He Borrowed His Big Brother's Class Ring in 1979 and Lost It on a Seattle Beach. A Metal Detector Found It.

PAWTUCKET, R.I., Nov. 9, 2026 — Every family has the story that comes up at every holiday. For the Bensons, it was the class ring Eric borrowed in 1979 and lost on a beach in Seattle. Forty-seven years later, a stranger with a metal detector handed it back.

Eric Benson was about 20 that year, a Saint Raphael Academy graduate who rode a Greyhound across the country with three friends and landed in an apartment in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood, The Valley Breeze reported. Before he left, he took his older brother Paul's gold Saint Ray's ring out of a bedroom cabinet at the family home as a reminder of home. Nobody asked Paul.

One evening Eric and his friends walked down to see the low tide and ended up roughhousing. When a friend squeezed his hand hard enough that he thought his ring finger might break, Eric took the ring off and set it on a rock. He forgot it there. By the time he went back, the tide had come in.

"I just took the ring off, put it down on the rock," he told WJAR. His first thought, he said, was, "My brother is going to kill me."

Paul, who is 13 years older, did not take it well. "Why did you do that? Why did you take it?" Eric remembered him asking. "So for the next four decades, at every family event, every gathering, the story of the lost ring would come up," he told The Breeze.

The ring stayed in the beach off Puget Sound until November 2025, when Lucas Thrun, a Seattle lawyer who hunts beaches with a metal detector, went out for a cold, late-night session at an unusually low tide. His machine gave a signal that usually means a nickel or a pull tab. About three inches down in a layer of clay, he found a gold ring with a Saint Ray's inscription and the initials P.E.B.

"This is the stuff that people in my hobby dream about," Thrun told WJAR.

He contacted the school, which had no easy way to reach a graduate from decades back. Its alumni office worked the problem for months, matched the initials to Paul Eric Benson in February and found him in Rhode Island in August. A few weeks later, Thrun got an email from Eric, who confessed he was the one who lost the ring and described the exact spot where Thrun had dug it up.

Paul told WJAR he was napping when word of the ring reached his door.

On Nov. 5, Thrun flew nearly 3,000 miles to Pawtucket and handed the ring back at Saint Raphael Academy. Eric, who now lives in Israel, made sure he was there too.

"Little did I know it would be a 47-year history. He forgave me. But trust me, he never forgot," Eric said. He has also learned his lesson. "Next time I take the ring, I'm gonna ask him."

"If it wasn't for him, it would just be a lost memory," Paul said of Thrun.