ALBANY -- Students and staff at Eagle Point Elementary School returned from Thanksgiving break to find a several-hundred-pound riddle lying literally at their doorstep.

At some point over the long weekend -- likely late that Sunday, Nov. 27 -- a stout granite ball mysteriously rolled to a stop near the Western Avenue school's front entrance.

The hefty sphere is estimated to weigh hundreds of pounds (nobody has officially been able to weigh it) and, according to Principal Kendra Chaires, was visible just barely tumbling into view on security-camera footage that surveys the Western Avenue schoolyard.

But the recording offers no clues as to who -- if anyone -- put it there. Or why.

And that's the way things stayed for weeks, with Chaires querying neighbors for ideas while the ball, too heavy for anyone at the school to budge, stayed put until just before Christmas.

"I tried to move it myself," said Vincent Rigosu, president of the Eagle Hill Neighborhood Association, which meets at the school. "I was going to be the good Samaritan and put it in my vehicle and drive it around and try to see who owned it. But I tried to pick it up and that was out of the question."

Asked who he thought might be responsible, Rigosu said if it weren't for the stone's extreme weight, he would assume it had to have been mischievous kids. "Evidently," he joked, "it had to be Mighty Joe Young."

As is often the case, the simplest answer turned out to be the right one -- even if the logistics of exactly how it happened remain a matter of pure speculation.

Grounds crews from the school district, assuming there was no other logical explanation, finally hefted the ball across bustling Western Avenue to Eagle Hill Cemetery, leaving it at the base of a steep hill leading to the heart of the mostly dormant burial ground that belongs to St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church on State Street.

It was about then that Andrew Van Acker, a church member and the cemetery's volunteer caretaker, got wind that something might be up.

Without the money to tend the cemetery, the church relies on a handful of volunteers like Van Acker to mow its grass an otherwise keep it up -- laborious work that typically ends with the year's first snowfall.

It didn't take long, he said, to realize the stone was actually part of a monument high up in the cemetery and that its sojourn was the end result of a spate of vandalism that also saw signs wrecked and the air vents torn off a mausoleum used by the volunteers to store equipment.

"It's just a shame that it's an all- volunteer cemetery and we've got to have that done," said Van Acker, 50, of East Greenbush, who works on the nearby Harriman State Office Campus.

Van Acker said he feels compelled to tend the cemetery because he has family -- including his great-grandparents -- buried there. But vandalism, he acknowledged, is not necessarily uncommon, a problem much broader than just Eagle Hill in struggling, resource-strapped old cemeteries across the state.

If Van Acker were to mow the cemetery himself, the task would take about 13 hours, he said.

"These are dead people," he said, "you should be respecting them."

More Information Those interested in helping out at Eagle Hill Cemetery can contact St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church on State Street at 463-0571. See More Collapse

The ball was mounted on a monument "just about the right height where some kids could get at it to push it off," he said, adding that from there he could see how it might bound down the hill and across Western Avenue into the schoolyard -- "lucky," he noted, "that no car was coming at the time."

The prank -- if that is, in fact, what it was -- has also posed a much more practical problem of Sisyphean dimensions for the volunteers. They lack the heavy equipment to haul the ball back up the hill.

"We'll find a way to get that ball back up there," he said. "One way or another."

Part of Van Acker that wishes it weren't vandalism, and he acknowledged with a laugh that there is another -- albeit spookier -- explanation: "Sometimes the elderly up there like to bowl."

Jordan Carleo-Evangelist can be reached at 454-5445 or by e-mail at jcarleo-evangelist@timesunion.com.