June 2 (UPI) — A Scottish man whose wallet was stolen at a bar 17 years ago was reunited with the long-lost item after it was found inside a bush near the business.
Ryan Seymour, 37, of Lochgelly, said he was initially confused when an officer from the Dunfermline Police Station contacted him on Facebook recently to ask if he was missing a wallet.
“I initially said I hadn’t, but they told me it was probably about 20 years ago,” Seymore wrote on Twitter. “I started racking my brains, and I said ‘yeah, now that you mention it, I did a long time ago.'”
Seymour said his wallet was stolen during a night out at the Elizabethan pub in Dunfermline about 17 years earlier.
“I had been playing pool with my pal. I went to the toilet, wallet in hand, and put it down on the cistern,” he wrote. “Seconds after coming out I realized I’d left it. I went back in and it was gone already. But obviously someone had gone in right at the back of me and run away with it.”
Police told Seymour the wallet had been found in a bush near the bar and was turned in by a member of the public.
Seymour said the contents of the wallet were mostly intact, except for the $85 cash he remembered having inside it. The wallet still contains his video rental membership card and an old work ID.
“It was just weird how much it was like a mini time capsule, it just transported back to that day,” he said.
Inspector Jill Moss of Dunfermline Police Station said officers were happy to help reunite Seymour with his lost property.
“We will make every effort, no matter how much time has passed, to trace owners of lost property which is handed into our stations,” Moss told Fife Today.
“It is great to hear that in this case, a wallet which had been missing for 17 years and recovered from a bush — of all places — was returned safely to its rightful owner.”