A woman was frightened after coming back to her flat after months of being away to find that ‘mutant potatoes’ had taken up residence.
The French native, Donna Porée, from Caen, had bought a €2.50 (£2.12) bag of potatoes from her local Super U supermarket just before lockdown measures were announced in France.
Instead of staying at hers and having to miss out of being with her boyfriend, she quickly fled to his on the other side of town.
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Obviously, when you leave in haste, you’re only going to take the essentials which tend to be keys, wallet, phone and clothes - not the sack of potatoes you’ve just bought from the shop.
So, like anyone would: she left them there.
But what she probably didn’t imagine happening is that upon her return just months later, her spuds had turned into something crazy.
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Seriously, it looks like an alien.
The 22-year-old discovered that the unassuming potatoes had grown huge vegetable tentacles and spread across her flat.
Communications manager Donna said: "As I opened the front door, I noticed a strange shape at the back of the kitchen.
"As the light was off and shutters down, I didn't realise it was the potatoes. It was only after opening the shutters that I took note of this extraordinary sight.
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"I was terrified at first, but after realising what it was I laughed a lot and shared a video of the plant on Snapchat.
"My friends couldn't stop laughing. They found the whole situation unbelievable."
The potatoes were not about to budge though, having been left home alone for months.
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The shoots had grown through the bag and between the kitchen worktop and the wall of the flat, which meant that Donna had to spend hours cutting the shoots to remove the mutant Maris Pipers (I'm not actually sure if they were Maris Pipers, but it feels right).
Donna said: "I wanted to extract the bag of potatoes from the counter-top seals, but it wasn't easy.
"The shoots had fixed in place in the joints and were difficult to remove. I ended up having to cut some of the shoots out with scissors and I had to fill in the holes they made."
Donna went on to share a photo of the monster Maris Pipers (I'm sticking with it) on X, formerly Twitter with the tweet receiving almost 200,000 likes from shocked/ amused people from across the world.
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The moral of the story?
The next time you have to evacuate your home prior to the introduction of quarantine measures - make sure you chuck your tatties out, or take them with you and make a meal of it. Jackets or herby, whatever your preference.
As for Donna though, she hasn't let the malformed Maris Pipers put her off potatoes.
She said: "I replanted the potatoes in my vegetable patch and today they're growing once again.
"I'm eager to see what will come out of the ground."
Hopefully not another alien.
Topics: Coronavirus, Food And Drink, Twitter, Viral, Weird
Britt Jones