Someone in Iowa has a lot of spare time, an off-beat sense of humor, and had a lot of old Ronald McDonald dolls on hand the other night so they took it upon themselves to line 500 or so of them up in the middle of several roads inside a mobile home park sometime between 10PM and 12:30AM. The prank was enough to freak out a corrections officer by the name of Eric Dau and his wife as they drove home from work in the early hours of the morning.

“It was eerie, frightening,” says Dau, who is corrections officer for the Clinton County sheriff’s office. Why all those 14-inch stuffed dolls, with ceramic faces, had been so carefully placed in the middle of a half-dozen roads in Cedar Heights, is a mystery from “Twilight Zone.”

“It was like we were seeing things not to be believed,” he says. Dau’s wife feared it was a bizarre trap to entice women out of their cars.

“It could have been a scheme. Some criminal would expect that a woman might stop to pick up a doll and assault her,” he says.

All this, remember, was about 12:30 a.m. Dan Vosatka, who is a volunteer firefighter along with Dau, told him that he had driven the same roads about 10 p.m. and saw no Ronald McDonald dolls.

“It was so scary, all those Ronald McDonalds staring at us in our headlights. It gave us a very, very funny feeling. If you hadn’t seen them with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it,” Dau says.

My reaction would have been completely different. I would have taken quite a bit of glee in running them all down at high speed while cackling maniacally and then going home to dream happy dreams.