New York City is filled with an endless supply of weird, wondrous and confounding sights, from opossums in bakeries to subways filled with trees. But the strangest sighting of the week wasn't even Joey Ramone's ghost hanging out at a LES venue—it was the guillotine spotted inexplicably residing on the rooftop of a Greenpoint building.

Hannah Silk Champagne first spotted the guillotine on Monday on the roof of a building on Guernsey Street and Nassau, just across from Beacon's Closet. Champagne, who works across the street and can see the roof from her office window, has spent much of the week trying to solve this mystery.

"The businesses below are a chocolate shop who have offices upstairs and a motorcycle shop, and I think the rest of the building is office space," Champagne told Gothamist during a break from her ongoing investigation.

please know that I’m currently walking the circumference of the block asking people and businesses if they know why there’s a guillotine on the roof. I’m the neighborhood crazy person now. — HannahSilkChampagne (@hsilkchampagne) October 17, 2018

We asked whether the murder device could be a Halloween decoration or display, or perhaps was just being kept in storage up there: "It actually hadn't even occurred to me that it might be for Halloween until that was pointed out. There are no other Halloween decorations on or near the building and they aren't residential units. People can access the roof but I rarely see anyone there," she said. "I suppose they could be storing it up there, although then I wonder where the heck do you keep it the rest of the year?!"

"[The chocolate shop] could be a front for The Resistance," she added. "Or maybe the motorcycle place is looking to become more of a chop shop har har." (She did ask a worker at the chocolate shop about it, but they had no clue what she was talking about.)

Since first tweeting about the out-of-place French Revolutionary-era tool for efficient executions on Wednesday, interest in its mysterious origins has remained steady, with more than 25K people liking the original tweet— Champagne has even given an interview to the Canadian Broadcast Company about it.

For her part, Champagne says she has been "wandering around asking people" in the neighborhood about it to no avail. Later in the week, it seemed like there may have been a break in the case when she spotted a photo shoot happening on the roof. But to her surprise, "There were people on the roof doing a photo shoot and [they were] totally not acknowledging the guillotine!"



(courtesy Hannah Silk Champagne)

Her latest theory is that it belongs to "a photo/artist studio in the building, but I don't know why they have it." But perhaps some mysteries are better if they stay that way. Yeah that's right, just hover over that link's url and think long and hard about where you want to go next.

