Most of the time when we send something through the post it gets there when it's meant to, whether that's with next day delivery or takes much longer as part of an overseas journey

However, there are plenty of tales about things going awry and getting lost in the system somewhere and not emerging until many years later.

Postcards are the most common examples, such as the one sent from Egypt in 1954 that landed on its destination doormat in Britain 57 years later.

80-year-old Margaret Eastham picked up the black-and-white card delivered by the postman along with her usual mail and was stunned to read a cheery message from her sister-in-law, Dorothy, who died four years ago which had been written in 1954 when she was emigrating to Malaysia.

Packages

One famous example is a package sent by a British soldier during World War II which finally got to its destination 64 years later.

Staff at the RAF Lakenheath near Brandon in Suffolk found the item inside a new envelope, along a note from Royal Mail with the words 'found loose in post please direct if possible.' It turned out to be a hand-written letter on American Red Cross paper posted by Serviceman Charles Fleming on March 20 1945.

Employees at Royal Mail's sorting centre in Peterborough had forwarded the 64-year-old package and military personnel found three photographs inside the envelope which included a portrait picture of Fleming, a picture of his regiment and a picture of him in Florence, Italy.

Time capsules

Of course some packages are meant to be opened much later than they were sent, as the story from the small town of Otta in Norway proved. 

A 'time capsule' package wrapped in brown paper, tied with a few pieces of string, sealed with red wax and delivered more than 100 years ago had the inscription “Can open in 2012.”

So it came to be that, in front of a crowd that included Princess Astrid of Norway and watched by curators from the Gudbrandsdal museum, , the mayor of Norway’s Sel municipality unwrapped the brown paper package in 2012 to see what was inside.

The revealations were perhaps sadly just another package containing a number of fabrics in the colour of Norway’s flag along with notebooks, newspapers, a letter, a small drawing, some community council papers and other bits of paper.

 

Images source: Reddit.com