Another Year, Another Ghost Stroller

photo credit: Elizabeth Graham/Brooklyn Paper

In 2010, the mystery of the now-legendary Park Slope Ghost Stroller swept the city (or a certain subset of it): was it a tribute to an unidentifiable accident? A joke about gentrification? We wondered, and then time passed, and eventually we stopped wondering.

But according to the Brooklyn Paper, it’s time to dust off the ol’ magnifying glass, because we’ve got a second ghost stroller on our hands:

A white-painted stroller adorned with a Jamaican flag appeared on a bike rack on Prospect Park West near 10th Street last week, baffling parents who aren’t quite sure whether to burst into tears, cringe, laugh, or scratch their heads at its bizarre symbolism.

Though the Ghost Stroller II, like Ghost Stroller I, looks an awful lot like a version of the city’s tragically recognizable ghost bikes, the police once again assure us that the stroller isn’t related to any sort of traffic-related death. “There were no fatalities in the past month [and] definitely none involving a child or a carriage,” officer Jerry Galante, a spokesman for the 78th Precinct, told the paper.

So what’s going on? No definitive answers, but the floating theories seem to be about the same as last time: some kind of joke about “the death” of the neighborhood, a “statement” about speeding on PPW, or…something else?

It seems like the Brooklyn Paper couldn’t get any juicy Park Slope parent quotes from the scene –word is that neighbors “hesitated to speculate about the changing hood — or any ominous what-ifs tied to the baby carriage,” and nobody seems to have offered any compelling read on the Jamaican flag sticker that’s attached to the seat.

Know anything?