The Mysterious Disappearance

This unsolved crime might not have made the headlines, but it has nonetheless kept my friends and I guessing for many, many years.

To set the scene, I have to take you back to the mid-eighties and to a small town on the northwest coast of Finland where I grew up. It was a time without mobile phones or the internet and in many ways so much simpler and safer to navigate as a child.

My hometown was a safe haven to grow up in. In our neighbourhood, everyone knew each other and looked out for each other. It was so safe that from the tender age of seven, my friends and I could sleep in a tent in the garden unsupervised.

Gardens back home didn't - and still don't - have high walls around them, so anyone could wander into your garden. But other than an elk on a rampage, we never had any uninvited visitors. Except for the mysterious thief.

Who - or indeed what - it was, where it came from and why it took what it did, we might never know.

Summer nights in our corner of the world are light and warm. It is the season when the sun never sets and nights are almost as light as days. Those nights are ideal for camping in the garden.

When the crime in question happened, I was sleeping overnight in a tent with two friends. We had set up our campsite in my friend’s garden and spent the evening chatting, playing board games and eating the foods we had prepared for our camping night.

When the nights are long and light, it is difficult to tell the time. Ten o’clock in the evening looks the same as two o’clock in the morning. Without realising it, we had stayed awake way past our bedtimes.

The food and snacks - our parents always allowed us some sweets and crisps on our camping nights - we had eaten through the evening and night had by now moved through the digestive system. Suddenly, all three of us realised we needed a number two.

Maybe, like best friends often get synchronised periods, our bowel movements had become synchronised, too.

We knew we couldn’t go back into the house to use the toilet. Having stayed up well past our bedtime would have got us into a lot of trouble and perhaps resulted in a ban on camping in the garden.

So we had to come up with Plan B.

I honestly cannot recall which one of us game up with the genius plan. I’d like to take the credit, but I might claim credit where credit is not due.

Our perfect plan included taking an A4 sheet each - we had brought some paper with us for drawing - and sneaking to the side of the house where my friend’s parents grew berries. There, sheltered by the bushes, we would set the papers on the floor and do our business on them. In the morning, we would get rid of the evidence and nobody would be any wiser.

Beats me why we wouldn’t just dig holes and cover them up. All I can say is that the brains of seven-year-olds work in very mysterious ways.

Having accomplished what we set out to do, we returned to the tent to carry out with our board game.

Now, you might wonder where is the crime. After all, it is not a crime to sneak out of the tent to the side of the house and do a number two in the middle of the night.

The crime is yet to be discovered.

Later, after we had played some more games and chatting a whole lot more, we needed to revisit our makeshift toilet area before finally getting to sleep.

To our shock and horror, what we found was not what we expected. All the evidence of our earlier visit were gone except the blank sheets of A4 paper.

Someone - or indeed something - had crept into the garden and stolen all the poo. We crawled back into our tent unnerved by our discovery at, what we now called the crimescene.

It was chilling to realise we were not alone, but instead there was a strange presence sharing the garden with us.

In the light of the day we investigated the crime scene, but found no clues. No footprints or any other clues had been left behind by the mysterious thief.

We didn’t sleep again in the tent for a few weeks. Our parents wondered why as it was the height of the summer. But we never revealed the mystery of the boo thief to them.

Over the years we have come up with many theories of what might have happened. But, we can never know for sure. Therefore it is, and I suspect will always remain, one of the great mysteries of our lives.