Thankfully, the actual object beneath the layers of plastic had never breathed a day in its life. It was a dummy that Louise had bought to celebrate Halloween.
“My 5-year-old boy is really into dressing up for every occasion, so we did the inside up with a circus theme, and he dressed as It,” she said, referring to the demonic clown that serves as the primary antagonist in the Stephen King novel of the same name. “So the prop in the garden was part of our theme.”
While gardening, Louise had relocated the dummy from her front yard to an area behind some garbage cans. She had meant to replace it, but had forgotten to do so before leaving to pick up her son. More than one of her neighbors thought it bore a disturbing resemblance to a corpse. Three even called 999, the U.K. equivalent of 911, to report that Louise had a body bag on her property, prompting multiple police cars to hightail it over to the hairdresser’s home, according to Fox News.
Several minutes after Louise arrived home, another squad car pulled up. Explaining the situation to the police, Louise pointed out that the dummy’s legs were too short to be those of a person.
“You might have cut them,” the officers replied.
“Oh, did you check my bins?’ Louise said, making an attempt to be humorous.
In response, she said, the officers “looked a bit concerned and asked, ‘Should we?’”
Once the officers had determined that the object was a dummy and that Louise was not, in fact, a deranged killer, they requested that she throw it out to prevent future misunderstandings. However, Louise’s five-year-old son, who was present for the duration of the conversation, begged them to reconsider.
He was “telling them how much he loves Halloween and we can’t get rid of the body because he loves it,” Louise said.
Ultimately Louise decided to store the dummy in her shed until Halloween rolled around again. However, she does have advice for other parents who also channel the holiday spirit.
“Dispose of props or put them away safely,” she warned, according to Fox News.
