Food

Mystery Bowls of Mashed Potatoes Keep Appearing on Mississippi Doorsteps

One woman said she walked to her car and found “a bowl of what I THINK was potato salad on my windshield.”
Bettina Makalintal
Brooklyn, US
a styrofoam bowl of mashed potatoes left on a mailbox in the belhaven neighborhood of jackson, mississippi
Photo Courtesy Michaela Lin

People in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi are known for their “quirky” neighborhood pranks, Jordan Lewis told KFVS, like decorating caution signs for the holidays and putting Christmas trees in potholes. Still, when Lewis found a bowl of potatoes on her car earlier this week, it was undeniably weird.

“When I walked out to my car I found a bowl of what I thought was potato salad, but because of the rainwater and how mushy it looked, my neighbors said it was mashed potatoes,” Lewis—who’s still team potato salad, by the way—told MUNCHIES in a message. “But I only found one bowl and immediately took it to the trash.”

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She posted about the find on Facebook on Tuesday. “I've seen a lot of weird things since moving to Jackson but walking out to my car this morning to find a bowl of what I THINK was potato salad on my windshield definitely ranks in the top 5,” Lewis wrote.

To make things even weirder, though, she wasn’t the only one. Soon after Lewis posted, Sebastian Bjernegard commented, “I’m so glad to read this! I had a bowl of mashed potatoes on my door steps!” He told the Clarion Ledger that he’d almost stepped in them on his way out of the house. At least three more neighbors chimed in, commenting that they’d also found bowls in their mailboxes and in front of their doors. Lewis says she knows about five to seven neighbors who got the same surprise.

According to local news stations, there are a few theories floating around, including the slightly paranoid take that the potatoes are poisoned in order to kill neighborhood animals, and the suggestion that someone might have just had a lot of leftovers (and a lot of Southern hospitality, obviously).

“My theory was just that it was a funny thing to do because it was so random and it would catch people’s attention,” Lewis said. “The Belhaven neighborhood tends to do things like that fairly often.” While nobody has copped to making the potatoes, Lewis says she has “some pretty good suspicions.”

According to local news reports, nobody has taken a chance and tried the mashed potatoes. To be fair, we probably wouldn’t either; people do some wild shit, like the Albuquerque man who kept leaving bags of white bread and bologna on a woman’s porch—except in that case, they were covered with pee. The risk is not worth the free spuds.