Discovered via the “Oddly Enough” section of Yahoo! news: A wallet lost by an 18-year old girl in southern Sweden 40 years ago has just been returned anonymously via the post, with everything in it intact.

Here is the original story [Swedish] from a local paper, with picture. Here is the BBC’s take, in English.

The story has intrigued a lot of news editors: The Reuters version has been picked up globally by at least 60 papers and news sites monitored by Google.

Why? Tritely, because it is an unusual occurence. A better reason might be that such stories resonate in us. We like to be assured that such occurences happen, if only occasionally. We like the idea that individuals make efforts on behalf of strangers, because it is a token of humanity’s ability to empathize. More broadly, we need to believe that we can sometimes trump the random small cruelties of daily life. And we like to fantasize that out there, the things we’ve lost continue to have a life of their own, perhaps one day to be reunited with us.

Finally, the story resonates because we are curious; because the return of the wallet must have a larger plotMy own theory: Like Aristides Silk, the kleptomanic pickpocket in Tintin’s The Secret of the Unicorn, somebody has been collecting wallets in Southern Sweden. That person has just died, and his widow is now disbanding the collection.. Is it a story of shame, or of benevolence? Did the anonymous mailer know the wallet’s owner? Good fiction tends to start this way — the wallet was returned to the town of Trelleborg, which is not far from where Henning Mankell‘s Kurt Wallander works; he’d discover a huge conspiracy involving stolen identities, human trafficking, and sex slavery.

Trelleborg is also not so far from Hässleholm, where the letter was written. That story, too, has not yet reached its end.