Ring Found After 36 Years... In Toilet

Terry and Donna Claver of Montana had a lot to be thankful for this Christmas season including the return of her engagement ring which had been lost for 36 years. 

Photo : Kimball Bennion  /  The Great Falls Tribune via AP

When Terry asked Donna to be his wife after a mere three dates, he couldn’t afford a diamond ring. So he chose a lovely sapphire on a gold band. Donna was thrilled with the ring and wore it proudly until one day she set it down on the back of the toilet while putting lotion on her hands. She then watched in horror as the ring started to slide down towards the bowl. “I went to grab it, but I missed and it fell in,” Donna told reporters. “It went right down into the little hole at the bottom of the toilet. I could put my finger in that hole and feel it with the tip of my finger, but it was wedged in tight.”

It was indeed truly stuck because no matter what Claver and her husband did the ring would not budge. They even tried draining the toilet, shaking, poking, and prodding, but to no avail. They soon gave up the hunt and moved out of the home a few years later assuming that the ring was gone for good. 

Over the years they watched as the house changed hands several times, eventually becoming a hunting cabin for a group based in Florida, but the lost ring was still a mystery. “It always irritated me that we lost it,” sighed Terry. “I always wanted to get it back. About five years ago the hunters asked me to go in the house and fix a bathroom faucet. I saw the toilet over there and I thought, ‘I ought to just take that toilet up to see if that ring is still down there.’ But I didn’t have time and it was somebody else’s house, so I didn’t.”

But luck was on his side when just last month he was fixing the roof of a home across the street. He looked at his old house and saw the hunters carrying out an old toilet, the very same toilet that had swallowed up the ring so many years before. Terry quickly offered to haul the broken fixture away, to the delight and probable confusion of the hunters. 

“I put it in the back of my pickup and drove it into the shop,” he recalls. “I got a sledgehammer, and I whacked it. The base of the toilet fell down on the truck’s end gate, and right in the center where the little hole would have been was the ring.” He then excitedly called his wife and asked her to meet him at the shop. When she arrived he held out the ring and asked his wife of nearly 40 years to marry him. Laughing and crying together they celebrated the return of that very small symbol of their love from all those years ago. Terry believes that “every marriage goes through its seasons. Sometimes you think everything the other person does is cute, and other times you can’t stand to be around them. Finding the ring brought back the same original feelings we had when we were kids. It was a gift from God that made those feelings strong again.”

And we can all share in that joy, and share in the hope that the ring received a thorough cleaning and is never taken anywhere near a toilet again!