Good samaritan spends 5 hours recovering lost wedding ring at Hampton Beach, then personally returns it

When Kelsey Battease lost her wedding ring on Hampton Beach on Aug. 10, she thought it was gone for good.

If slipped off her finger in the Atlantic Ocean as she was walking along the beach, holding hands with her 2-year-old son. Battease immediately felt it fall off and spent about an hour looking for it.

“My stomach hurt and my heart dropped,” she said. “I looked at my son, and I was like, ‘oh my god, I just lost my wedding ring,’” she said.

She posted pictures of the missing ring on the Hampton Beach Facebook group, using her best guess at the coordinates from information on her phone. She said she lost it across from the mini golf course.

“It’s a long shot if there ever was one,” she said on Facebook, asking the community to help. 

That’s when Arthur Fleming stepped in. Fleming asked her what time she lost it.

“Apparently he knows how far to go out based on the tide and the time,” Battease said. 

The next day, Fleming drove about an hour from his home in Massachusetts and got to the beach at 7 a.m. He spent five hours looking for the ring with his metal detector. Then he spotted it around 12:15 p.m., as he was standing knee-deep in the water, with waves crashing around his waist.

“I was just about ready to give up,” he said.

Fleming knows the beach well. He has used a metal detector at Hampton Beach as a hobby since the 1990s and he has a drawer full of rings—about 14 silver and 20 gold rings, along with tungsten carbide rings, smartphones, and fishing lures. 

He knew to start looking for Battease’s ring early in the day. “She lost it two hours after the tide started coming in,” he said. “This was something that really meant something to somebody.” 

He used his multi-frequency metal detector he purchased years ago from Streeter’s Treasure Hunting Supply in Marlboro, New Hampshire. 

Fleming’s good deed didn’t stop there. He personally drove about three hours to deliver the ring to Battease’s home near the Vermont border in New York, not wanting to send it to get lost in the mail.

“The irony of life is you find it in the ocean, but you lose it in the mail,” he said.

Battease comes to Hampton Beach about once a year for a vacation.She and her husband are about to celebrate their six-year wedding anniversary in October. For her, the fact that the ring was found was a miracle. 

“I’m speechless,” she said. “How kind and selfless he was to drive an hour from his house just to look for my ring and then drive another three hours one way to deliver my ring to me. I just, I can’t believe it.”