Stolen purse turns up after nearly 40 years hiding in Halifax

HALIFAX, N.S. - Now, where’d my purse go? That was a question Liz Campbell got an answer to nearly four decades after her purse was stolen.

The answer? Tucked away in the ceiling tiles in the women’s washroom.

On Dec. 1, 1980, Campbell went to the bank just around the corner from her work in Halifax. She took out $225 to go Christmas shopping, put her purse in her filing cabinet at work and headed to lunch.

“I remembered I had something to show my coworkers, so I went back to get my purse and it was gone. It was that quick,” Campbell recalled.

Campbell said she filed a report with the police, who searched the general vicinity, but nothing turned up.

But little did Campbell know, her purse wasn’t too far from where it was stolen.

Brendan Sage, an employee at Smarter Spaces, was 3-D laser scanning above ceiling tiles at their office — the former Catholic Pastoral Centre, where Campbell used to work. Sage, a new employee, was practising capturing existing mechanical conditions in the washrooms, as it’s the only space in the office with drop ceilings.

“So I scanned the men’s and the women’s washrooms, but when I went over to the women’s and poked my head up in there I noticed there was a purse sitting up there,” Sage said.

Sage took the dust-covered purse down and brought it to show his coworker, Greg Hanlon. “We saw the purse we figured it’d be a couple of years old, but then we saw the IDs expired in 1980,” Hanlon said.

Hanlon noticed the woman’s driver’s licence showed a Dartmouth address and her age, so he searched for Elizabeth Campbells on Facebook and messaged who he thought it might be.

Campbell met with Hanlon and Sage and was reunited with her old purse this week. “It was really a time capsule,” Campbell said.