An ad selling a "Unique Pig Couch" popped up on New York City's Craigslist this week. You can see it here, and the photos do indeed show a unique pig couch, which is to say, a couch in the shape of a pig. "Selling it for $250 even though my boyfriend and I bought it for over 11k and it's in pristine condition," the ad reads. "Need someone to pick it up ASAP as my new boyfriend hates it and sadly this is non-negotiable for him." Alas, the ad was a hoax, though a "benevolent" one, explains the New York Times. However, the couch itself is real, and ads purporting to sell it pop up on Craigslist with regularity. Confused? Both the Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer dig into the strange tale.
The facts: Philadelphia artist Pavia Burroughs designed and built the couch—it's technically a chair, she says—in 2010 as part of a senior thesis on sculpture. Afterward, she sold it on Craigslist for what she recalls was $500 to a man named Martin Roesch, whose startup made software called Snort and had a pig as its mascot. To this day—the Times tracked it down—the one-of-a-kind piece of furniture sits in the Maryland offices of Cisco, the company that acquired Roesch's firm. For inexplicable reasons, the fake ad frequently surfaces on Craigslist, as evidenced by this investigatory Twitter thread. Burroughs—you can scope out her other work on Etsy—doesn't seem to mind at all. "This is all delightfully weird and it keeps getting weirder," she tells the Inquirer. (More strange stuff stories.)
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