The Story of the Lost Garfield Phones

Since the 1980s, bright orange parts of a novelty Garfield phone have been steadily washing up on the Iroise coast of Brittany in France, and nobody knew why. It was all part of a mystery where the locals had no other choice but to keep collecting the pieces from the famous fat cat who loved lasagne.

35 years later the mystery is solved! According to BBC, the novelty phones started washing up on the shore because a shipping container had lost its way. The shipping container was found earlier this year in an abandoned sea cave (accessible only with low tides) with some of the novelty phones in excellent condition.

There is still nothing to indicate which ship they were being transported on or which carrier was responsible for them. Authorities also don’t know if the lost cargo was restricted to just one container.

Claire Simonin, the head of local beach cleaning group Ar Viltansou, Brittany, spoke of the discovery:

"Our association has existed for 18 years and in that time we have found pieces of Garfield telephones almost every time we clean. He [the resident] told us where it was... it was very, very dangerous. We found this incredible fissure that is 30 metres deep and at the very bottom, there were the remains of a container. Under the boulders in front of the entrance, we found 23 complete handsets with electronics and wires. They were everywhere," she added.

The character of Garfield was created by illustrated Jim Davis in the late 1970s and since spawned into a merchandising empire worth approximately hundreds of millions of dollars.