Woman finds 30-year-old Valentine's card written in a cryptic code. Online sleuths reveal the confession it's hiding
Some say it's a love confession hidden in a cipher key. Others are still trying to grasp the mysterious phrases scrawled in the message
Love is not just in the air but in every place that catches our deepest attention. In Yorkshire, one woman found love inside a drawer; stowed and abandoned amidst heaps of packing boxes, stacks of old concert tickets, and festival programs, lay a faded Valentine’s greeting card. The only problem: she wasn't sure whether the card was really about love. Sarah (@sarah_snop13) shared screenshots of the mysterious vintage card in a March 15 post on Threads. The enigmatic card has unsuspectingly invited codebreakers, pattern recognition experts, and self-proclaimed detectives who are scratching their heads and rolling their eyes in bewilderment. Many say they are probably going to think about the card for the rest of their lives.
It looks creepy, like a crossword of codewords and symbols. When Sarah first flipped through the card, she felt flummoxed by its betraying mystery. She felt like she was missing something. Not being able to decipher it added another level of irritation to her turmoil. “Dear Sarah,” the card was addressed. In what looked like a scrupulous center formatting, the message went on to read, "I wish you quite a few unsloppy kisses to the space where your head is. I hope that you enjoy today and tomorrow, and don’t forget to eat the broccoli on the shorts.”
The message, scribbled in red ink, was followed by a short text in the brackets: "And dear Valentine’s Day Two." If this message wasn’t mysterious enough, the writer also added several sentences to the card, scattering them at the edges of the inner flap. “But I’ve done it now,” read a line on the upper edge. The one on the right edge read, “Okay — so it wasn’t a very good idea.” The writer marked the message with the signature, “BESTWISHesLOVEfrOMGetWELLSOONYOURS,” with a question mark below it and the word “Faithfull.”
The card was light pink with the front flap featuring a cluster of differently sized red hearts dangling from clouds, encased within a rectangular frame. On a corner of the back flap was a tiny bouquet of hearts and an address that was mostly crossed out by a red pen. Only the word “HAPPY” was left unblemished. This added another level of intrigue to the mystery.
The left-side inner flap resembled a card from the standard 52-deck, only a bit odd. On the left uppermost corner and the right lowermost corner, two red hearts were drawn facing each other, each paired with the letter “A.” In the middle was an upside-down heart, with an ultra-tiny arrow pointing towards the message on the right flap. The card, it seems, is a bombardment of puzzles, too overwhelming for humans to solve. But there are detectives hidden amongst the crowd who can see through the encryption and crack invisible codes.
@virginiakay77, for instance, has a theory. The word “Faithfull,” they say, could be a “columnar cipher key.” If the letters in “Faithfull” were numbered according to their alphabetical positions, as in “A-F-F-H-I-L-L-H-U,” and the message was written in rows in a grid under this message and the columns were reordered, “then reading down the correct vertical column after reordering reveals the hidden name DAVID, and the rest of the letters form LOVE FROM DAVID.” @x-heathermay inputted the message on ChatGPT that said it could be a “null cipher.”
According to what the AI reported, the text was a secret love confession where the writer went on to joke that they had made it overly complicated. But when all is said and done, even after three decades, the mystery of this cryptic card remains unsolved, keeping internet sleuths busy in codebreaking attempts accompanied by blatant self-loathing over not being able to break it.
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