in a cargo container in 1992. The ducks are now gradually popping up on the surface and drifting all over the world with ocean currents.
The fascinating thing about them is that they have helped marine scientists develop a better understanding of how the seas work. Since we know where the container sank, it’s easy to calculate the route they took based on where and when they appear.
Currently, it’s estimated that more than 200 rubber ducks are still floating in North Pacific Gyre. The ducks have showed up everywhere from Alaska and Hawaii to South America, Australia, and Oregon.
8) Drugs
It’s really nothing weird for drugs to show up on beaches. Smugglers often use boats to transport illicit narcotics, and sometimes those boats sink or the smugglers dump their cargo when the Coast Guard shows up.
In May 2015, cops in Galveston, Texas, found a 66-pound stash of cocaine on a local beach, worth $3.5 million. That wasn’t all that strange in itself, but it was sixth drug shipment found on that beach within one week.
Nobody knows where the drugs came from. Then again, if we did, someone would’ve probably already been arrested.