‘We Always Stayed in Touch’: Lifelong Pen Pals Finally Meet After 40 Years

It was 1980 when two ten-year-old girls across the country from each other were paired up as pen pals for a class project. The pair stayed in touch for over 40 years, and just met in person for the first time.

Lifelong friends Krystel Alston and Haley Briggs from California and Pennsylvania, respectively, amazingly kept up their handwritten correspondence for years after their fifth-grade pen pal project ended, they said in an interview with WYMT. 

The friends’ first meeting was covered by the local news station, where they read aloud some of the letters they had sent to each other over the years and reminisced on their prior conversations.

“I’m sure they were probably hoping that we would stay connected or continue on with it,” Alston told the outlet, referring to their elementary school teachers who facilitated the initial connection.

The women went above and beyond the expectations, remaining in touch for the next four decades as they each experienced love, loss, and all of life’s biggest moments. 

“We wrote by-hand letters for a long time,” Briggs said. “I think we thought about each other, whether we were in contact or not.”

“Our differences, we would write about and that’s what I would learn about, and she would learn about me,” Alston said. “It was a new experience with a new person.”

Eventually, the friends switched to communicating by the internet, using social media to share photos and speak with each other more frequently.

“We always stayed in touch in some way,” said Alston.

Briggs always said the two would meet one day. 

They first planned to meet for a fiftieth birthday celebration in 2020, but had to postpone due to the coronavirus lockdowns.

Over four decades after their first correspondence, the stars finally aligned for Alston to visit Pennsylvania where she met Briggs for the first time at a hotel in Wayne, then caught up over a nice Italian dinner.

“We’ll just continue to stay in contact and stay in each other’s lives,” Alston said. “Only difference is now we’ve been in the same place at the same time.”