Someone keeps leaving plates of peeled bananas on British street corners

Cassie Brummitt doesn't remember exactly when she first saw bananas.

Not long ago, about two years ago, she moved to Beeston, a small town outside Nottingham, England.

She walked past the junction of Abbey Road and Wensor Avenue and there it was – a bowl of over 15 peeled bananas “all in a pile”.

“I remember thinking that was very strange,” Brummitt said How does this happen? host Nil Köksal.

It wouldn't be her last encounter with bananas on this corner. He says the amount of bananas varies. Sometimes they are in a bowl. Sometimes they're on the plate. But they are always peeled and stacked and left near the hedge at the same intersection, like some kind of potassium-rich offering.

“It seems like it's a little secret.”

At first Brummitt felt as if she had stumbled upon a secret that no one else knew, as if these observations were her “private little thing.”

But then she learned from social media that bananas have been a long-time — and sometimes divisive — local secret.

“I don't think anyone knows (where they come from). And if they know, they keep silent about it,” she said. “But yeah, I have no idea. For example, I heard that they can appear very early in the morning or late at night, so it seems a bit secretive.”

Beeston resident James Oviedo walks his dog past this corner almost every day and says bananas have been showing up there “for at least a few years.”

“There's always a lot of them, peeled on the plate, and they always look like they've been drizzled with something that looks like honey,” he told CBC.

“It's very strange and honestly I'm surprised it took so long for people to start asking questions.”

Oviedo says the area is residential, but the banana corner is not in front of anyone's home. As far as he knows, no one has ever recorded footage of a fruit dropper in action.

According to a recent article on BBC News, bananas seem to appear like clockwork on the second of every month.

“I wondered if it was maybe a matter of sentiment. Like, I don't know, maybe superstition,” Brummit said. “Sometimes people leave bits of food for the fairies at the end of the garden, for example.”

But if that's the case, fairies don't seem to be hungry.

“They usually start to get moldy and eventually someone throws them into the bush around the corner,” Oviedo said. “The plate often goes missing and I think it's because people who collect rubbish remove it. I also saw a sign land broken on the side of the road earlier.”

Canadian banana secret

The strange British phenomenon has echoes of another banana-related mystery that has long been uncovered in Canada's north.

For years, someone had been dumping banana peels at a stop sign on a concrete traffic island at the intersection of the North Klondike and Alaska Highways in Whitehorse, resident Jenny MacKinnon said in an email after hearing about the Beeston bananas How does this happen?

“This is a fact known to most residents,” she said, “without context and without any denomination.”

Lewis Rifkind, who often cycles past the stop, says he has been seeing the skins for “at least a decade.”

He's heard speculation that it started as a protest against composting laws, but he suspects the real story may be much more mundane.

“Maybe it's just routine that this person, you know, who eats a banana maybe every day or whatever, whenever they come to town, and they just get into the habit of throwing it,” he told Köksal.

“Please, respectfully: NO MORE BANANAS!”

Meanwhile, in Beeston, rotting fruit has become a nuisance and irritation for some residents.

One frustrated neighbor recently went so far as to put up a sign that read, “PLEASE RESPECTLY: NO MORE BANANAS!!”

“Missed plates and rotting bananas leave such a mess!” the sign continues. “I wish you all a Happy New Year! From a Nottingham Clean Street cleaning volunteer.”

But it was no use, Oviedo said. The bananas kept coming.

When Brummit saw the sign, she was surprised that anyone was concerned about bananas. For her part, she had come to appreciate the thrill of being privy to a bizarre local secret.

Besides, he says, it gives people something to talk about.

“It doesn't really hurt anyone, and it kind of gave me some joy, you know, just walking down the street,” she said. “It's weird, and there's nothing wrong with things being a little weird.”