A St. Henri couple are trying to solve a bizarre mystery that has them, and much of the area's Facebook community, tied up in knots.
David Mitchell says he and his partner were away from their apartment for much of the day on Monday to attend a funeral. By the time they returned home at around 9 p.m. that evening, they discovered a bike sitting in the middle of their living room.
It didn't belong to either of them, they don't have any roommates, and even their landlord has no idea how it got there.
"To have to solve a mystery after a long, sad and tense day, was really a strange way to end the evening," Mitchell told CJAD 800's Robyn Flynn on Tuesday. "Needless to say, there was about three hours of anxiety and panic and mystery."
Of course, their thoughts turned first to everyone they knew that has a key to their apartment — their landlord, and their parents — and any plausible explanation for the bike being plunked there.
It was a fairly narrow list of what-ifs, but when they contacted their landlord, Mitchell says they reacted with "an interesting mix of shock, and laughter". There was nothing actually missing from, or displaced inside, the apartment — in other words, they lost nothing, and gained a mystery bike.
"I guess now that some time has passed and we've been thinking about it harder, it has to me maybe a neighbor or a former tenant," he says. "It's so bizarre".
Mitchell's partner then posted the news on a St. Henri Facebook group, in the hope, perhaps, they'd be able to shed light on what happened.
"I think that's been a really fun silver lining to this situation is following the post," Mitchell said. "We even had a troll, so to speak, who made a preceding post in the group saying, he just woke up from an Île Soniq hangover, and didn't know where his bike was. We got a big kick out of that one."
Another poster suggested he burn the bike, to make sure whatever "evil spirits" there might have been were gone.
Meanwhile, several people claimed the bike was actually theirs — one wrote that it had been stolen from him two months earlier outside a nearby restaurant.