Chances are, at one point or another, your wily mind has played a trick on you. It is, unfortunately, part of the human experience. Sometimes you awake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, convinced that the shadow in the corner your bedroom is actually a demon; in another instance, you might mistake a stranger on the subway for an ex you’d rather not see.
This sort of mind trickery recently befell a woman in Krakow, Poland — a woman who called animal control on a croissant. Though, of course, she didn’t know it was a croissant at the time. When she made the call to Krakow Animal Welfare Society, she told them that a menacing creature had been lurking in a lilac tree outside her home for two to three days. She thought it resembled an iguana, but wasn’t sure. But its species was irrelevant. “People aren’t opening their windows because they’re afraid it will go into their house,” the woman told the officers, according to a dramatic Facebook post from the Welfare Society.
While the officers doubted the creature was a reptile, they figured it might be someone’s pet that had escaped or been abandoned, per the BBC. At the scene, they discovered it was no dangerous beast, but rather a classic French pastry suspended in the tree’s branches. Now, what was a croissant doing in a tree? Perhaps someone tossed it out their window to feed birds and other small critters, but who can say.
How embarrassing for that woman, you might be thinking, imagining the conversation she had with the officers. But also, look at that thing — if you saw that football-sized object ensnared in a tree’s branches, would you think to identify it as the delicate pastry known for its crisp exterior and flaky, buttery inner layers? A pâtissier would never.