Woman finds coded telegraph in antique dress, computer analyst cracks it

When an antique collector purchased an antique bustle dress from an antique store a decade ago, she brought it home from the store and found a hidden pocket with something inside.

When antique collector Sara Rivers Cofield made a unique discovery in one of her purchases, she didn’t know it would lead to an almost decade-long mystery.

Rivers Cofield, who lives in Chesapeake Beach, Md., purchased an antique bustle dress from an antique store in Searsport, Maine, about 10 years ago.

When she brought it home from the store, Rivers Cofield, who works as an archaeological curator, found a hidden pocket on the dress with something inside.

“I could feel that there was a clump in the pocket so I finally figured out how to access the pocket, and it turned out whatever was balled up in there was paper,” River Cofield told Global News.

“I started to try and un-ball it, I realize as I’m going that there’s actually two sheets. My mom, who was with me, we were doing this together, and we were like, ‘Oh man, it’s like secret writing from the 19th century!’”

Rivers Cofield says she and her mother were puzzled by what they found on the paper.

“We finally get them all unfolded and realized it just didn’t make any sense. You could kind of tell we were in this race, or ‘Who’s going to read it first and get to the secret message?’” she said.

“And mine was, the first one was like, ‘Bismarck omit buck bank’…. It made no sense whatsoever. There were actual words; you could read it, it just didn’t mean anything. We were just looking at each other like, ‘What is this? I have no idea.’”