A strange story about a set of dentures missing their owner has just gotten stranger.

The teeth were found in a snowbank near a Hay River, N.W.T., restaurant owned by former MLA Jane Groenewegen over the weekend.

Groenewegen posted a picture of them to Facebook and thought she had helped reunite the upper plate with its owner when she got a text from staff at the restaurant Monday night saying that an elderly gentleman had showed up and claimed them.

"I thought, 'Great. End of story. They've been returned to the owner and that's really good,'" said Groenewegen.

That was until she got another text this morning, this one from her husband telling her that the gentleman had just brought the teeth back.

"They were actually not his," she said.

Groenewegen said people in Hay River had teased her about something like this happening when news of the lost teeth started to spread.

"Some had jokingly said 'Are we going to do the Cinderella thing? When somebody comes and says 'Those are my dentures' are you going to ask them to try them on?' I told them, 'Oh, no, no, no. No one who doesn't own those dentures is going to come in and say, 'Those are my dentures.'"

Jane Groenewegen says the Driftwood Diner won't be doing 'the Cinderella thing' to determine the true owner of the dentures. (Facebook)

And sure enough that is exactly what happened.

While the whole thing has given Groenewegen a laugh, she said she hopes all of the attention doesn't prevent the real owner from coming forward.

"I really would like to see the person get their dentures back," she said.

If they belong to you, your teeth are still safely in their Ziploc bag at the Driftwood Diner in Hay River and you can claim them, no questions asked, no fitting required.

More denture dramas

Meanwhile, people shared some of their own denture dramas on CBC North's Facebook page.

Aven Trembleet's teeth literally once became a dog's breakfast. She wrote of removing her partial plate during a bad bout of morning sickness while she was pregnant. "So I took it out and put it on the sink .... once I was done being sick, I heard some crunching and turned around and my dog had eaten it!"

Britanny Wilson told of seeing her grandfather sitting on a chair at the Northern store one day. "I walk up to him and see his dentures sitting on his chest. So I pointed and said 'ba'ba, your teeth.' He looked down, grabbed them, and while he started to clean them, he said to his teeth 'I've been looking for you.'"

And Margaret Melhorn wrote that her grandfather's teeth once nearly stopped a group of teenage girls in their tracks. She was walking with her grandfather when he gave a massive sneeze. "His dentures went flying, and landed at the feet of two teenage girls coming the other way. I can still remember the look of horror on their faces as they looked down at those teeth lying in front of them."