The mystery of a Manchester family’s lost theatre tickets has deepened after an anonymous person in the Post Office returned them after the story was published on MM.
Kate Collins spent £136 on six Manchester Royal Exchange tickets but just two arrived, in an envelope which seemed to have been opened and re-sealed with Sellotape.
However on Monday November 23 she received a letter from the theatre with the other four tickets and a slip saying ‘Returned by Post office’.
“I was very surprised,” 52-year-old Kate, from Prestbury, told MM.
The mum-of-three bought the tickets for a Christmas trip to see musical Into the Woods at 2:30pm on December 27.
She will go with her husband, their two daughters aged 22 and 12, and their twenty-year-old son and his girlfriend.
“I’m pleased I got my tickets in the end,” she said.
“And it wasn’t a big problem when they were missing even because I was going to get the replacements.
“But now that I have got them it’s nice because I won’t have to go in early on the day that we’re going to see the play.”
Kate said she didn’t ‘have any idea’ how the tickets could have gone missing.
She’d initially complained to the Royal Exchange, who said they’d had problems with deliveries being damaged.
But it now seems that the tickets went missing or were stolen while in transit with the postal service.
Kate said the publicity from the Mancunian Matters story could have encouraged someone with a guilty conscience to return the tickets.
However her husband Richard, 52, said he thought it was more likely that they fell out of the envelope at the sorting office by mistake.
A Royal Mail spokesman said it was ‘very difficult’ to establish what happened because the delivery was not tracked and Mrs Collins is not making a formal complaint.
“If some of the tickets came out of the envelope during the process, they may well have ended up being returned to sender and sent out to the customer,” he told MM.
He added that it is a criminal offence to tamper or interfere with mail.
“We have a zero tolerance approach to criminality,” he said.
“It’s probably far more likely that something happened in transit.
“We’re pleased that the tickets have arrived safely and apologise for any concern caused to the customer.”
