Dad Innocently Opens Lid to Weird, Old Bottle – Moments Later the Ground’s on Fire, the Bomb Squad’s Coming, and He’s Headed to the Hospital
Tony Lovell, a British dog walker, thought he’d discovered what was just a “nice looking bottle” on the beach.
Instead of finding a message inside, he found near-tragedy for him and his family — potentially from one of the greatest tragedies of the last century.
According to a BBC report last week, Lovell was walking along the beach at Hartlepool, on the coast of the North Sea in Britain, when he found a bottle that looked to be interesting.
“I always like searching the beach for interesting things — bits of old boats, funny stones, pieces of Victorian boots, weird vapes,” he told the U.K. Daily Mail.
A glass bottle qualified as interesting enough, and he took it home to clean it. While he initially thought it to be a liquor bottle, he later noticed a liquid that definitely didn’t seem to be booze inside of it.
“I thought it was some posh modern gin bottle. But the liquid inside was bright orange and smelled awful,” he said.
Lovell’s son told him it was too “dangerous” to keep. This would later prove to be very accurate.
Although accounts vary as to what happened next — the BBC reported he took the top off, the Daily Mail said it had just been in his hands when it started smoking — what happened next isn’t in dispute.
The material inside the bottle was dangerous — and the flames from it apparently began singeing the dog leash that was around his neck.