Kit Pullen woke up Wednesday morning to piles of furniture stacked outside his garage door.
The Ottawa man says he doesn't know how it got there, who it belongs to or what he'll do with it.
"Do you want a driveway full of furniture?" he chuckled during a telephone interview. "Cause I got a lot of unexplained furniture I have to get rid of."
Pullen first found out about the mysterious delivery from his wife, who told him there was "a pile of junk in the driveway."
Then he heard from a neighbour who said he'd seen a U-Haul van in his driveway at 3 a.m.
Good thing Pullen is retired, he said, because he couldn't get the car out of the garage — or even the snowblower to deal with the aftermath of the previous night's snowstorm.
"Fortunately, the truck that dumped all this stuff had packed all the snow down," Pullen said, laughing.
He had some "computer work" and several errands he couldn't attend to because his car was trapped in the garage. He even forgot to eat breakfast, he said, which is a touch dangerous for a 76-year-old diabetic.
That pile seemed to contain an entire apartment's worth of stuff, he said: two old tube televisions, a Nintendo Wii video game system, a binder full of CDs, a book from a Kingston, Ont., library, children's toys, a wardrobe and "at least two kitchen chairs."
"It was a huge pile of junk," he said.
He called police, but while "they were really nice," they didn't show much interest since there was no evidence of a crime.
"Then I got a call from a provincial police officer," Pullen said. "And this is where it gets wilder."
He said the officer told him they had pulled over a U-Haul van near Kingston, Ont., and the male driver told them "he and his partner were on their way back to Ottawa to correct the mistake they made."
"They could be en route, I'm not sure, but maybe they took it from the wrong-wrong address to the wrong address."
No one had showed up by late Wednesday afternoon.
While going through some of the "junk," Pullen came across some identification papers, the likely owner, who he believes is a young woman.
Unfortunately, he said, he had already tossed two mattresses and a box spring when the garbage truck came by. But he has told a charity to hold off on picking up the rest of the stuff because police have reached out to the owner.
"We are giving this gal a chance to come pick this stuff up," he said.
In the meantime, he has invited his children and grandchildren over "so we don't have to tell each of them the whole story one at a time."
"And to help us move the stuff so we can get the car out," he said.
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Liam Casey, The Canadian Press
