THE SIDE QUEST THAT GOT WEIRD | OCTOBER 2026 - Volume 9

Owning a motorcycle shop has taught us that the original plan rarely survives the day. You can walk in expecting to work on one motorcycle and somehow end up on a completely unrelated side quest. Most of the time, those detours are funny. Every once in a while, though, they leave you wondering what exactly just happened.

This particular side quest started with a raccoon.

There was a dead raccoon near the dumpster at the shop, which by itself isn't exactly unusual. Oklahoma has plenty of wildlife, and unfortunately, sometimes they end up in places they shouldn't. But it happened to come up during one of those conversations that seem to happen at the shop more often than you might expect.

Over the years, we've had Native American customers share stories with us about animals, spirits, signs, and things they've experienced that they couldn't always explain. Those conversations have always fascinated me because there isn't one single set of beliefs that applies to every Native American tradition. Different tribes and families have their own stories and interpretations, but animals can carry all kinds of meanings depending on the tradition. Raccoons, in particular, show up in some Indigenous stories as clever, mischievous, or unpredictable figures.

So naturally, once you start talking about raccoons and stories about spirits, it doesn't take much imagination to start wondering about the things you can't see.

We weren't sitting around trying to convince ourselves that the shop was haunted. It was more of a conversation that grew out of the sort of things people tell us. Working in a motorcycle shop, you hear a lot of stories. People come in to talk about their bikes and somehow end up telling you about their families, their past, things that happened to them, and sometimes things they've experienced that they still don't have an explanation for.

Then there was the motorcycle.

There was an abandoned bike that had been sitting at the shop, and at the time, it was simply another unfinished piece of business. Nothing about it seemed particularly mysterious. It was just there.

That weekend, though, the shop alarm went off.

Nobody was supposed to be there.

When an alarm goes off at an empty shop, you don't immediately think, Maybe a motorcycle fell over. Your first thought is that somebody is inside. We started checking everything we could from a distance, looking at the cameras and trying to figure out what had happened.

There was no obvious sign of a break-in. No broken windows. No damaged doors. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, and there wasn't any indication that somebody had somehow gotten past the security system.

Which was almost more unsettling.

The alarm had gone off, but there didn't seem to be a reason for it.

Eventually, we found the answer.

The abandoned motorcycle's tire had gone completely flat. The bike had also been left turned in the same direction as the kickstand, which meant that with the tire completely deflated, the weight of the bike was resting heavily on the kickstand side. Eventually, there wasn't enough balance to hold it upright, and it tipped over. When it hit the floor, it triggered the alarm.

There it was. The completely reasonable explanation we'd been looking for.

No intruder. No mysterious person wandering around the shop. No ghost setting off the alarm. Just a motorcycle with a flat tire that had finally lost its balance.

And yet, by that point, we'd already had the conversation about the raccoon. We'd already been talking about animals, signs, spirits, and the strange stories people had shared with us over the years.

So even after we had an explanation, there was still that little part of us that thought, Okay... but that's weird.

Maybe it was all just coincidence. The raccoon was just a raccoon. The motorcycle fell because its tire went flat and it was positioned just wrong. The alarm did exactly what it was designed to do.

Or maybe that's how these things always work. You start with something completely ordinary, one strange detail gets added, and suddenly you're wondering whether there's a connection when there probably isn't one.

That's the thing about side quests. You don't plan for them. You don't know where they're going when they start, and sometimes by the time you get back to the original mission, you've collected a story you never expected to have.

We'll probably never know whether there was anything more to that particular series of events. But I do know that the next time someone brings up raccoons, spirits, and strange things happening around the shop, we're probably going to listen a little more closely.