A message in a bottle, penned by a 9-year-old girl in 1973, washed ashore on the Jersey Shore 53 years after it was set adrift. The man who found the note, John Kauterman, also discovered that he and the girl who wrote it share the same birthday.

Laurie Blair Brown wrote the playful note during a family vacation in Ocean City in August 1973. The message read, “This bottle was adrift on August 20, 1973 on 2nd Street beach Ocean City as my captors were transporting me to an island off shore in the Atlantic. Please notify my family that a band of ruthless sponge fisherman are forcing me to dive for them in shark infested waters!” Brown included her home address in Bernardsville with the dispatch.

Kauterman, co-founder of the nonprofit Tidelands Initiative, found the long-lost note near the Garden State Parkway while participating in a cleanup in the wetlands of Upper Township, approximately 10 miles from where Brown and her sisters had released it.

Initially suspecting it was a child's prank, Kauterman posted a photo of the message in a local Facebook group. This led to the discovery that Laurie Blair Brown had died in 2017 from cancer at the age of 52. Within hours, Kauterman connected with Brown's sister, Allison Spencer.

Spencer revealed that the handwriting in the note was hers. "I offered to write it for her because she wasn’t sure how to spell all of the words. It was her story, and I was the scribe," Spencer told NJ.com. She described her sister as a creative and humorous individual who embraced the idea for the message.

Kauterman, who returned the letter to Spencer, expressed awe at the rapid connection. "I felt as though it’s kind of fascinating how the world works, where you can literally put something that’s been … essentially hiding for 53 years, put its content on the internet and be talking with the creator in like less than 12 hours," he said.

Spencer also learned that Kauterman shares her late sister's birthday. She plans to display the message in a shadow box at her home, noting that her sister had been confident it would be found. "She was really confident at the time we wrote it that it was going to be found," Spencer told 6ABC. "So I think she would say, ‘I told you so.’"