A woman who purchased a vintage dress at an antique store back in 2013 discovered almost a decade later that she walked away with more than just the dress itself.
CNN wrote that Sara Rivers Cofield had never seen a dress like the one she found in the Maine antique mall as its “fitted bodice, puffy bustle and lace cuffs reflected a bygone era.”
As Rivers Cofield is an archaeologist “who collects antique costumes and purses for fun,” she reportedly recognized that the dress was from the 1880s and purchased it for $100.
What Rivers Cofield didn’t know at the time was that her purchase would bring “history, mystery and national media attention,” according to the Portland Press Herald.
About a decade after first purchasing the dress, Rivers Cofield reportedly found, “inside a secret pocket tucked under the bustle were two crumpled sheets of paper with lists of seemingly random words and places:
“Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank
“Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, Fagan”
The dress evidently, “also had a tag stitched into the dress with a handwritten name: Bennett.”
The words baffled Rivers Cofield as she reportedly said, “what did they mean, and why did Bennett need a ‘super secret hidey-hold,’ in Rivers Cofield’s words, to stash them? The buttons alone portrayed a forlorn Ophelia from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet,’ and were worth more than she’d paid for the dress.”
What did the mysterious note in the vintage dress mean?
Despite being an archaeologist, Rivers Cofield reportedly didn’t understand what the random words written in the note might mean or why they were in the secret dress pocket to begin with.
“I thought it might be part of a spy story,” Rivers Cofield said.
NDTV World reported that Rivers Cofield decided to post the note online to see if anyone else could decode it writing, “I’m putting it up here in case there’s some decoding prodigy out there looking for a project.”
Within minutes, online sleuths began to attempt deciphering the note only to bring up several conspiracy theories about the note.
CNN reported some of the theories people came up with online were that the note is the “silk dress cryptogram” while others speculated that Bennett was “a spy using coded words to communicate.”
Other theories posed the questions wondering if it was “a cryptic love note? Dress measurements? Civil War codes?”
Despite the hard work people put in to deciphering the note, the investigations turned out unsuccessful.
“I had kind of abandoned the blog at that point,” Rivers Cofield said. “Every once in a while I would see that a comment was posted or that some other codebreaker would email me and be like, ‘Hey, I’m still interested in this,’ but nobody ever solved it.”