(This story was originally written and recorded for Retrocast #28 – Podcast #226, which was released on October 2, 2024.)

On Friday, May 18, 1990, news broke that two severed fingers had finally been returned to their owner after spending 23 years in a jar. However, another resident of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, disputed the claim, telling police that they were rightfully his.

The curious case of these two digits had captivated Bendigo since the previous Sunday when a young couple brought a jar containing the pickled fingers, preserved in methylated spirits, to the local police station. They had discovered the jar while cleaning out their garden shed.

Senior Sgt. Graham Aitken explained, “They had obviously been there a while, so we ran a piece in the local paper and the next morning this bloke comes in and says they’re his.”

That bloke was Michael Ellis, who maintained that the fingers were rightfully his.  The only problem with his claim was that all of his fingers were fully intact. Ellis explained that a man had lost his middle and fourth fingers in an accident at the garage where he had worked twenty-three years earlier. He said that the fingers had been sheared off while the man sat in the back of a tow truck.

After the injured man was taken to the hospital, the then 14-year-old Ellis decided to retrieve the severed fingers.

Initially, Ellis kept them in a matchbox, and he would later use them as a prank to scare women in bars. But one day, the fingers’ rightful owner confronted him, demanding their return. Ellis denied having them, but later stashed the fingers in a jar, sealed it, and hid them away.

The story took another twist a decade before they were found in that garden shed. That’s when someone stole the jar from Ellis. How it ended up in the couple’s shed remains unclear.

Unfortunately, over all those many years the alcohol had mostly evaporated and that caused the fingers to mummify.  They had turned a light chocolate color and looked more like pieces of wood. The only telltale sign that they were fingers were the fingernails at the tips.

Ellis wanted the fingers back. “He said he wanted them now because of their sentimental value,” Aitken said. “We refused but he said he was going to contact the tractor driver and ask his permission to keep them.”

Any claim that Ellis had to those severed digits vaporized when 52-year-old farmer Giles Cary, walked into the police station that Friday morning and took possession of the jar. He said, “But there’s no doubt they are mine. You can see where they’ve come from – the tear matches up with the stumps.”

Giles took the jar containing his fingers home and placed it on top of his china cabinet.

Sargent Aitken commented, “It’s been a bit of a laugh, but it’s nice to have a happy ending.”