Claudine Tahmin wants justice.

She noticed something strange as she left for work Monday morning. The glittery, bat-adorned Halloween wreath that usually hung on the door of her South End apartment was gone. It had disappeared. Vanished.

The flyer, which Tahmin made in Microsoft Word. —Claudine Tahmin

“The walk to work just felt like a funeral march,” Tahmin, 21, said Tuesday.

But this was not happenstance, she was convinced. This was a crime.

Unsure of what else to do and unwilling to divert police resources toward her misfortune, Tahmin started printing flyers asking for help locating the missing decoration. Their message was straightforward: help.

“IT IS SOLD OUT ON AMAZON I CANNOT BUY ANOTHER ONE,” the flyers read. (A preliminary Google search confirmed this is accurate.)


And then: “To the spineless bastard who took it, I am going to find you and make you sorry.”

So far, Tahmin has passed out 300 of the leaflets, stuffing them in mail slots and under windshield wipers. (“Do you think its legal to put things in mail slots?” she wondered. “I’m going to Google that.”) But no one has seen her beloved wreath.

The silence has only strengthened her resolve.

Tahmin doesn’t even have a photo of the wreath to remember it by, but she does have this one of her flowered zombie. —Claudine Tahmin

Tahmin was headed to Staples after work Tuesday to print 1,000 more flyers. She’s allotted an hour and a half of each of her evenings to go wreath hunting.

“Even if they don’t return it, I want to shame them,” she said Tuesday. “And I think public humiliation is the best way to go about that.”

Halloween is Tahmin’s favorite holiday. She spent $500 on decorations this year. (Her other decor, including the zombie that pokes out of her flowerbed, was untouched.) She doesn’t know what kind of person would do something like this.

“It’s the most innocent holiday,” she said. “You’re really going to tarnish it? By stealing?”

And it’s not just that someone pilfered the wreath, she said. It’s the lengths the thief must have gone to. Her apartment is basement-level, so they would have had to target her specifically. The wreath’s orange lights weren’t even on. She doesn’t know how anyone saw it.


And yes — Tahmin is sure the wreath was stolen. It was too heavy to have been blown away. The heist happened overnight. The string the decoration was hanging from, which was attached to the other side of the door, was cut clean.

The whole experience has been distressing, Tahmin said. The wreath thief haunts her dreams.

“I have had nightmares of someone in dark clothing carrying it away, laughing maniacally,” she said.