Every Sunday, TikToker Aaron Edward (@aaron__edward) goes to church with his mother at 5:30 p.m. While he was at church one Sunday, his father called him. He declined the call, but his dad proceeded to call several more times.
His dad has a cell phone, but almost never uses it, so Aaron figured it must be important, especially since his dad knew they were at church.
He stepped out of the church to answer the phone, thinking there was an emergency of some sort.
When his dad picked up, he was clearly very irritated. He stated that there was a bucket of poop sitting in front of the house and demanded to know whether Aaron had done it.
“Now, you have to understand something,” said Aaron. “I’m autistic. When I was a kid, I did a lot of weird things, and there was a period of time where I really enjoyed pooping in buckets outside.”
“We have a lot of buckets for a business my parents run, so in the warmer months of the year, sometimes, when I was a kid and a teenager, I would take a bucket, go back in the woods, and use it like a toilet.”
Afterward, he usually left the bucket of poop for his dad to find and take care of. But Aaron is now 24 years old and has since grown out of such activities. He does not do that anymore and certainly would never do it during the cold winter months.
So, Aaron thought his dad was just pranking him because he could be quite the jokester. But he was serious and told Aaron that he had to take care of the bucket when he got home. Then, he hung up the phone.
“And so, I started questioning my sanity because that’s something I used to do a lot as a kid, and I thought, did I do it unconsciously somehow? Do I have split personality disorder and don’t realize it? And the other personality came out and did that?” Aaron said.
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The whole thing was bothering him, and he couldn’t wait around for church to be over, so he asked his mom for the car keys and said that he needed to sit in the car for a bit.
But in reality, he went home because they lived only three minutes down the road. As he pulled into the driveway, there was just enough daylight left for him to see a white bucket at their front door.
Aaron walked up to the bucket and peered into it. Sure enough, there was poop in the bucket. It was a lot of poop, and it definitely belonged to a human. Of course, it smelled awful.
His first thought was that it had to be some sort of joke. The culprit could be the neighbors because they had two teenage kids, but the son was off at college, and the daughter would never do something like this.
The other neighbor had adult children, who were mature and in their thirties, so it wasn’t likely that they would do this either.
By then, his dad realized that he was home. He came out the front door and scolded him about the poop, saying that he was tired of cleaning it up. Aaron had no other choice.
He went into the house to retrieve some latex gloves, put on a mask, picked up the bucket, and walked toward the dumpster at the front of the property.
He planned to place the whole bucket inside, poop and all, and let the garbage truck pick it up. Aaron lives in a rural country area, where the houses are spaced farther apart. But it was so quiet there that you could often hear conversations being had on your neighbor’s porch.
As he walked back down the driveway, he heard a guy talking to his wife two doors down. They were talking about how they had discovered a bucket of poop on their porch. Aaron was relieved that he wasn’t going crazy.
“It was pretty clear to me at this point that some kid, probably in this neighborhood or this little rural area where we live, is doing some kind of a prank where he’s going up to people’s houses and leaving buckets of poop,” said Aaron.
“The mystery is yet to be solved.”
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
