By Tim Binnall
A woman in New York state wound up with a rather weird mystery on her hands when she went to get her mail and discovered that she had inexplicably received a postcard that her late mother had sent back in 1960. According to a local media report, the eerie missive from long ago arrived at Carol Hover's home in the community of Hornell late last month. While sorting through her mail one afternoon, she was taken aback when she noticed a postcard that sported what she immediately recognized as the handwriting of her mother, who passed away in 2014. To Hover's profound surprise, a closer look at the postmark on the card revealed that it had been sent from Canada back in 1960 when her parents had been visiting there on their honeymoon.
Puzzled by the peculiar piece of mail, Hover brought it to her local post office to inquire about the oddity and things took an even stranger turn when the equally surprised employees revealed that they actually had even more of the 'ghost mail' waiting for her in the back. Specifically, the woman was given three additional postcards that were mailed by her parents at different years during the 1960s and 70s. Oddly enough, the circumstances surrounding the decades-old mail turning up at her local post office is a mystery to the people who work there. "Nobody seems to know how they are getting to us and why," Hover marveled.
Adding one more peculiarity to the puzzling case of postage from the past, at around the same time that the 'ghost mail' was delivered to her house in Hornell, her cousin's former family home in Minnesota also received a postcard that had been sent to Hover's aunt and uncle back in 1983. Both family members are at a loss to explain how the missives, sent from separate locations around the world and at various times across different decades, could collectively reappear a few weeks ago. Nonetheless, Hover understandably took some comfort in seeing her late mother's writing "on a recent piece of mail" and mused that "whether it gets explained or not, I am okay with that."