Sometimes real life is stranger than fiction and this is definitely one of those moments. In what is a one-in-a-million chance story, a woman who lost her mixtape while on holiday 25 years ago has been reunited with it, after spotting it at an art exhibition.
The story only gets stranger from there - not only was the tape located 1,200 miles away from where she misplaced it, but the damn thing still works!
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Stella Wedell was beyond shocked when she attended a photography show in Stockholm last year, only to find her lost mixtape - and the list of 20 songs she had lovingly assembled - on display.
Sky News reports that the tape - which features an eclectic mix of songs from the Pet Shop Boys, Bob Marley, Shaggy and more - was listened to by Stella on her Walkman while in the Costa Brava and Mallorca back in 1993.
Amazingly, in 2017 her tape made it back to the mainland after a sea-bound adventure, washing ashore in Fuerteventura before being recovered by UK photographic artist Mandy Barker.
Mandy herself was surprised to find that the tape still worked after sending it to a professional audio restorer and so she decided to include the discovery alongside the tracklist in her touring installation, Sea of Artefacts.
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Little did she know the owner would turn up to see her show.
"When I was reading the tracklist, it seemed very familiar to me," said Stella.
"So I took a picture of it and compared it with the original CD from 1993, which I still have - and it was exactly the same tracklist, but starting with track three.
"I remember that I didn't like the first two songs on the CD because I felt they were too old, so I wouldn't have included them when I recorded the mixtape aged 12.
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"I also have an association with the Jungle Book song and this was always the third track.
"I always made tapes from my CDs at this time to listen to them with my Walkman, especially for holidays, and to think that a tape I could have lost more than 20 years ago had been found was incredible."
Photographer Mandy - who often uses her work to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the world's oceans - was equally as surprised as Stella.
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"Even after getting the tape to play, it was then an astounding chance for Stella to walk into my exhibition and recognise her tape," she explained.
"She said she was shocked to find it and when I read her email I couldn't believe it either. It was shock all round.
"The songs at the start were damaged but further in the songs were as clear as they would be today. It shows how long plastic can exist in the sea."
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Music, Interesting, Weird