Woman Looks Through Family Photo Album from the ’90s, Makes Wild Discovery

A video of a woman looking back at family photographs from the 1990s has gone viral thanks to the unusual discovery she made.

Photos can be a great way of storing treasured family memories, but they can also lead to a process Linda Henkel, a psychology professor at Fairfield University, refers to as “offloading.”

Henkel told NPR: “When people rely on technology to remember something for them, they’re essentially outsourcing their memory. They know their camera is capturing that moment for them, so they don’t pay full attention to it in a way that might help them remember.”

But while photographs might have a negative impact in some ways, had it not been for the discovery of a series of unusual family snaps, then one woman might not have learned the bizarre truth about an item that had been in her family for decades.

The discovery came as part of a video uploaded to TikTok by a woman posting under the handle catalina.ann. It all started when she decided to look back through some old family snaps and uncovered something unusual.

“We’re looking through this photo album and we see this picture of my parents dying these eggs sometime in the early 1990s,” she explained in the video. “Then I see this picture of the eggs that came out.”

Catalina.Ann said that when she saw the photographs of the eggs, she noticed they looked “really familiar.” That’s when she realized that her grandmother had, in fact, recently gifted her those same eggs. You can watch the video here.

She had previously assumed they were hollow “fake Easter Eggs” but after picking one up and noticing “a little noise” Ann decided to crack one open. That’s when things took another unexpected turn.

Inside the shell she discovered the rock-hard remnants of an egg that calcified in the years since. Ann was clearly in shock at this bizarre discovery, declaring “this woman [her grandmother] kept hold of these eggs for 35 years!” as the clip comes to a close.

At the time of writing catalina.ann’s video has been watched 6.7 million times, with viewers equally baffled by her grandmother’s decision to hold on to the decorated eggs for such a long period of time.

Most were baffled at the fact the eggs still contained actual egg. “How did they not smell after a while?” one wrote with another commenting: “Before painting eggs normal people do a tiny hole and empty the egg.” A third added: “Who paints eggs without blowing them out first?”

Others, meanwhile, appeared to simply take umbrage with the fact that the early 1990s is now some 35 years ago. “Saying ‘early 1990s’ in that tone is criminal,” one user said.

Then there were those who simply took umbrage with the woman behind the video breaking her grandma’s eggs. “Don’t keep destroying them,” one viewer pleaded. “They are memories she’s held on to for a reason. It must have been a really special day to her. Imagine how many times she’s dyed eggs, this one meant something.”

Another simply asked: “Why did you have to break them though?”

Newsweek contacted catalina.ann for comment.