In the 1980s, no one could hide their surprise when orange telephones began hitting the French shores of the English Channel. These phones were designed in the shape of the famous cartoon character Garfield. Hundreds of such phones have popped up on the shores of France over the years, and no one has been able to come up with a logical explanation as to where they came from.
Dubbed the Great Garfield Mystery, it was unraveled a few years ago with the help of a farmer whose memory was refreshed by a new campaign by a beach-cleaning team in France about the phones. When the press got locked into the story, she contacted him to say he remembered seeing a Garfield phone after a storm in the early 1980s and knew where they were coming from.
Tyco Garfield phones were leaking from a shipping container that had disappeared from a freighter at sea, as is often the case when lots of strange items start to wash up in a particular area. The shipping container the phones had come from was trapped inside a secret sea cave, and its location was known only to the farmer who arrived in Brittany in 2019 to finally settle the case of the Garfield phones. It’s been decades since the container fell into the sea, but when the teams went to explore the cave, they found several phones as well as the destroyed container.
“I saw Garfield and container parts all over the cave. But most of the phones are long gone, the sea has been doing its job for 30 years. We got here much later,” Claire Simonin Le Meur, president of the local beach cleaning association, said in a statement.
While the mystery is over, Garfield’s dominance of the French coastline remains, as the shipping container has been located but is in a very difficult spot to lift.
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