Man Loses Grandmother's Engagement Ring. Then While Driving Sees Sign Pinned to Tree
Nico Bellamy, 27, had finally decided to plan a proposal to his longtime girlfriend Caitie Schlisserman in 2017.
Just three years earlier, Schlisserman’s father had given Bellamy his late mother’s engagement ring to keep safe. And Bellamy wanted to make sure the ring stayed safe, so he put it into a deposit box until he was ready to propose.
When the couple planned to move in July 2017, Bellamy withdrew the ring to take with them. He put the ring into a plastic bag for safety and then returned it to its ring box. He then put it in his backpack so that he could keep a close eye on it.
It wasn’t until a week after moving in that Bellamy went to retrieve the ring and noticed his unzipped backpack on the floor.
And after dumping out the contents of the bag and thoroughly searching through it, he realized the engagement ring had vanished.
“I went to go get it and noticed my backpack had been unzipped,” he said. “When I dumped everything out and realized the ring wasn’t there, I ran to the bathroom and threw up immediately.”
Needless to say, Bellamy was distraught. He couldn’t believe the priceless heirloom entrusted to him was gone.
“Not only was it this heirloom that was given to me by her dad to keep safe and I misplaced it,” he said, “but her father was still recovering from his mother passing away just nine months earlier.”
Bellamy began to frantically search through the entire house, knowing that he had made sure it was secure and that there was no way the ring could have fallen out.
But then he realized that while they were moving in, one of the movers had asked if they could move his backpack.
“I figured it had to have been the movers because the bag was zipped up and it couldn’t have fallen out,” he said.
Immediately, Bellamy called the moving company, but no one answered the phone. And although he was panicking, he managed to keep Catie completely unaware of the situation.
Eventually, the pair headed to the airport to pick up Schlisserman’s father. For the entire car ride, Bellamy silently planned how he would break the news to him.
At the airport, he rushed in ahead of his girlfriend, unsure how her father would react.
He took the news better than expected and said to Bellamy that they would find a way to “figure it out.”
On their way home, Bellamy decided to avoid traffic and take a back road he’d never taken before. And at the corner of an intersection, he happened to look out the window just in time to see large letters pinned to a tree that read “Found Engagement Ring.”
“I thought it had to be mine, because it seemed like such a weird coincidence,” Bellamy said. “I hoped it would be, but how could someone have found this thing?”
Not wanting to alert Schlisserman, he didn’t write down the phone number on the sign right away. Instead, he drove them home and shortly went back out under the guise of taking their dog for a walk.
Bellamy went back to the tree to get the phone number and immediately sent a message to the finder describing the ring.
Sure enough, it was the ring he’d lost! Bellamy said that moment was the most relieved he’d ever felt.
He soon met with his neighbors, who’d found the ring. They told him they found it in a nearby alley — the same alley that the moving company parked their truck in.
“The movers had to have seen it and thrown it away,” said Bellamy, thinking that the movers must have taken it but not seen the ring in the bag.
“Then my neighbors found it and almost threw it away, and then kept it. Then they put up this one sign, and it was the only sign they put up, on a street that I never go on.”
With the ring back in his hands, Bellamy decided it was time to propose. The couple went on a trip to Paris together, where Bellamy popped the question on New Year’s Eve.
And after she said yes, he was finally able to tell her what he had gone through to get that ring back just months before.
“I went through like every stage of panic, anger, fear and then joy in such a small amount of time. It was the most stressful two hours in my life,” Bellamy recalled. “And the greatest thing now is it’s on Caitie’s (sic) hand — so if it gets lost again it’s her fault!”
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