By Tim Binnall
Residents of a neighborhood in a Mississippi city say that someone keeps leaving mashed potatoes in bizarre locations throughout the community and no one knows why. According to a local media report, the truly weird mystery has been unfolding for the last few days in an area of Jackson known as Belhaven. One 'target' of the spud-wielding individual, Jordan Lewis, discovered a bowl of mashed potatoes sitting on her car and was left positively bewildered by the odd find.
"This neighborhood does a lot of quirky things," she observed, noting that residents have been known to put Christmas trees in potholes among other eccentric community projects, "but it’s definitely one of the weirdest things I've seen." With that in mind, Lewis went down a rather familiar route and promptly posted a picture of the spuds to a local Facebook group. Much to her surprise, it turns out that Jackson has a full-blown mashed potato mystery on their hands.
Numerous residents quickly chimed in with their own accounts of discovering inexplicable bowls of the Thanksgiving meal staple sitting on their front porches or, in one instance, in their mailbox. "I got up and was headed to work 7 o'clock," recalled one spud recipient, "and there was just a Styrofoam bowl of mashed potatoes on the doorstep." As for who or what may be behind the potatoes, the predominant theory for the mysterious offerings is that they are simply some kind of prank, but some observers have expressed concern that the food could be poisoned.
"I didn’t taste it," said one resident, "I have a three-second rule so I didn't touch it but some people were worried." While it seems unlikely that someone was running around the neighborhood depositing bowls of poisoned mashed potatoes in random spots, it's also probably a wise choice not to sample the spuds to test the theory, since eating mysterious food left on one's porch or in their mailbox could be a recipe for disaster.