I found a secret door in my home which led to hundreds of love letters – sparking 3,000-mile quest to find their owners
A SECRET passageway in a Virginia home led to a heart-warming discovery.
Anna Prillaman loves spending time relaxing in her home with her dog, but when she bought her house, she didn’t know her home came with a hidden mystery.
When she was spring cleaning her home in Richmond, she found a panel leading to a hidden part of her attic, WTVR-TV .
It didn’t require a key, and was held shut with a simple latch.
And in the secret room she found two boxes stuffed hundreds of handwritten letters sent to a young woman named Betty Sue from a young man named Vance.
“There are no SMHs or OMGs or LOLs. It’s full sentences. Grammatically correct sentences. Isn’t that funny how that works,” Prillaman said.
Vance was smitten with Betty who he met at John Marshall High School, Prillaman determined based on the contents.
Prillaman noted that the letters were written in cursive and were clearly parts of a love story.
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“Hi Honey. How is my Baby getting along? When we’re not together I know just the right words that I would use in telling you everything. But when we’re together all I can think of is ‘I love you.’ Vance,” the letter read.
Prillaman felt that reading these letters was an invasion of Vance and Betty’s privacy, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them away.
So 70 years after the letters were written, she turned to social media to try and find a relative to pass them on to.
Within days, she found a promising lead within days.
She reached out to Dalton Long who lived 3,000 miles away in Portland, Oregon.
Long, 30, confirmed that following a string of written correspondence, Vance and Betty eventually exchanged vows and got married.
He knew this because Vance and Betty were his grandparents, and were wed for 50 years
“To me they were ‘B’ and Pop. But to the rest of the world, they were Betty McGhee Long and Vance Herschel Long,” Long told WTVR. “To add words to that time in their life is going to be incredible.”
Long grew up in Prillaman’s Virginia home, but never knew about the letters.
Long’s mother picked up the box of letters which will be sent to Long in Oregon soon.
