127-year-old Victorian home hides a mystery: Illinois couple discovers mysterious, unopened letter dating back to 1914

Imagine renovating your home and stumbling upon a piece of antique. You are filled with feelings of intrigue and excitement about what it could be. Well, an Illinois couple recently experienced something similar in their 127-year-old Victorian home in Evanston. Kate Pearce and her husband, Bill, purchased a Queen Anne-inspired mansion in 2022, lured by the property’s architectural brilliance, including stained-glass windows, curved moldings, and a turret. But the home’s renovation brought them something unexpected: an unopened letter from Sweden, dating back to 1914.

Illinois couple finds mysterious letter

Kate and Bill were removing a built-in along the butler’s pantry wall. They wanted to access the plumbing to renovate the particular space into a bathroom. That’s when the couple stumbled upon the ‘dirty and dusty’ envelope, reported People magazine.

Kate, an interior designer, revealed that the envelope was old, carrying 4 foreign stamps. ‘It felt almost criminal to open it, but we had to know what was inside,’ she said, before finally unsealing the 1914 letter.

What the letter read

Initially, Kate and her husband struggled to identify the language, but after she posted screenshots of the letter on Instagram, one of her followers helped her decode it. They found out that the letter was in Swedish.

The letter talked about the day-to-day life in Sweden back at that time, written to someone named Elsa by her mother. The mother had shared that Elsa’s father was unwell and he had been suffering from back problems.

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Illinois couple decides to keep the letter

It was only later that Kate and her husband found out that the letter was actually addressed to a neighbouring house which was Swedish in origin.

Instead of throwing the letter away, Kate decided to honour it as it stayed in their Victorian home for over a century. She has now framed the letter and hung it on the walls of the newly renovated bathroom, near the place where she found it originally.